Why I will NEVER use the Metric System
How Americans Missed out on the Metric System
🌏 Exclusive! Grab the NordVPN deal ➼ nordvpn.com/johnnyharris. Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee!
The US decided not to join the rest of the world to go metric. Here’s why.
View my sources here: docs.google.com/document/d/1b...
- ways to support -
My Patreon: / johnnyharris
Our custom Presets & LUTs: store.dftba.com/products/john...
- where to find me -
Instagram: / johnny.harris
Tiktok: / johnny.harris
Facebook: / johnnyharrisvox
Iz's (my wife’s) channel: / iz-harris
- how i make my videos -
Tom Fox makes my music, work with him here: tfbeats.com/
I make maps using this AE Plugin: aescripts.com/geolayers/?aff=77
All the gear I use: www.izharris.com/gear-guide
- my courses -
Learn a language: brighttrip.com/course/language/
Visual storytelling: www.brighttrip.com/courses/vi...
- about -
Johnny Harris is a filmmaker and journalist. He currently is based in Washington, DC, reporting on interesting trends and stories domestically and around the globe. Johnny's visual style blends motion graphics with cinematic videography to create content that explains complex issues in relatable ways. He holds a BA in international relations from Brigham Young University and an MA in international peace and conflict resolution from American University.
- press -
NYTimes: www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/op...
NYTimes: www.nytimes.com/video/opinion...
Vox Borders: • Inside Hong Kong’s cag...
Finding Founders: findingfounders.co/episodes/j...
NPR Planet Money: www.npr.org/transcripts/10721...
Fun fact: The way all imperial units are defined now is through the metric system. An inch has no definition other than 2.54 cm.
25.4 millimeters
One 12th of a foot.
@@markfinlay6923how do you think a foot is defined?
3 barleycorns
@@snarlbanarl1940poof, right into his head😂, he will probably say something'th of a mile..😂😂
Metric System supporters: “its perfect, it’s logical, it’s easy” Imperial System supporters: “USA! USA! USA!”
Who uses Imperial System besides USA? Liberia and Burma a very exclusive club indeed. :D
@@Nekoyama69 No, when I was in the UK everything was in miles/yards etc. I heard that Canada uses the same measurement so it may apply to Australia and New Zealand and more british colonies
@@elomial724 I can assure you us over here is Australia and New Zealand don't use imperial at all and much prefer metric
@@elomial724 i don't know to which england you went because literally everything was in meters
@@harmlessbird Every country uses imperial system to measure a length of screen actually
The fact that you made a 22-minute video on basically what is a matter of "being used to", highlights the quality of the content you're willing to create.
My thoughts exactly. What your used to does not equate to what is better.
Thanks. You've just saved me 20 minutes of my life.
This is more Like Apologist video, might as well become johnny Harris Public Apology video, for using a weird measurement system
@@lewis72 You really should watch it, because what the other guy said doesn't really give a good summary to it, the commenter is being really misleading about it. The video also includes the history of how the metric system was created, how one of the scientists who helped create it realized he made a mistake but didn't say anything about it for a good reason, how geopolitics and pirates are involved in why the USA didn't adopt the metric system. The video does explain why after many years of trying to train himself to use the metric system "naturally" in the same way Americans use imperial system "naturally" didn't actually work, and even trying to teach his own kids to use the metric system in a natural way also isn't working because of what they are exposed to throughout their life including school. The commenter you are saying "thanks" to is doing a huge disservice to you through dishonesty, disregarding a lot of historical and cultural information that is shared throughout the video.
@@Wolfeisberg That is as may be but having a units system that isn't based on Base-10 is ridiculous.
I honestly wanna know how you guys do physics at school. Calculating volumes, distances, speed, etc. Must be torturous.
Using the metric system - US schools stop using the imperial system after a certain level
@@AaryanSajwaniAnything distance is usually calculated in meters. I don’t recall a single problem that used feet or miles in physics class
Sorry meant to reply to Lucas :p
@@gizmocat11 seems harder to learn two systems.
In my high school physics class we had questions in metric and had to answer with imperial or the other way all the time. Everyone knows 1mi=5280ft=12in or “five tomato”, so you just had to learn 1in=2.54cm and then use dimensional analysis as usual. Yeah it’s not multiples of 10 but with calculators it doesn’t matter much.
As a physicist, I shrink in horror from the thought of using imperial units for calculations.
well, as electronics designer I am using metric for definition of board dimensions, all calculations, reflow profiles, etc. But when it comes to routing - I am switching to imperial - despite the fact, I am living in Europe. Why? Because basic THT pin grid was 0.1" and that stayed. Of course, today you will find, that most components have their pitch and dimensions defined purely in metric, but majority of PCB fab houses will show you their copper etching capabilities in imperial. So you basically have 90% of PCB dimensions metric, but track widths are in freaking mils. And yes, in theory you can provide metric Gerber files - but when you go for the minimal values permitted by fab - your project may be rejected.
What's the first thing Americans learn in grade school science classes? Oh right, always use metric for any science. Why are Europeans so mad that Americans prefer to use imperial in their day-to-day life? Because the majority of media content they consume is made by Americans and they're minorly inconvenienced by the use of imperial. Maybe Europeans shouldn't have invented the imperial system
I agree. Imagine using BTUs and foot/pounds again.
Yes. Just like it would be a horror to measure time in days, hours, minutes and seconds, and angles in degrees, minutes and seconds. The conversion to the metric system is not yet finished, even outside the three countries using imperial measurements.
The second is an SI unit though.
Metric > Imperial
I feel like I’m in a war zone
@@engineerenginering8633 how? they're saying Metric is better than Imperial
Luv mi imperial 'ate mi metric Simple as
@@_laurenolo_ it's not
I like that the world's superpower is still stubbornly using the quirky imperial system.
16:54 I love that when comparing two non-metric measurements, he uses a THIRD system (metric) to arrive at an answer. I love metric. I was born in 1962 (Australia) and grew up with Imperial, we moved over to Metric while I was in primary school, and so I learned both, and I still use both, aged 61. Metric is my go-to, but sometimes it's easier to say "foot" than "thirty centimetres" - BUT, as a wood and metal worker, metric RULES.
I'm trying to force myself to pure metric for woodworking now. I'm just so tired of doing fractional math.
What year was your primary/conversion to metric? I have a mish mash of metric and imperial in my head but i’m a bit younger and from NZ. I’m not sure if we converted later or I picked it up from my parents and learned metric in school.
@@PaloclesI'd guess around 1969-1971, aged 7-9, I don't really remember. I was already conversant with imperial, picked up metric without difficulty.
