While I get this is a meme, I do think the imperial measurement system deserves some credit. More the vast majority of humanity’s existence it has been an incredibly capable and powerful system. It’s only in more modern times where a system like metric is an upgrade. This is also ignoring the few ways where imperial still eke out a win, but that is besides the point.
Imperial’s weird gaps between units are pieces that come from a variety of different systems that got layered together over the centuries it lasted. 5280 feet in a mile? Based on the Roman mile which was 5000 paces from a soldier. 12 inches in a foot? From a different way people counted on their hands.
Length of an inch and length of a foot? From different parts of the body. Weird? Certainly. Practical? Amazing so. They were easier for day to day tasks and for measuring on the small, human scale. Metric is easier to calculate between different units and that is an amazing innovation.
Fahrenheit is weird today, but was more practical when it was first established. Even then it has value in how it is more granular without the necessity of decimals. Celsius is still the better unit, 0° being freezing and 100° being boiling for water is very useful. It gives you two easy to remember extremes.
Imperial had to walk, so metric could run in a way. Both systems are great in their own ways and in their own times. Imperial isn’t needed anymore, but deserves recognition for being good for its time and for being more practical historically.
The only dud metric really has is metric time, and that is because everything we have ever done has been based on the older time keeping system. Cultures have laid claim to certain dates and times of day within the old system that just have constrained us to it.
I definitely prefer metric overall, but I genuinely believe that imperial deserves more credit for getting us to the point where metric makes sense to swap to.
Metric time ❤️
Please also lets use the International fixed calendar where every month has exactly 28 days/4 weeks and the year has 13 months. Every 1st of the month is a sunday, every 2nd is a monday and so on, so you will always know which day it is by the number.
The leftover day is a dedicated new years day.
Every other full spin it stops for 4h. There. We also get rid of DST because who can tell the time anymore?
100 warm
Yeah, I suppose that’s one way to describe 100°C
Boiling warm is still warm
That’s how I like my showers
That’s how I like my
showerssaunaYou need more wood
Yes… Thank you British Empire, French Empire, and Spanish Empire for your contributions to the system.
-British: Mile, Foot, Inch, Yard
-Spanish: Dollar, from the Spanish Pieces of 8
-French: You know what you did
As a European living in the US now for many years the temperature scale is the least of my annoyances. It’s easy enough to memorize be ranges for what to wear. Fahrenheit is more granular, which is nice sometimes but really doesn’t matter.
No, let’s convert all the ridiculous weight/volume measures first. Having two kinds of ounces makes no sense. Measuring solids by volume (mostly) doesn’t make sense. Having different units for different magnitudes doesn’t make sense.
Fortunately things are often labeled in both metric and customary units so I can convert way easier.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to have my 12 fluid ounces of coffee and a 1/3 cup of oatmeal.
I very much prefer to cook/bake/prep in metric grams.
2c white flour, sifted.
1c brown sugar, packed.
1c room temperature water.
2tsp active dry yeast.
2tbsp vegetable oil.
1/2tsp baking powder.
2 egg yolks.
5 egg whites.
Pinch of cinnamon.Fuck you. Tell me how many grams that is. I don’t need five different tools to measure out my ingredients. I need a wet bowl, a dry bowl, and a scale.
Also this isn’t a real recipe I just started naming shit at random.
I’ve had to translate recipes from Norwegian to American and this struggle is real. Never thought I’d need to look up material density tables for cooking.
“To American” … what?
We have kitchen scales, we know how to weigh ingredients.
Old recipes in English often use volume measurements, across the pond too.
Modern recipes use weights when possible.
Idk why you’d convert to
ye olde style.I accidentally a word. Converting recipes from Norwegian and metric to American and US customary units.
I’m aware. I have a scale, too. But most people didn’t weigh dry ingredients. So when I translate for someone else I have to use the “normal” measures they’re used to. For myself, I speak the language and just use metric, my scale, and a measuring cup with both markings.
If they’d just standardized on one unit per measurement and apply si prefixes it’s still an imperial unit but easier to work with. Say a quart for volume, and a yard for distance, because they’re close to liter and meter. But I guess a kiloyard and a deciquart is taking it too far.
Yeah I think at that point it would be easier to just go metric.
