Americans, what's so great about the Imperial System?

[talideon]

Also saying "I ran a mile." rolls off the tongue a lot easier than "I ran a kilometer.".

We wouldn't say that. 'Kilometre' in English tends to be abbreviated to 'k' ('kay'), which rolls off the tongue quite nicely, just as 'kilo' does as an abbreviation of 'kilogramme'.

 

[Heronblade]

Ok, then let's get this started. I read up a bit on the Imperial System and i just can't find any great benefits to it.

Quite simply it is good for practical things when building. Wood Frames are 16" center to center, even in places with metric, it's not a number that works out nicely, and quite simply it saves time. Tiles are done in sq feet aswell due to there size.

Also how often do you have to convert? that is all I hear people say when it comes to metric, and i almost never see it even in science, they still want it in base units. So with that the strength of metric is out the window and it just comes down to what numbers you remember more, and quite frankly the imperial numbers are just easier when wood and steel are involved.

40 centimeters is a less convenient dimensional standard for a frame than 16 inches? I'm not sure I see it. Switching from square foot tiles over to 9 square decimeters doesn't seem like too much of a hassle either.

As to how often I have to convert, go look up a couple of intermediate dynamics problems and try to stick with imperial units throughout, I dare you.

 

[Maze1125]

Metric:
+ Mixes well with mathematics since it is base 10 (the symbols used for numerical digits in modern mathematics are ten).
+ More established in science; many widely different units mix well with each other.

Imperial:
+ Base 12, which is divisible by prime numbers 1,2,3,4. This makes simple division more convenient.
+ Already established culturally (in the USA).

1 and 4 are not prime numbers.
The only prime numbers 12 is divisible by are 2 and 3.
The only prime numbers 10 is divisible by are 2 and 5.

Which means that base 10 and base 12 are both equally easily divisible by prime numbers and, in my opinion, 5 is a more useful number than 3 to be able to divide by easily.

Further, imperial isn't even always base 12, sometimes it's base 14, or 16, making it even more complicated for no reason.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Also how often do you have to convert? that is all I hear people say when it comes to metric, and i almost never see it even in science, they still want it in base units. So with that the strength of metric is out the window and it just comes down to what numbers you remember more, and quite frankly the imperial numbers are just easier when wood and steel are involved.

I see it all the time in my science, in and out of the classroom, especially in journals and presentations of findings.

Oooooo! Are you on local TV. You must be, like, a celebrity or something!

Uh, no. Though I do know some of my classmates have gone to intern at several of the local TV stations.
One of them I think is going to try giving the weather and another is looking for a reporting job.

Keep in mind, most operational meteorologists do analysis well off camera.

 

[ZZoMBiE13]

First of all. I know this i probably going to be a pretty difficult discussion. Everyone here has grown up with one or the other measurement system, so nobody can be really objective about this.

Ok, then let's get this started. I read up a bit on the Imperial System and i just can't find any great benefits to it.
Let's start with the obvious advantage of the metric system, as that it is not only the international standard, but also the System of SCIENCE (Which kinda is an instant win right there).
It's easy to calculate with and is just perfect for Mathmatics, Physics and so on.
I heard from some people that the imperial system is easier to use in day to day life, but i can't see why.
It's obviously better in day to day life, if you have grown up with it and used it your entire life.
But if we look at both systems and how we would use them in day to day life, i still think the metric system to be far superiour.
First of all, you just have to learn 3 units of measurement. Meter, gramm and litre. Any larger or smaller units you might need, you just use the appropriate word before it. kilo for a thousand, mega for a million and so on.
In the imperial system you got yards, feet, miles, pinch, pounds, tons and so on, and so on.
It's just way more to memorize, for practically no benefit in day to day life.

As an American who grew up on the "Imperial System", I forking hate it. There was a big push back in the 70s to finally bring us up to speed with the rest of the world and for some reason old people pushed back because they couldn't handle it. So they went on teaching us kids to use it so we could get by.

And to reiterate, I HATE it. I wish like crazy that we could get on the metric system. Even though I'm in my 40s now I would happily realign. Sure, it would be difficult at first. All moves are. But it's so much more elegant than the standard outdated system we use here. And it's not like it's even universal anymore. We buy 2 litre soda, we have metric tools sitting alongside the "standard" (if you can believe we still call it that) tool.

I'm a bit of an anglophile anyway, so maybe I'm a snob toward my own country sometimes. There's a lot of things about living in the USA that I really love though, but the measurement system is not one of them. I passionately hate it in fact. I feel like we're the backwater hillbillies of the world when it comes to measurement standards.

 

[the doom cannon]

#1 reason imperial is better than metric:

Wtf is a newton, and wtf is a pascal?
Pound and psi is way easier

Ps. I know what a newton and pascal represent, but they are hard to interpret physically

 

[ReverendJ]

Here we go... again. Every damn time we encounter someone from the rest of the world...