@@Palocles We changed in 1973 (in primary schools). There were earlier changes in some fields, and our currency changed in 1966 (NZ 1967, UK 1971). The US changed to metric currency in 1792! There were some hold-outs, and feet is still valid for vertical seperation in aviation. I was at primary school for the change, and although I think of paper sizes in millimetres, I think of margins in half-inches. Height is feet and inches, but weight is kg,
Aren't decimeters and similar prefixes used in colloquial speech where you live? It's far easier to say "two dec(imeters)" than "twenty centimeters". Or "two hecto" instead of "two hundres grams".
The fact that there is a "debate " just because one country on earth doesn't want to be rational is astounding
Aren't we used to that, as that one country is pretty unrational about other things to
A debate that wil remain a debate for now, because the time to implement it has passed. Now everything in the U.S is gets divided. I'm not American, but even I know there would be a part of the population that start ranting against the 'woke leftie metric system' and pro- freedom feet. ;)
I think there are 2 or 3 other countries
Imperial and metric have something in common: They're both incompatible with imperial.
😂😂😂
just joining the ride to top comment
underrated comment
Took me a few moments 🤣
This should have way more likes 😂
I love the imperial system in medieval RPG's. It really gives it a sense of immersion into a primitive society where nothing makes sense.
@Tom Beebe lmao, thinking the imperial system was even somewhat equal in usefulness to the metric system, so you feel the need to know both…
@@aetos198 Imagine thinking it even matters, it's simply a way to convey distance and temperature. Arguing over what's better is like trying to argue what language is better, and then saying "English is the best language because that's what everyone is using at the global level." It's all meaningless. We're fucking monkeys on a space rock flying around a burning ball of gas in space, do you think the universe gives a fuck?
🔥
@Tom Beebe Imagine not using kelvin to cook noodles
I used to think that only developing countries would use a imperial system, until I realized there are only three of them
Sometimes, life reminds me of how lucky I am for having been born where I was. For example, I could be trapped in the imperial system. Thank you. You've humbled me.
i mean because of how simple it is any person in the US is abled to use the metric systems whenever they want
same
_"This stick is precisely two feet and four inches and a half and one sixteenth of an inch long."_ _"So, it's 72.5 centimeters."_ _"I have no idea what that means!"_
The metric system: literally every unit is just 10x , 100x or 1000x the sum of the last. Americans: This is too complicated to me.
hahahaha so many "Yards/Feet/Poles/What-the-f**k-ever" of this. Logic... apparently not for everyone :P
Yeah but powers of 2 are much easier in actual use than powers of ten. Look at a distance--easy to mentally cut it in half, quarters, eights, etc. Units that are 10x from each other just aren't that convenient. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter--as long as it's standardized. Pick a system that works for you and stop being a snob about it.4
they even don't know where america is !
But 10 isn't useful for me. I do woodworking. Halves and doubles in feet and inches is far more useful. I got all excited in college when I found precision decimal inch rulers, because I could finally work in decimal, which sounded amazing, but still work at my familiar scale, and fit standard spaces and objects in the US. I struggled with it for a year or two, before ditching it entirely. It sucked, constantly. I don't convert between things like lengths and liquid volumes, so ×10 and ÷10 is it's only trick, which I never found useful. With a foot I can divide a box into 1 12" space, 2 6" spaces, 3 4" spaces, 4 3" spaces, 6 2" spaces, or 12 1" spaces, all of which are really great, human-scale sizes. A cm is so small, it's never useful on its own, and everywhere I look I find things are some crazy number of mm, like 17.3mm x 29.7mm. All the standards are crazy, too, like plywood is 1200x2400mm (13 syllables), whereas mine is 4x8ft (4 syllables). All our stuff is 1x2, 2x4, 4x4, 2x8, etc - super small and simple. European cabinetry uses a lot of roughly 5x5ft panels, but there it's 1525x1525mm. In the US, ceilings tend to be 8 (I can almost touch), 9 (can almost jump to touch), or 10 ft (can't reach). In the UK they're 2.4m or 2.6m, complicated from the start. All the numbers are a lot more wacky to me. We have 2x4s. They have 100x47mm (I found a number of different things, but most weren't nice, simple, memorable things). I've heard other countries use these wacky mm sizes, but often still call them things like 2x4s, because of how nice that is. We do a ton of timber framing the US, so all of these numbers are small, simple, and work out great. The UK does a ton of brick and block building. The office I'm in right now is 10x12x9, super easy to figure out things like how much paint I need for the walls, or how much wood I need for the flooring. I just looked up standard UK office spaces, and right away found a page that said "In a typical room, where the ceiling is 2.4m high, a floor area of 4.6m2 (for example 2.0 x 2.3m) will be needed to provide a space of 11 cubic metres. Where the ceiling is 3.0m high or higher the minimum floor area will be 3.7m2 (for example 2.0 x 1.85m). It's all a bunch of hard to remember decimals, and that seems standard. I've investigated this many times over the years, and everything ends up a wash of thick decimal numbers. All the rooms in all the houses I've lived in have been simple, whole number feet measurements - 10x10, 15x20, 10x12. I could remember the whole house when I was at the home store, because feet are a much more usable scale than centimeters or meters, and so we build to them most of the time. I also find mm to be just too tiny. It's like having to work in 32nds of an inch all the time. At my age I can't even easily see them anymore. The next thing up, cm, are still so small I need a ton of them to do anything. Up from there, we blow past desktop scale stuff, and we're in m, but even that doesn't match up with anything, like the height of a human, or a room. Everything is off, and non-ergonomic. I could go on and on. Imperial may not be great for science, and conversions between entirely different types of units - totally agree - but it is a really nice system for things like woodworking, and even CNC machining (I have an imperial CNC mill and lathe). Now, of course, everything's trade-offs, so I will say that I looked into it before, and found stud (joist? rafter? I forget now) spacing in metric being done at 60cm, which is very nearly 24"/2', but is wonderfully divisible by almost everything - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60. I have to admit that's pretty cool.
@@gfixler If you grow up in metric system then some or many of your points never happen. You still feel and think in the imperial system, but try to use the metric system. That does not work. Just like me using the imprial system. I find it easy to work with those hard to remember decimals, but i guess its a point you have there with those multiplications. I know how tall i am and how far i can reach. 2.4m is not complicated for me at all. I rougthly know what a cm is. I know where to find proportions on my hands that are 10cm or 20 cm. Very usefull. I know how to make a step that is 1 m long.
I studied Physics at Uni in the UK. Occasionally they'd use Imperial and get us to convert them just to show how bat shit crazy the system is. Christ, having to account for minutes, seconds and hours was painful enough
Time is a whole nother can of worm. Ask any software developer. Our current system is an absolute mess, and we've barely started tackling time in space and the relativistic effects. At least most of the world is on the same page and using the same system.
@@dsp4392 Time is fairly easy (leap seconds not withstanding), but dealing with the calendar in software is a right PITA.
