Most of them I guess, I only just learned there’s 2 types, one for Americans and one for whoever else is dumb enough to not use metric. Imperial units are dumb, inconsistent, arbitrary increments that make little sense. Metric is uniform, even increments of ten/hundred/thousand no matter how far up/down in scale you go.
Measuring distance, the smallest increment imperial has is the inch. 12 inches make a foot, and 3 feet make a yard. The next increment up is a mile, which is 1780 yards, why the giant leap?
Meanwhile with metric, no matter what you’re measuring, the next step up is just a multiple or factor of 100 or 1000 of whatever you’re measuring. 100cm = 1m, and 1000m = 1km.
And don’t even get me started on Ferenheit vs Celsius, nevermind the fact that Kelvin is better than both.
I say all this as an American who grew up struggling with our dumb ways of doing things.
I mean, I’m European, on metric and fully agree with you.
But you’re not right about the units. They’re just the most well known, and used ones.
An inch is 3 barleycorns. A barleycorn is 4 poppyseeds. A poppyseed (2.11mm) is six points. A point, 0.35mm is twenty twips. A twip is 17 micrometers. 0.0176mm, roughly the width of a human hair.
Which makes it even dumber, because it shows it’s from a time in people could measure things in twips, yet those people still chose to make a unit called “a twip” instead of just saying “fuck this we’re going metric”. Nevermind I checked and point and twip are both typographical measurements, so it’s less unreasonable.
With most common and best known ones, the same things still exist in metric, but they’re just minimally confusing, as people know it’s prefix+unit. A milliliter is very common. Deciliter as well, but probably less so (someone once told me their country don’t use it as much despite being on metric, can’t remember the country), but something like a decimeter or a decigram would sound pretty weird. Hectogram however, isn’t too unfamiliar, pretty used in the drug world. I’m sure a lot of people would be confused by the prefix “yotta” or “ronna”, which I was too. Yonna is above zetta, above exa, above peta. I’m sure a lot of people on Lemmy know at least “peta” and probably exa.
Discounting those amazingly big prefixes, even if I use a less used combo like, say, “megasecond”, you don’t need additional information to figure out how long that is. But with seconds it’s annoying to transform them into days and hours and minutes, because you have to also use base 60, but still doable. Here’s a tangentially related example: a nice comparison between millionaires and billionaires; if you earned a dollar a second, you’d be a millionaire in a megasecond, a billionaire in a gigasecond. A megasecond is is 11.57 days. A gigasecond is 32 years.
Yeah I just came back from Lowe’s after cutting a bunch of 2x6s into feet, inches, and 1/4 of an inch… wish I could’ve just said cm
I’ve used Celsius for decades in America, I just look up the weather every day in Celsius and figured it out pretty quickly (although I have to use F for all my kitchen appliances for cooking at least my climate control systems in car/home all work with C)
The imperial vs metric thing doesn’t really bother me as an imperial user, since it’s all I’ve ever known and is ingrained. However, fahrenheit is the superior temperature unit. Celsius is too narrow, for effectively portraying temps, at least with weather and cooking, IMO.
The difference between 20ºC and 21ºC is imperceptible to a human. Ignoring the fact that you can easily increment in halves (20.5ºC), making your point complete moot, how is it narrow? Also, Celsius is an absolute scale, just like Kelvin. Fahrenheit is an abomination.
Fahrenheit is more descriptive. You could do half degrees, but it’s better to use whole degrees and have more to choose from. It’s better for cooking because it offers more granularity. I personally feel it’s vastly superior but to each their own.