You wanna know why? Here goes:

We don't wanna.

They tried making us, we're not having it. Yes, metric is easier to learn, is based on something remotely logical as opposed to the as-you-like faffing about of the Imperial system, and is used internationally for both science and commerce. But still... we don't wanna. Gonna be a bunch of contrarians about it, some of whom will whine about cost, but when it comes down to brass tacks that's what it is. We don't want to, and frankly some of us wonder what all y'all in the rest of the world are gonna do about it.

 

[shootthebandit]

Why do you Europeans get so bent out of shape that we Americans don't use your arbitrary definitions of measurement?

Yanks having a thing for automatic transmission

This is something which must be outlawed. An automatic tranmission is not a real transmission

 

[Zombie Sodomy]

I like feet. If I want to measure my height in metric units my basic choices are meters and centimeters. Maybe it's just me, but those are just way too far apart. Instead of being 6'1" I'm now 185.5cm, or 1m 85.5cm. Maybe it's just because I didn't grow up with it, but I really hate that. Even a decimeter is too small, being .3ish feet.

 

[Lieju]

There are many advantages to a dozenal system:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal

(but metric works better than imperial for the time being)

That's a different thing, though. It's a numeral system, as opposed to a system of measurement.
Even if you used that, you'd still need to use another system for measuring stuff.

 

[shootthebandit]

#1 reason imperial is better than metric:

Wtf is a newton, and wtf is a pascal?
Pound and psi is way easier

Ps. I know what a newton and pascal represent, but they are hard to interpret physically

What the fuck is a PSI or a pound?

A newton is described as the force required to accelerate an object of 1kg to 1 metre per second per second. What so difficult to interpret about that?

A pascal is the pressure of 1N applied over 1 square metre

Im guessing you already know that but i dont know how if you have any background in science and/or engineering. Im sure if you do youll realise that metric values are so easy to do calculations with

 

[talideon]

"The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1 / 299,792,458 of a second."

... Wait that's not divisible by 10

And since meters were developed by the french after the french revolution you can't say that the meter is BASED on the speed of light
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light

and light travels 1 foot in 1 nanosecond

That's only a rough approximation to use as a rule of thumb though.

so what?
You carve up the distance light travels into a certain number of chunks
We cave it up into a different number of chunks
that is the definition of arbitrary

Eh... it's less arbitrary than that. In fact, the definition of the metre has always been an attempt to find a non-arbitrary measurement based off of natural constants.

The real original proposal for the metre came from John Wilkins in the mid-1600s, and was defined as the length of a pendulum with a half-period of one second. The only truly arbitrary thing (at the time) there is the length of a second. However, it was found that due to gravity varying slightly over the surface of the Earth, that wasn't ultimately workable, so after the French Revolution, it was defined as 1/10,000,000th the distance from the North Pole to the Equator along the meridian line passing through Paris. This was pretty damned close to Wilkins' original proposal and had the benefit of being more absolute. However, we later found that measurement to be less stable and more mathematically complex than would be convenient, so other standards were used, until we settled on using the speed of light, which is, best as we can tell, a fundamental constant.

And thus it turns out that the only thing that makes a metre arbitrary is the length of a second, and I'm OK with that.

 

[SnakeSpawn]

I like the Imperial system when it deals with length.

Why?
- Because it revolves around 2 and 3 (or 12). There are 12 inches in a foot (12 = 2*2*3). There are 5280 feet in a mile (one 3 and several 2s).

Why does this matter?
- Because of fractions! I prefer to do math in my my head, and it's easier with the number 12. The number 12 lets us use 1/2, 1/3, and 1/4 with whole numbers. The metric system deals with 10 as it's most important number. that means that 1/2 and 1/5 are easy but other, common fractions are not.

Metric lets us move the decimal point to convert. That makes math easier!
- Yes, but I don't like dealing with decimals. We're talking fractions. I suppose this is a personal choice, but decimals introduce rounding errors that can add up by the end. Also, I've worked in construction where it's easier to speak to people using fractions than decimals.

But everyone else uses metric!
- Well everyone else may use metric, but EVERYONE tells time using the same system. We have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. These numbers both use 12 as a factor.

In the end though, it doesn't matter, eventually we'll all probably switch to metric and my dreams of a base 12 world will die. Just because a system is better, doesn't mean it will win. See Dvorak keyboards.

 

[the doom cannon]

#1 reason imperial is better than metric:

Wtf is a newton, and wtf is a pascal?
Pound and psi is way easier

Ps. I know what a newton and pascal represent, but they are hard to interpret physically

What the fuck is a PSI or a pound?

A newton is described as the force required to accelerate an object of 1kg to 1 metre per second per second. What so difficult to interpret about that?