@@dsp4392 Not just software. Im in hardware as well, and when I started working with IMU and GNSS data I was shocked to see how hard it would be to get accurate data when sampling at up to 2KHz and moving at 200++km/t.
In the US, studying engineering, unit conversion was basically the only thing we did for a whole semester. Metric, Imperial, and even other weird shit - it didn't matter. It was drilled in us how to do unit conversion. To this day, I can still caclulate how many smoots to the beard-second by hand or whatever units there are. It's a skill engineers should know, even if they stay in SI. That being said, imperial needs to die and metric is the best.
We British do use a hybrid. We are not getting rid of the British pint. That is British culture.
I am a retired engineer in Australia. In my career I went through school using mostly FPS (feet, pounds and seconds) but learned the MKS system (metres, kilograms and seconds) in secondary school science. When I started working FPS was the standard for machining etc but in the 60's Australia changed over to metric and so did the engineering and manufacturing. At this stage I became a contracting consultant and worked for various companies some of which hadn't converted so for a large part of my career I was dealing with both systems. I much preferred the metric system - especially in such anarchic measurements as fractions of an inch. Dimensions in whole numbers are less prone to misinterpretation than yards, feet, inches and fractions of a inch. Ultimately the Earth will need to be on one system and it will be metric. Get real and do the hard yards it's self evident just like the UK will have to rejoin the EEC. Finally we don't have 12 fingers so why use such out of date units that started with the length of a kings foot.
Engineering is where you need the precision. For household situations metric is just a nuisance.
@@physiocrat7143 If you are used to imperial, sure. But you can't have the arrogance to think that it people used to metric don't find imperial units a nuisance in household (it is even more of a nuisance: discomfort of using a foreign unit + discomfort of having to switch unit for science life and for everyday life. You guy are maybe used to switch between 2 systems depending on whether you are doing science or cooking, but we are not)
@@christophelegal9194 I am used to both systems, having done model railways as a ten year old, which use millimetres, and then done physics and chemistry. I am therefore in a position to compare objectively, and of course, what people are used to is important. The origin of the metric system was based on concepts which had nothing to do with daily usage. Ten is not the optimal base, as it can only be divided by 2 and 5, whereas 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 5, and the next best base after that is 60 which is obviously unsuitable. Weights and volumes are binary, eg pints and gallons, ounces and pounds. The system as it evolved is messy but the point that specific trades adopted units that suited their requirements and enabled people to work in small whole numbers. The metric system works well in scientific and engineering situations, apart from the decimal point in a medical context, which has resulted in patients receiving ten times, or a tenth, of the prescribed dose of their medication. As for the science/life switch - grammes and millimetres are too small to be useful around the house and the kilo is a bit on the big size except for things like potatoes. Shops seem to have adopted the hecto for things like cheese, but the system as it was handed down from on high be the French Revolution scientists has had to be fiddled around with quite a lot to make it workable in daily life.
@@physiocrat7143 It's a nuisance if you aren't used to it. If you were using it from the start it wouldn't feel like a nuisance, on the contrary even for simple household stuff the metric can still be equally good, or even superior. Let's say you have a recipe that's made for a 1L portion, but you only want to make 10% of that. 1L neatly converts to 10 dcl, giving you 10 smaller parts without having to use a calculator. And it just works so nicely between units as well, like the fact that 1L of water weighs exactly 1kg and if you want to express a L in cm^3 it's as easy as just calculating 10x10x10cm. The only unit that makes it easier to imagine things for me is PSI vs. bar/Pa. [eidt:] ps. don't get me started on Celcius vs. Fahrenheit. You have to admit that especially for household stuff having a centigrade measurement where 0° is freeze point and 100° is boiling is way better than the totally arbitrary and random values F's have. :)
@@NixHarpinger I have been using the metric system since the age of about 9 as it is used for model railways. If you have a recipe that you want to make a quarter or a third of, more likely than a tenth, then you are left with recurring decimals.Then I did a science degree. I am perfectly used to the system but there are horses for courses. The French academics who cooked up this system lived in an ivory tower in an atmosphere of detached and imagined rationality. They even divided the time and the calendar decimally. There is nothing natural about the use of the number ten - we just happen to have that number of fingers and toes. From a mathematical perspective, 8, 12, 16 and 20 are more useful as as bases. You would not want a clock divided into ten hours - it would be hard to mark out with a compass and rule. The Babylonians had a better grasp of numbers when they divided the circle into 360. which has factors 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 24, 30, 40, 60, 90, 120 and 180. The metric system is now established and is obviously here to stay, but it would be a good idea if we stopped kidding ourselves that it is inherently and naturally superior. Rulers and tape measures marked in millimetres are a darned nuisance when you are working to an accuracy of about 3 mm.
I wish you guys could at least have a single chapter or something in math every year where you're introduced to the metric system in school, showing its benefits and maybe getting the next generation to get on board. Imperial is holding you guys back
@@sorban5352 no, I did. I was just asking for more normalisation, so there will be a generation where they'd know both systems, then maybe the next generation gets more comfortable with metric and the next generation transitions, leaving behind the garbage that is imperial
@@sorban5352 I am not sure what part of my comment made you think I didn't see the video. Can you enlighten me? I didn't say he didn't praise metric like it seems you believe I said
They've beent talking about the metric system in the U.S longer then what my Mom was in grade school. Little to nothing has changed.
@@brendanmichaelwelsh6260 he talked about them now having metric in nutritional, pharmaceutical and fabrication stuff or whatever. The more steps into normalisation, the easier the transition will become.
This seems rational, I am 21 and grew up in the UK. I remember being taught basics of the imperial system when I was in primary school. I don't struggle switching between the two however I find adding and subtracting inches much harder because of the fractions, millimeters just make so much more sense, as a carpenter I mainly use millimeters but a lot of things we do are based in feet such as door widths and board sizes as you can't just change them as there are hundreds of thousands of houses that still have imperial doors that will need replacing at some point
Q. What is 1 x 10? A. 10 Congratulations, you just mastered the metric system.
Americans will never figure that out.
@@fransthefox9682a lot of Americans. I’m American and I can… READ!!! Can you believe it!!! I’m an AMERICAN that can READ and do MATH(s). I’m like a genius or something, right?
@@TheMapGod275 Ah okay. Then you must know the Metric system even more than the Imperial system.
@@TheMapGod275 i bet u still use imperial... for us who never use imperial using it seems stupid..aka even if u only use it once every while.....stupid.
That's the decimal system... And the US have that as well when it comes to 100 cents in a dollar.
As an Australian Boomer, I grew up with the British Imperial Measurement System. However. during my twenties, we switched over to the metric system completely. It wasn't long before most of us were thinking in metric, although some of us (me included) occasionally think about something in Imperial. So I think anyone who claims to not be able to change is simply in denial and is using the "inability" as a madeup cop-out excuse.