Most Americans actually seem to be five with metric and probably would not mind it too much if we just switched. The objections are basically: 1) it’s too expensive to switch now (okay), or 2) it’s part of our identity (doubt). I swear to God everything is a culture war with some people.
More rational people, especially in STEM where it’s already the standard, prefer it.
In general though, I would argue that Americans know metric better then Europeans know US customary, for what that’s worth
It’s mostly about what you’re used to. Americans buy soda in liters, run 5km and do drugs by the gram. But we buy gasoline and milk in gallons and our recipes call for flour by volume. It’s mostly inertia. At the end of the day you have to communicate with people around you so you use units they understand.
It’s funny because all of the imperial units are mathematically based on metric anyway.
I’m an American, so I started with imperial units, but I am making the very slow progression of converting to metric. I already use metric for work, and it’s already the scientific standard here and has been since the 70s. It’s just turbo annoying to try and get used to a new measuring system that I use reflexively especially when surrounded by imperial units. Makes it too easy to trip up and fall back.
Having the more granular temperature seems more practical. I often find myself adjusting my thermostat by just a single degree F. Do heating/ac thermostats in Europe use half degrees as increments? Even then I don’t think it’s as granular. But just integer values would be super annoying.
Half a C is actually quite close to a whole F in delta. I don’t have a thermostat though.
I have not seen any thermostats in Europe with decimal degrees. But I also don’t think a thermostat is necessarily accurate to that level anyway.
lol you don’t think it’s accurate to a degree Fahrenheit? Why wouldn’t it be?
Because it’s mass produced consumer goods operating on a “below x temperature turn on heat/turn off AC” and “above y temperature turn off heat/turn on AC”. Old ones are just bimetallic strips where you change the trigger position with a slider, and modern ones use commodity grade temperature sensors, and neither is guaranteed to be placed particularly far from the vent.
The sensor is typically on the thermostat. Not at the vents. You would typically place the sensor in a central location in the house. A high quality multi speed motor AC is designed to keep a decently consistent temperature which is a bit more complex than just turn on / turn off. If you’re dropping $15k to $30k on central AC, they aren’t going to cheap out on a poor quality temp sensor.
It’s just not that fine tuned of an instrument. The furnace also runs on intervals so it’s just going to naturally fluctuate a bit. Like with anything “it depends”, but I doubt it’s possible to keep the room within a tenth of a centigrade just with a consumer level thermostat. Maybe in a small room with resistive heating? I’d love to see actual measurements of this.
Thermostats are not exactly calibrated machines unless you spend for a high end model. Put a few next to each other and they might differ 1°C, 2°F. Worse if you take the really cheap stuff.
different units for different magnitudes
I’m not sure I get what you mean? Are you saying how we use ounces for tiny weights, pounds for “human”-ish weights, and tons for huge weights?
I think they mean ounces, cups, quarts, gallons, with no intuitive sense of conversion between them. I personally use ounces for almost everything (cocktail recipes are in 0.25 ounce increments, big cups are 40 ounces, big ol buckets can be 256 ounces). I might mess with gallons for very large amounts, but anything that can be expressed in cups or pints I’m usually just talking ounces anyway.
Your assumption is correct. I meant using cups, ounces, etc separately or in combination. Especially annoying when trying to figure out portions. Serving size: 8oz, package size: 1lb 4 oz. You have to do math every time.
1 mile is 5 tomAtoes (5280)
my kid
Edit: formatting
Another mnemonic, “ailing office” is 5280 in the major system.
The cold/warm at the bottom doesn’t make sense unless you’re water.
Fahrenheit is like asking a person how it feels, Celsius is like asking water how it feels.
Also everyone loves metric until you have to ask for a third of something…
I’m not sure if you noticed, but we are literally mostly made out of water, the stuff we eat is mostly water, we drink water, we cook water, we freeze water, we shower in water, we piss water and even our shit contains water.
Also, guessing temperature in fahrenheit is only simpler to americans because they are used to fahrenheit. For everyone using celcius when they grow up, its perfectly normal to think “Oh it feels like 13 degrees celcius outside.”. For us its weird to guess Fahrenheit because we are not used to it.
And wheres the problem in asking for a third of something?