A pascal is the pressure of 1N applied over 1 square metre

Im guessing you already know that but i dont know how if you have any background in science and/or engineering. Im sure if you do youll realise that metric values are so easy to do calculations with

And yet theyre called a newton and a pascal.... A pound is a force, a psi is a Pound per Square Inch. A ksi is a kip per square inch. Oh and a kip is a KIlo Pound, so 1000 pounds. When you get into engineering, it doesnt matter which system you use because you just use equations. Its a lot easier for me to visualize a pound of force on a square inch as opposed to a kilogram per square second per meter. Just saying

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

When 300+ million people are all committed to one system and their entire society is built around it, they can't change just because the other system makes a little more sense.

Why not? The rest of the world managed it, something like 48 states use Metric as the officially accepted units of measurement, so does NASA and the US military, it's taught in American schools and even your criminal justice system defines contraband amounts by Metric units.

You're much further along that change than you think.

I certainly hope you're right. After taking remedial Physics this semester I already despise the Imperial system.

 

[mascotbeaver]

Actually, america's been on the metric system since the 80's, we're just too lazy to change. I don't think anyone really likes the imperial system, nor does it really hold any advantages in day to day life. However, fahrenheit is so much much easier to use in day to day life. The range of conditions anyone is actually going to be living in is between 0 and 100 F, with only a few outliers, as opposed to -5 and 40 C. Also, why use Celsius over Kelvin anyway?

 

[Amaror]

I like the Imperial system when it deals with length.

Why?
- Because it revolves around 2 and 3 (or 12). There are 12 inches in a foot (12 = 2*2*3). There are 5280 feet in a mile (one 3 and several 2s).

Why does this matter?
- Because of fractions! I prefer to do math in my my head, and it's easier with the number 12. The number 12 lets us use 1/2, 1/3, and 1/4 with whole numbers. The metric system deals with 10 as it's most important number. that means that 1/2 and 1/5 are easy but other, common fractions are not.

Metric lets us move the decimal point to convert. That makes math easier!
- Yes, but I don't like dealing with decimals. We're talking fractions. I suppose this is a personal choice, but decimals introduce rounding errors that can add up by the end. Also, I've worked in construction where it's easier to speak to people using fractions than decimals.

But everyone else uses metric!
- Well everyone else may use metric, but EVERYONE tells time using the same system. We have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. These numbers both use 12 as a factor.

In the end though, it doesn't matter, eventually we'll all probably switch to metric and my dreams of a base 12 world will die. Just because a system is better, doesn't mean it will win. See Dvorak keyboards.

I am a computer scientist. You don't have to tell me of the beaty of a system based on the number 2. However the decimal system is way better to calculate more complex stuff in advanced mathmatics and physics, etc.
But come on you have to agree that those numbers are pretty ugly to deal with. 12 inches in a foot, 5280(!!!) foot in a mile. Come on, who wants to memorize that stuff. Just take a meter and calculate with thousands in the metric system and your good to go.

 

[Bravo Company]

From what I've been told, America didn't change over to the metric system because when the metric system was being widely adopted America was the leader in manufacturing goods. For America to switch to the metric system would've cost some serious money, therefor engineers and business owners at the time never switched. Now to switch would just be incomprehensible because of derps

There really isn't any advantages of the imperial system unless you really want to be an elitest and try getting people to adapt a base 12 duodecimal system, but that would require adding 2 numbers that don't exist in the imperial or metric system.

 

[Worgen]

The only reason we still use imperial is because anyone who tries to change to metric gets voted out of office.

 

[shootthebandit]

#1 reason imperial is better than metric:

Wtf is a newton, and wtf is a pascal?
Pound and psi is way easier

Ps. I know what a newton and pascal represent, but they are hard to interpret physically

What the fuck is a PSI or a pound?

A newton is described as the force required to accelerate an object of 1kg to 1 metre per second per second. What so difficult to interpret about that?

A pascal is the pressure of 1N applied over 1 square metre

Im guessing you already know that but i dont know how if you have any background in science and/or engineering. Im sure if you do youll realise that metric values are so easy to do calculations with

And yet theyre called a newton and a pascal.... A pound is a force, a psi is a Pound per Square Inch. A ksi is a kip per square inch. Oh and a kip is a KIlo Pound, so 1000 pounds. When you get into engineering, it doesnt matter which system you use because you just use equations. Its a lot easier for me to visualize a pound of force on a square inch as opposed to a kilogram per square second per meter. Just saying

A newton is called a newton because Sir isaac newton discovered that forces (N) = mass (Kg) × acceleration (ms^-2) which explains the description i said above. You mentioned equations by using the newton it makes so much sense where these equations come from and how to follow them.

You also mentioned the PSI. pressure = force/area so in this instance the pound is a unit of force. The pound is also used as a unit of mass (2.2 pounds = 1 kg) going back to my previous equation force = mass x acceleration. How do you equate this when using the pound as a measurement?