Well said!! They made up excuses during the industrialisation and they continue to do so in 2023. But any job of real world application or significance(research, medicine, engineering etc) has silently moved on to the metric system for obvious reasons but the general public are stuck with an outdated system thanks to the educational inadequacies and inaction by the government. It probably explains the obesity crisis in America as all nutritional information on packages is in the metric system but no one even understands what it means!
it is funny (lame, actually) how Australians use the metric system for everything except their own height. they are like "this tree in 3 m tall" "and how tall are you?" "six feet"
Me too. What's ironic is that when my parents migrated to Australia from Germany in 1960, my father, who was a carpenter, had to learn the imperial measurement system ... only to have to convert back in the 70's when we went metric!
Exactly what i was thinking. It's all fun and games with ft and inches. Until you need to split a fraction of an inch in half. or know what 1" 25/64ths means. The whole excuse of "i can't relate" turns right around when you get into the fractions. bad habits die hard.
There you have it, switched completely. All your surroundings were metric, while in the US they're not and probably won't be for a long long time.
This is a very well made video explaining exactly why the Metric system is better in every way. I've been using both measurements for many years and do exactly as you do. The quick on the fly conversions in my head. That wouldn't be a problem if we in the US were exposed to the Metric system on a regular basis, but the only way that is possible is if the government replaces every label, every roadsign, every speedometer (yes i know they have the small numbers in Metric), everything we learn in school all at the same time. I am an avid supporter of the Metric in the US however and hope one day a president manages to make the change.
Our cars in Canada can flip over to imperial once we cross into the stupider side of North America.
I once switched all my thermometers and my car's digital speedometer to metric. It took two weeks living like that to fully adjust. All you have to do is immerse yourself in it and it comes pretty quickly.
Metric system is superior!
Obviously
Metric gang 📏
@UCKW5MtM_bgUIfQLT6eIFq-g You're the one who is wrong.
Chill out nerds
Woooo metric
I was born in 1977 and live in the USA, minus about 7 years spent abroad. I find it fun to convert metric to imperial and vice vs. I do it often. In medicine, I like to know my patient's temperatures in Celsius as well as Fahrenheit, and consistently convert weights from lbs to kg for doing dosage calculations of medicine, as a couple examples. I convert miles to km when driving, and my R3 motorcycle has a feature, which I use, to change between miles and km. I will drive for a month or so using metric, then switch and repeat. It's completely possible for a person to be familiar or even adept with both systems. Much the same way you can learn multiple languages, be they spoken, programming, or even systems of measurement.
But like why? Why couldn’t Americans just make it simple?
DId you know the inch is defined as 25.4 millimetres? Has been since Hendy Ford's day, because mass production required repeatability, and repreatability meant accurate measurement gauges - which at the time were only available in metric measurements, from (I think) Germany.
France not Germany
I love how this discussion comes up again and again even though one system is objectively and utterly superior
Superior? How exactly? Objectively and utterly?
Yeah, the imperial system is based on random things, while the metric is very consistent within, works with the most standard physics models, its overall logical
The metrics system is also based on random things. "Earth" and "water" are no more objective than body parts or pieces of corn. And as explained, even measurements based on the human body can be standardized. And they can also be used to calculate physical phenomenon. The imperial system is very good for human style living and human sized things.
@@WhiteShadowZO Actually it is not, the metric system is a universal system of measurement, as it has been proven that a meter is the inverse of the speed of light in a vacuum. Which is given a fixed numerical value of 299,792,458 m/s, so a meter can be defined as the distance covered by light in a vacuum in exactly 1/299,792,458 of a second.
Yea metric really is superior 🦅🇺🇸🥓🍳
As a foreigner that moved to America I’ve found their measurement system just plain crazy, thank goodness for the internet and my phone.
Here in the UK we have a ridiculous mash up of both systems. And most people still give their height and weight in imperial even now.
Like how many football fields crazy?
right
its not crazy..its stupid
It's not crazy. It's natural. Metric is "of the mind" not "of nature". Anything of the mind is evil, of nature good. Just the fact that you wrote "foreigner" tells the tale. Metric is foreign.
21:22 If you take as a reference for 1 meter the ruler, a long piece of metal or wood that you are using for measurements, it is obviously hard to estimate distances in meters... However, when you realize that any medium-large step when you walk is about 1 meter long, it becomes much more comfortable and easy to use !
I was in Canada for a couple of years starting in 1975. They were converting to the metric system, but started first with converting temperature to Celsius. It was easy to learn once I memorized a couple of values. Weather report is 12 C? I had memorized that 10 C if 50 F. Then double the 2 to get 4, and 12 C is 54 F. Changing is very easy. But soon I started thinking in Celsius, and didn't need to convert. Oh, and my finger is 1 dm long. Much better than working with 4 inches.
As a mechanical engineering student in America, I can firmly claim that myself and all students in my major beg on their hands and knees for metric based problems and never imperial unit based ones.
Because it is built as an actual system and it works with decimal numbers. Imperial "system" is just random pile of ad-hoc measurement units added on top of each other over centuries when someone needed to measure something new. It's somewhat useful for day to day life, but it is incompatible with modern math.
As an engineering student in Australia, if I get a problem with imperial units, I convert to metric as the first step, because engineering, and indeed any endeavour that requires any degree of precision, should not be done with imperial under any circumstances.
Yeah because it’s by design by the government to give up the imperial system just to “get in line” with the rest of the world.
Why?
You're on the wrong board for that. That's a matter of another discussion hence the term mechanical engineer. When you step outside to see if you need a jacket or not you don't get surveying equipment. If you get in your car to grab something to eat and need to go by the gas station they don't break your tank down into cc's. That would be for Ju Mcduck. We're not paying in Shekels. For measuring your Johnson I'm sure metric is a little more flattering.
Hey, as a metric person and engineer, I feel the urge to point out that the official SI abbreviations are case sensitive, so for example from 21:15 on you use "M" instead of "m" for meters, then "KM" instead of "km" (but correctly use "cm", why?). Case is very important, as you don't want to confuse MW (megawatt) with mW (milliwatt) or PV (petavolt) with pV (picovolt)!
Imagine running a train with mW but charging your phone with MW
One metric person to another... just give up, they wont ever get it. And i doubt they want to get it cus the f in feet and farenheight stands for FREEDOM
@@IncDoge 'Murica - the place where they believe they are ultra-free but they are totally not.
@@texanplayer7651 I imagine that you wouldn't be able to call a taxi because the train isn't working because your phone just caught fire.
I never knew these awesome thanks for Donation of some knowledge to me
Also paper sizes are interesting. There's ISO A0, A1... starting from an area of 1m2, B0 starting from width of 1m, and a 'letter' - meaning you can run into some problem. But, unfortunately, there's still a problem of 24h/day and 60 min/hr (I understand that 365 days/year is non negotiable). Time conversion is very interesting, because I suppose it gives you some insight into how it is to be an imperial system user.