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Yeah, 100°C is pretty warm
0°C = outside the sauna
100°C = inside the sauna
100 degrees is uncomfortably hot for a sauna. Somewhere around 80 is good.
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Being surrounded by hot air does a lot less than getting dumped into hot water, so the egg shouldn’t get hard unless it sat there for a really long time.
I replied to you by accident, that’s why I deleted it.
Preferrable way less outside of the sauna.
yup, i take baths in 100C regularly bc its warm :3
That’s hard-boiled (for eggs)
Well if sauna is considered a bath then yes
The sauna you’re in is 100°C? 212°F? I think you might be dead bro.
Sauna temperature is usually around 80-100°C, depending on your preference.
World Sauna Championship starting temperature was 110°C
Fascinating. And now I really wonder what “small things” the prizes were.
EDIT: Also fascinating how Kaukonen and Pusa duked it out for 9 years in the men’s competition.The last competition hosted had Harvia stove for sauna as the price
If you told me this was a satirical Wikipedia article I would have believed you
We have also wife carrying competition and swamp football in Finland
Incredible. What a magical place
Lmao bless your heart
came to.comment this. lol
The US could have switched to the world-wide standard years ago but under Reagan the switch was abandoned.
No, the original “Make America Great Again” guy? The first actor elected President who presided over an unprecedented health crisis and ignored it because he hoped it would only hurt the “right” people, and plunged America into an economic disaster the likes of which we are still feeling today and may never recover from? That guy?
God this place actually sucks
We could have had it as early as 1793, but the ship carrying the metric standards was attacked by pirates.
C is even more intuitive than the graphic.
0 = water’s frozen 100 = water’s boiling
Most metric units are designed around water in some way. Very easy to convert to different units because of this. 1mL of water is equal to 1g of water which is equal to 1 cubic cm of water, for example.
I had an American explain “well you just know that 68 is long sleeve warm, 80 is shorts” or something, as if people cannot memorize that 18 is chilly and 21/22 is usual room temperature, 26 is shorts.
The only thing I dislike like about Celsius is that my thermostat supports both, but doesn’t allow half degrees Celsius, so it provides less granular control in Celsius than if you set it to Fahrenheit.
As you approach 0°F it is getting dangerously cold. As you approach 100°F it’s getting dangerously hot. Celsius is obviously better scientifically, but fahrenheit is pretty reasonable for everyday use (unlike other imperial measurements).
Really my point is you can memorize new numbers when you look at the weather report.
When I go (went ) to the US it was not obvious to me looking at the weather in Fahrenheit what it would feel like.
Yeah, you just remember 0/20/40 °C close enough to 30/70/100 °F is freezing/good/heat stroke.
Of course. I’m just adding that there is some logic to fahrenheit in day to day use.
I’m in Québec, -10 is chilly, 14 is shorts :)
oui, toujours :)
I was about to say, in Denmark i definitely have shorts on in the teens, else I’d barely need to own any
Same in Alberta -10 maybe put on a jacket, 14 grab the beers and fire up the BBQ it’s patio time
And weight also revolves around water. 1L of water is 1KG which is 1000cm3 whereas 1cm3 is 1g. Super easy to calculate things.
Edit: correction
*cm³
The original Fahrenheit system was actually pretty clever. It set 0° at the temperature of brine and 96° at internal body temperature. That made marking a thermometer really easy. Like, ridiculously easy. 96 is divisible by two many times before reaching a decimal.
Because the freezing temperature of water was really close to 32°, the later Fahrenheit system set that as the lower temperature and 212° as the boiling point instead of using body temperature. That made marking a thermometer more difficult, and basically took away Fahrenheit’s only advantage. It was more consistent though. Now Fahrenheit is formally defined based on Kelvin.
Centigrade was originally marked as 100° at the freezing temperature, going down as temperature increases to 0° at the boiling temperature. Obviously that didn’t last long. The downside is that marking a Celsius thermometer depended on atmospheric pressure. Now Celsius is defined based on Kelvin by -273.15° being absolute zero and a degree corresponding to a very specific amount of heat energy increase.
So yeah, Fahrenheit hasn’t made any sense for many many years.
…and the heat energy for 1K stemming from one 1°C
No, it’s ultimately defined in joules.
every 1 K change of thermodynamic temperature corresponds to a change in the thermal energy, kBT, of exactly 1.380649×10−23 joules.