The only thing that is good about the imperial system is the notion of the magic number "12". It is so good for being able to be split up in so many ways (it has a lot of factors): 2, 3, 4, 6... (1 & 12). And then when you get to 240, you have some additional factors. Great in almost every field of social, scientific and common use. Metric numbers, 5, 10, 15, 20, etc. present a problem in how well things can be divvyed up. BUT, the metric system can accommodate "12" and other combinations. Just use the numbers. So, again, we need to use the metric system, but perhaps retain the traditional use of magic "12" and some other magic numbers.
I remember when Canada switched to Metric. It was confusing for a bit, and we had to convert things in our heads. Now I have no idea how the US-ian measurement system works. Now when I travel to the States I have to convert to metric for it to make sense.
In Canada the extent of our metric use is km for speed limits and Celsius for temperature. Everything else here is still imperial. We aren’t a metric country.
@@kjay8796 km/h, km is for length ahah
@@kjay8796 I feel like you're forgetting a lot of things. Like yeah we measure people's height in feet and inches, and weight in pounds, but food is all in metric like 2L soda bottles, or at least it's labeled as such even when it's not actually measured in it, like 473ml beer cans (16 fl oz). Also in the weather, snowfall is measured in cm and rain in mm. Also on the road, height limits are in metres and weight limits in metric tonnes.
@@WilliamAndrea Canada, Quebec. For people’s height, it seems to be mixes. Some people use inches and some use cm. When I visit various doctors, they only use cm. For road length and speed, it is pretty rare to hear miles and feet. For weather reports, they only use mm, cm for rain and snow depth. They only use Celsius. They only use km for visibility. They only use Pascal or kPa for pressure. For TV and monitor size, everyone uses inches since that is what the box says in large letter. It is USA related. For supermarkets and such, pounds are prioritized for some reason. They mostly print out $/kg as well. It is mostly in the construction industry where imperial units are always used. If I want to buy drill bits, they give fractional numbers like 3/8 of an inch.... and they lost me. I have no idea what 3/8 or 1/4 and such means. Why don’t they give exact numbers? Hey, what time is it? It is 345/1735 hour and 731/3895 minutes.
Go and try to buy 1/4 of kilo of anything at the market, they will scratch their heads and say: "oh, a half-pound!"
I'm Canadian machinist working in the wood industry. I have to convert and switch from one unit to the other every day because the wood we buy and construction site use the old US imperial system and everything else in metric. The imperial measurement is a nightmare when you need to work with decimal.
ouch , I feel you
Welcome to the UK. 😂
BRo decimals are simple, come back when you do fractions for 7/16 and 15/32
@@timtomnec I think you are missing the point here. Only working with decimal, of course it's easy but converting the fraction back and forth its is where the pain begin especially in the 32th of an inch and smaller.
@soyel94 welcome the the wood industry in Quebec, I don't know about the other province. I guess we like it rough lol
I love your candid way of admitting how hard it is to try and unlearn. It's so hard and I feel you.
No, it's not. A lot of nations has done, both for metrics and for money It's hard to change when you are lazy and entitled USA, USA, USA!! :D
@@TheChzoronzon cope nerd
@@Speedy_pig123 Project more, Kletus :D
@@TheChzoronzon cope nerd
This video is full of brilliant edits! And very interesting :D Great job and thank you for the job.
There is a reason why all the standard formulas in science are using the metric system… BECAUSE IT MAKES SENSE 🤣
In the science of land surveying/engineering we use tenths where the decimal doesn't move. Metric moves decimals.
@@odnewdylee that is metric…
I mean all maths is made up, it makes Broad sense cause we have 10 digits in total on both hand and makes using a base 10 system more familiar as when we grow up, fingers are good for learning aids
I work in international logistics and constant change of systems really doesn't make job easier with hundreds of currencies and languages and hundreds of thousands of kind of goods. Yes metrics system makes sense, because people are able to do mistakes because of overly complicated systemic issues (I mean not just measurement 😀)
@@bassiebe until using cm, then the decimal is in the wrong place. It becomes it's own entity not like tenths. Tenths are always behind the decimal so when using blueprints you don't have to check any signs after the number.
I am 77 years of age and I grew up using the imperial system. I can add fractions in my head. However when making furniture I quickly recognized that imperial is (practically) just not accurate enough! And so I changed to Metric. Working to a millimetre is easier (and more accurate) than working to 1/16th inch! Once you get used to metric you will never want to go back!
discovered the same thing !
What I don't understand, is why things were divided like on a binary system in powers of 2?? I mean, imagine if the foot was not divided into 4ths, 8th, 16ths and 32nds, but instead divided into tenths, hundredths, and thousandths just like metric? Issue gone. Poof. And what if we just picked one single unit for each type of measurment, and just multiplied or divided by 10, 100, 1000, etc? Like, ok, you got meters, grams, and liters, we got yards, ounces, and gallons. Now instead of kilometers, centimeters, kilograms, milligrams etc we got kiloyards, centiyards, kiloounces, milliounces, kilogallons, etc... Boom, issue solved again. The thing I like about imperial is that many of the base units of measure are good representations for what they are commonly used for. Feet is good because you can approximate a distance with literal feet, so it fits nicely for the application. Fahrenheit is particularly good for weather because instead of being based on boiling point of water, it's based on the average temperature of the human body, and it allows for nice round numbers for particular air temperatures that feel noticably different. For instance, most people like their room temperature to be 68, 69, 70, 71, or 72 degrees fahrenheit. This corresponds to 20c, 20.555c, 21.111c, 21.666c, and 22.222c. If you wanted to give whole numbers for room temp in celcius, each whole digit would go up by nearly 2 degrees fahrenheit, which is too large of a jump, so you are forced to use decimal places to describe your ideal room temp.
@@rameynoodles152 this is a lame excuse. I have no problem describing 20.5 C, 21C, 21.5C and so on for my room temperature. My A/C control shift temperature in 0.5C steps. In fact, comparing to distance, using 0.5 increments in temperature is easier than describing a size of wrench socket a 7/16" or 1-1/8". Describing like that it is very ackward compared to the closest metric equivalents (M16 or M29).
@@rameynoodles152 I dont know, using Celcious is easy and logical, 0 is freezing water, 100 is boiling and means dont shove your fingers, average human body temp is 36, i use AC set to 25C The differences in your example are not feelable one degree celcious is nothing, plus one minus one you wont really feel it
@@NoBodysGamer Man, i gotta say.. A/C set to 25C is REALLY HOT.
In Canada there was a case where pilots have mistaken liters with gallons. Fortunately they where able to emergency land their plane.
The reason is our land system of measurement was successfully in place before the metric system could be considered. Without compulsory implementation it won’t happen. In the 1970s a popular local gas station began selling in liters. People avoided buying their gas for fear of being ripped off and the inability to calculate mpg. So out of business interests they went back to gallons.
The trick in getting used to metric is not to start using metric in your head - it's to stop using imperial. And it can be done. It's like learning a new language - at first you're translating everything in your head until eventually something clicks and you just think in a new language. But yeah, probably not feasible to do it alone - you need everybody else doing it to keep you going.
That has actually happened to me with small measurements. Anything under half an inch makes more sense to me in mm because I have a German car I often work on and all the bolts are in metric, so when I think of a frame of reference from small units of length, i think of those bolt sizes, in Metric. I will use US Customary down the about a half inch then just switch over to mm. Anything over about 18mm becomes meaningless to me and anything under half an inch also becomes somewhat meaningless.
Metric is the easiest language to learn, while teaching you a scientific logic that goes forwards and backwards with absolute accuracy using 1s and 0s. I will teach you a learning. Are you ready? 1+1=2 Congrats!...you now know the Metric System. Well done children. Gold Star for you all. Oh...by the way...as in money we use a "Coma" per Metric Currency...all you have to use is a "Dot" or in Imperial it might be called a "Period". A "Period" is a simular word that Women do not enjoy having as Math nuts hate hearing.
@@waystadtymphyndir7079 any woman that does have 60 periods per second does sound like an electric power station
@@waystadtymphyndir7079 try this 2+4= 3/8
I was a physics major in university so I learned the metric system and worked with it for years. As soon as I left the field tho, I lost the ability to estimate in metric. Later in life, I decided to do my woodworking in metric (I still have a metric tape measure and a meter stick) and run my thermometers in celsius. I made like two wood projects in metric and was SO frustrated that my metric tools are covered with sawdust. As for the temperature, I was constantly and secretly converting EVERY temperature back to Fahrenheit. Both totally failed. About the only thing that I can easily do is go from Kilometers to Miles and back as I have a pretty good feel for that and the conversion is so simple.
As an engineer, we use the metric system although while in college we were exposed to problems with imperial units so we had to memorize frequently used conversion values. In practice, it's metric system all the way, I cant imagine doing it in imperial. I still encounter imperial in daily life so had to be flexible and tolerant somehow.
Agreed. As soon as I see some Fred Flintstone units like BTU or ft, I heave a sigh and convert to usable units. Oddly, I am stuck with KSI (thousands of pounds [force] per square inch) for most material strengths. Oh, and that lie that your engineering professors told you about the pound being a US customary unit of force, not a mass is a lie (and nonsense about slugs). Since the early 1970's the U.S. pound has been defined with respect to the international kilogram, which is a mass.
Carter who was an engineer but a bad politicians pushed fir metrication. Idiots who followed stopped to please lazy idiots. Confusion also help stores as customers cant figure out and compare prices per quantity !
So you're not a Ford engineer then?
You're in the US?
@@FinnMcRiangabra You didn't mention poundals!
Grams for cooking, Fahrenheit for weather, feet for altitude and elevation, metric for chemistry. Perfectly happy!! BTW, _designing 3D printed objects_ and _building RC airplanes_ have converted me to thinking in millimeters like nothing else has in more than 50 years of living.
Why is Fahrenheit better than Celsius? Why would feet be better for elevation or altitude? I see no reason other than you are used to it. Thank you in advance
Fahrenheit is such a dumb system. Freezing temperatures are measured in the positive scale, where's the logic in that.
@@yankis. because 40 degrees is a bitch number compared to 103
@@Speedy_pig123 lol
You can use Fahrenheit for weather, as long as you use celsius for temperature...
Funny, I grew up as a kid with the Imperial system in the UK, but it changed to metric at some point, and then I moved to Australia where it was metric, and now only metric makes sense to me, although I do find myself using Imperial occasionally.
I was in high school in Australia when the whole country switched to metric. The text books were imperial one year and metric the next. The thing is they took the same text and changed the measurements. The technical drawing books would say draw a square 52 mm by 52 mm. Every thing I read had conversion factors built in. I was constantly doing conversions for my dad. (Not my mum, she was a pharmacist and was already across the whole metric system). After a while my dad got used to it too, it wasn't that hard.
Probably the only way to do it is the whole country in one big bang
yeah, the key is schooling.
Yeah, as an American, I don't disagree that it wouldn't be that hard - in the long run. It would just be one hell of a speed bump to get over. I personally think we should convert to metric, but until it becomes officially sanctioned by the government, I agree with Johnny in that it is impossible for me to comprehend and retain it. It's basically like learning a second language. You can learn that language and even be fluent in it, but if you don't use it in everyday life, you will just revert back to what you know and are comfortable with.
You underestimate how stubborn Americans are.
It's really true that you learn this because your environment adjusted to it. In my country there are little green signs next to the road spread 100 m apart. The signs are there to tell you the exact location if you were to be stranded there (amongst other things). But it helped me to understand what a distance of 100 m looks like subconsciously. Just a small example.
Whenever I see a title like that, my first thought is- "Is base 10 just too hard for you to figure out?" I'm an American, trained and worked as an American Mechanic. I moved to Europe. The metric system makes MY life easier in so many ways.
It's not that it's hard. From my experience, it's just useless stubbornness and a weird sense of national pride.
@@ilsgrade8357 exceptionalism :)
We should all remember that Sumerians used a sexagesimal system back in 4000 BC, which is Base-60 and far from 10! They designed the 60-minute hour ffs... We still use the base 60 numbering for designing navigaton systems.
It's not difficult to use base 10 (decimal). It's just stupid to use base 10 (decimal). We should use base 10 instead.
Also the problem is how they said " everything will be made in metric" they said that when my dad was a kid
I decided to teach my kid both systems. It was really hard for him to grasp imperial system but metric system was a breeze for him.
Surprising lol
Because Metric is the best
What a surprise
Then just teach him the metric system if it's so much easier, no need to make your child go through that much mental torment.
There’s a reason why pretty much the entire world is using it
Great video👍 us Brits started the change to metric in 1965 but haven't fully gone metric. We still use a lot of imperial measurements, our cars do miles per gallon and miles per hour many plumbing parts are still imperial, fencing and gates quite often are in feet and inches and beer,larger and milk are still sold by the pint even recipe instructions on food items still call for pint measurements.
Its is not only a measure of distance. On daily basis I know that 30 feet is about 10 meters. But temprature? How ? Water turns Ice at 0 and gas at 100. Under 1 atmosphere of pressure. Kinda easy to remember. Even Miles versus Km.. Is easily translated. But farenheight ? it makes no sense. Kelvin start at absolute ZERO. Makes sense too. As there is no upper limit.