Yeah, of course that is the case now that most definitions have been updated to be tied to physical constants rather than observations that rely on specific conditions…
But the same wiki article you linked literally says otherwise. The Kelvin’s magnitude was based on the magnitude of Celcius because of Charle’s Law.
I.e. the volumes of gases under the ideal gas law scaled linearly with degrees celcius by about 1/273rd between 0-100C - which led to the prediction that the lowest possible temperature a gas could be was -273C (because that would be the point where it theoretically would have absolutely zero volume).
Which is a long-winded way of saying stop being a smartass. The guy you replied to was just as technically correct as you were, given they said 1k stemmed from 1C.
But they didn’t say “stemmed”. They said “stemming”. But sure, they’re technically correct in a historical context. I wanted to be more precise about the current definition. Under that current definition, it’s actually degree Celsius that stems from Kelvin.
My water does not describe 100°C as “warm”
People who say 100°C is warm make my blood boil.
As a woman I also only take 100ºC showers
Any hotter wouldn’t be a shower anymore, would it?
Supercriticality has entered the chat.
*For some definition of warm
Celsius makes most sense in places that experience proper winter.
Is it above 0? Then the snow is melting. Is it below 0? Then the melted snow has turned into slippery ice. Have fun!
Anybody who’s lived anywhere that has a proper winter knows that it isn’t as simple as below freezing = ice and above freezing = water.
Well yeah but you know that yesterday it was +3 and some snow melted, and froze overnight when it was -5. That tells you it’s going to be slippery in the morning
On a scale of 0 to 100.
Celsius is water Fahrenheit is people
The Fahrenheit scale has only one point of reference for people and that is not 100.
Fahrenheit (the scientist) determined 0° at the coldest stable temperature he could achieve with a mixture of water, ice and ammonium chloride, then set the mean healthy body temperature (as it was known at that time, modern measuring equipment is more precise) at 96° and then as a third reference set 32° as the freezing point of water.
The reference points were later changed to 32° for water freezing and 180° higher at 212° for water boiling due to Anders Celsius work and influence.Everything about this looks just random and devoid of any logic. Celsius for his scale referenced the temperatures at which water changes state and Kelvin uses the Celsius scale but sets 0 at the point of literally no energy. Behind both is an idea easily to grasp.
Hey I’m American and think we should switch to metric. While Celsius has a more objective basis than Fahrenheit, doesn’t seem like the same slam dunk as the other measurements.
Are there applications where we’re measuring in centicelsius or kilocelsius? There aren’t weird non-base ten increments of Fahrenheit. In Fahrenheit 0 is cold and 100 is hot as well…
I’m still fine changing to it, just doesn’t seem to have the same “in your face” value for this graphic.
centicelsius or kilocelsius?
In physics at these scales kilo Kelvins are used.
We do use metric in America. All the time actually. It’s taught in high school science classes. We use it in science, medicine, aerospace, military, and engineering.
I too live in America and grew up here. I know what metric is. But it’s not dominant, which I think you know.
It is in all the areas that matter. Who cares if our road signs and weather reports aren’t.
I’m curious, what are the areas that matter that you see metric having replaced imperial?
I still see imperial used for building materials, tools, furniture, product dimensions, food packaging, recipes, travel distances. The doctor still tells me my weight in pounds. It’s what we use at my job when describing products to clients.
Milk bottles in the supermarkets in the UK are now using weird sizes like 1.136l, because apparently that easier for some old cunt to read.
LMAO.
I’m guessing that the 1.136 L comes from not wanting to change actual package size when switching to metric. Can’t be a coincidence that 1.136L is 2 imperial pints.
It’s not too uncommon for that to happen. The smaller glass Coke bottles are something like 290ml from being converted from flozzies (I think some places have a 355ml one)
You really recognize these weirdly precise numbers in packaging.
355ml. 454g. 25.4mm.
Yeah, suuuuure your chocolate bar is precise to 3 sig figs…
I wouldn’t actually be surprised if chocolate bars are that exact. The equipment to do it is easily available, and they would be motivated to buy it to save having even 1 extra gram in the package.
It’s like this in Canada for years, everything in groceries is strange numbers in ml or g, converted from pounds/qt/whatever units