Fahrenheit actually makes more sense for human beings than Celsius. 0 is too cold, 100 is too hot. The middle is where it's comfortable. It's also more granular. Celsius bears no natural relation to the comfort of the human body, we're not sentient water droplets.
Very funny.. haha But we are about 60% water. So if I drink loads of water.. I freeze at 60% of 32 F.. If I am drunk 2% alcohol maybe 30 f ? .. Does that make sense? Oh and you boil faster if youre drunk.. mabye at 202 F ?
Johnny... literally EVERYONE that changed over to the metric system in the past faced the same dilemma that you did. They weren't used to it. They got used to it & they got over it. Now, they enjoy a system where they don't gave to convert from a 1/16 in, feet to miles, or ounces to gallons. Now we're still stuck with this measurement system because people didn't want to adjust. They didn't get used to it & didn't get over it. Now we're still multiplying fractions & doing complicated conversions. I'm sure the adjustment we would have had to make would be long forgotten by now but we just didn't want to put in the effort. Now we're still stuck with it.
That's nice. You know, until you go to the hardware store and all the lumber is cut to inch measurements (that aren't even really the measurements they say they are but fuck don't get me started on that shit) and everything is still sold by the foot. It bugs me that so many people outside the U.S. shit on us for not using metric, but it's not like we can really switch to using it individually when everything around us is still in Imperial units. BTW, I think that, objectively, the way you guys measure fuel efficiency in the metric system is infinitely stupider than we measure it here, even with our dumb units.
@@Kevin-jb2pv pretty sure you didn’t read the comment. The point is everyone had these same issues when they switched. You’re not special. It’s just that everyone else did it and gone on with life while you’re moaning about it all
@@Kevin-jb2pv You realize that most other countries use Foot and inches too. A country can develop a system where both can be used when appropriate.
Funny because I grew up using the metric system and as I watch and read a lot of American and British videos and books, I get to use the imperial system 😂 nothing hard, just like a lot pesaid, just have to get used to it.
You know this is true for most changes in the US, it is way more conservative than people in the US think themselves
I always found it funny how during my school years (in Estonia) we used rules that always had centimeters on one side and inches on the other and I never knew what those inches are on the other side, no one used them anywhere, but they were still there.
Same here in Germany.
That's what it was like in the U.S. except we only used inches and didn't really know what the centimeters meant!
Same here in Mozambique
I'm from Estonia too, very familiar for me
Same in Australia.
You guys do metric with money. Imagine a world where a dime is 12 pennies, a dollar is 23 dimes, 10 dollars is 12.5 unit dollars, etc. See how we see it?
As the video went on, I began to get where you were going with all of this. It's not a matter of desire, but a matter of ability. We do the same thing when we learn a different language. We use our native language as a base to learn another language. Takes a long time to get used to it. Lovely video!
I was raised in Canada when we converted to Metric overnight in the 1970s. Eventually, everyone has their own experience of what a kilometre is like, how much a litre is, what a gram of pot is vs. a kg of hamburger meat or what 5 C feels like. You just need to tie the physical experience to the theoretical measurement. It can be done in the USA.
100% his excuse as to why he cant use metric boils down to he just didnt use it enough to get use to it.
@@trashmammal454 I feel like he said more that everything that surrounds him and his kids is imperial and that makes it so difficult to get the experience to be metric. For me a meter is about a step. Probably very off since that's my messure of being a kid but it's still in my head
Idk when I visited Vancouver pizza sizes were still 12-14". Whats up with that Canada?
But not in 'MURICA.. the tribal zone currently occupied by about 50% reasonable people..
I had the same experience when we switched currencies in my country.
"I won't use the metric system, because I'm trapped in the imperial system" - You're trapped as much in the imperial system as you are trapped in the English language i.e. you can learn the metric system as much as you can learn a new language. But that requires effort and the realization that there is more in the world beyond the borders of the US. Also, learning the metric system is way easier than learning a new language. I was born in Europe, lived there the first 35 years of my life, and then moved to the US. I learned to use the imperial system really fast, and it is not hard once you figure out what is what. In fact, I would argue that learning the imperial system for a European is much harder than for a US person to learn the metric system, due to the imperial system's lack of easy logic. So to summarize: learning something new takes effort and it will help you understand the world better, but it's up to you how important it is for you.
You need to expose yourself to learn a new language. The real problem is because everything around him and all US is in Imperial system, doesn't matter how hard he try to learn, he will neve be able to say "I really know metric system now", because he never uses. North Americans hasn't any small contact with it, so they are all doomed to this shit. Until some government strategy start to fix this.
@@gustavomalta6428 Or... he'll always have to drive that Arizona road each and every day 😂
There is something you don’t understand. I used to preach this message on my way to a physics PhD as I was a TA and a tutor for many years, and now I think differently. The imperial system is based on highly composite numbers. We use dozens because 12 has more factors than any number smaller than it. 360 degrees in a circle and 60 minutes in an hour all fall under this umbrella. It’s about being able to easily divide things among people. Yes, it’s possible if everything is in base 10, but not everything in life is a decimal calculation. It’s fine for both systems to exist. Think about it, America uses imperial and is, far and away, the technological driver of the entire world.
effort🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@cougar2013 can you tell me how many inches are in 11.7654 miles in 5 seconds? you can't. Meanwhile I can tell you exactly how many centimetres are in 11.7654 kilometres. Case closed
Me: What are the marks on the other side of the ruler? My first grade teacher: Don't worry you'll never use those :)
Became a hobby chemist a few years ago and fell in love with the metric system because it's just so easy! I still think, mostly, in US, for sure. And in chemistry, to think about it, I commonly relate 5ml=1 teaspoon and 15ml=1 tablespoon as a way to imagine volumes.
Wait till you realize that in many countries, a mix of both systems is used. In India, people use kms for long distances, liters for volume but sq.ft for area and feet for measuring heights 😅
Do we use feet for measuring height???
Namaskar doston
Same in Canada, British relics
Wassup my man 👋
haha true.but these days atleast school going students mostly use centimeters for height as medical check up reports mention it in metric system.also 1liter = 1000ml so its atleast better than that 29.547.... conversion for ounces
I grew up in a country that still uses some imperial units (and spanish imperial units which are just as crazy). For example, pounds and ounces are used to measuring mass there. Moved to Europe as a grown up having never really used kilograms for anything. Within a year I was completely converted to kilograms and had even forgotten what a pound was supposed to be. So it can definitely be done. You just need to give yourself time to adapt.
all except the United States We don't need to memorize anything because our perception is in meters from birth. studying science becomes easy.
I've never heard about the existence of spanish imperial units, and I'm spanish.
A pound - that's a measurement of British money ! You kbnow - so many Shillings and Pence. How can you forget that ?
And to be surrounded by it
Why though?
As a Canadian I mainly use the metric system but did learn a small bit of imperial but have no idea how miles work lol
@10:00 Since this was not further clarified in the video. Nowadays the 1 meter is defined as the distance light travels in vacuum in a certain amount of time. This definition is definite and not based on any geographical properties. Same with kilogram. 1 liter of water obviously proved itself as inaccurate. The reference used to be a platinum cube stored somewhere in Paris. But nowadays 1kg is also base on some physical constant. I think meanwhile all units of the SI system are based on physical constants.
Since Planck found another constant then the speed of light in a vacuüm ( the vibration of a cesium atom) we can derive every measurement from those two constants.
As many many commenters pointed out, yes, you still can teach it not only yourself but also your kids and pretty much anyone. But there has to be a country wide switch. Same as we, a European country switched from our own currency to Euro. We had a one year transition period where all prices were mandatory double labeled. After that, everybody got used to euro, even my then 70 years old grandma and her friends. You just need to DO IT.
yeah, but she wasn't American :)
I was gonna say the same thing; I was 20+ when france changed from francs to euros, it took me a while to adapt, it took my parents even more, but after a while it become natural. BUT it have to be a national change because, as you said, as long as your children (or even you) only see imperial measurements in your daily life, you wont be able to change.
So true a couple of years after the change no one could be bother to try to convert to the old coin it worked perfectly
Yeah but theres just no reason to do it. If you work in a field where it matters then you can use metric just fine no ones bothered by it, meanwhile in every day life imperial does not impact the vast majority of us. I'm not losing anything because I think of distance in miles instead of kilometers or because I measure in cups when cooking.
@@daroaminggnomeI was actually surprised to know that American labels are in the metric system because how are you supposed to understand what you are buying if you can't understand what is in it? I know most people don't even look at the labels but the only reason they exist is to inform the customer so this is kind of like writing a label in a different language at least that's how I see it.
As a pilot I can say the imperial system is making everyone's lives more difficult in the industry.
As a pilot I can say that's a crock.
as a pilot im thankful imperial is standard, as a maker i’m not so thankful for imperial
Only for altitude.@@DudeManBoroMan
maker of what? wdym@@DudeManBoroMan
Aviation doesn't use any one system. It's a mixture of imperial (altitude), nautical (distance/speed) and in most cases, metric (visibility, air pressure, temperature, dewpoint). Personally I'm glad they don't use metric for altitude or speed/distance. "When ready, descend to one thousand two hundred metres" or "reduce speed to three three three kilometres per hour" (as opposed to "descend to four thousand feet" and "reduce speed to to one eight zero knots" is much quicker to say on the radio. There's also the fact that ATC 'units' are in blocks of 5 miles lateral and 1000 feet vertical, so to switch to the metric system makes all that a lot harder for those who separate aircraft from each other.
Great Video, I have long said I wish they would start replacing road signs with signs that have both Miles and Km in the US. It would be a way to ease into the switch and for it to be a little easier to visualize the distance in metric.
Miles are better for road signs. Because of the coincidence of typical travel speeds being around 60mph and a minute being 60 seconds, when traveling at highway speeds, you go 1 mile per minute. So you can glance at a road sign and read the numbers as if it were telling you how many minutes it will take to get there. Doesn't work in metric.
As a Brit in my late 40s metrification happened in the UK a relatively short time before I was born, so my parents and grandparents used imperial measurements, and my children use metric, but I am familiar with both systems. When I drive my car I think in miles, because that's what is on the signs and the speedo, but when I cycle I think in kilometres because it's much easier to calculate with. I go to the pub and drink pints of beer, but at home I drink from 500ml cans of beer or 2 litre bottles of soft drink. When I'm doing DIY or working in my garage I use metric and imperial interchangeably depending on what I'm doing. I'd quite like for the UK to go the rest of the way with metric but the cost involved in switching all the road signs to km would be a LOT, and I'm sure manufacturers would use it as an excuse to increase the cost of products (e.g. switch pints to 500ml but keep the same price).
I was able to successfully calibrate my brain to metric by changing my map navigation to metric. Since you're constantly being given feedback on how many meters away you are from a given turn, it doesn't take long for your brain to be able to tell how far a kilometer is. I highly suggest giving it a try.
I started with temperature, but am still not used to using it consistently...
@@privatemale27 If you live in a moderate climate you just have to know that 0° is freezing so you can see ice or snow, 20 degrees is a comfortable shirt temperature, at 30 its hot and 100 you literally evaporate. After that it's all downhill. Btw even i can't guess better than plus or minus a couple degrees
I'll try it. I forsee a multitude of U-turns in my future
@@t0k4m4k7 wellllll you can actually exist in 100 degrees (celcius, ofc) for some time before you die. You can do that in a sauna.
I did this on a recent road trip to Canada. Google maps automatically switches to km when crossing the border and I changed my car’s measurements to metric too
I'm from Brazil. Here in Brazil we made the shift from Portuguese Imperial Units to the metric system in 1862. It was 161 years ago. Today, EVERYBODY use the meters and kilometers and almost nobody knows about the existence of another measurement system.
ofc
Do you realize their arguments? 22 minutes to justify MURICA
@@BornToBeUaifuck murica
@@castillo5148 The US is a great country, but they should get rid of these units of measurements
1979 to 1984 I taught machine tool engineering in Malaysia. The country by then had changed to metric .. almost. Being a newly independent country and ex British colony the change took time. Micrometers, dial indicators, and all kinds of other tools had to be both imperial and metric. Mind boggling was that taps & dies took up a huge amount of shelf space. Canada and many other countries have the same thing going on ... until now. The most effected are car and motorcycle repair shops and of course machine shops.
I started my working life for the Ford Motor Company in the UK, that was fun! We received information from Detroit in US units, which we would then convert into British units before sending it to Ford of Germany who had to convert it to metric. FoG would send us their information im metric which we would then convert to British units, and din‘t even get me started on 1st and 3rd angle drawings, where you realised you were then measuring from the wrong end! 😂
I live in Ireland and we made the switch to metric in my lifetime to metric. I can say it takes time to rewire yourself but it isn't impossible. I think the main thing is that, like a language, it is hard to do it if your environment doesn't re-enforce it. I was used to miles and stones and feet but now they are hard for me to understand after so many years of only using the alternative. Americans could get used to the metric system but it would have to come from the top down, not just from individuals trying to learn it like a foreign language. It's going to be nearly impossible to think in French without being surrounded by French speakers, and the same way it will be hard to think in metric unless you're actually forced to use it and get frames of reference for it every day.
Pretty much. A few years ago I decided to change all my weather apps to use Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. At first it was odd, but I've gotten to the point where I'm used to it. I live in the US and I know approximately what I should wear when it's 15C outside ... and I'm starting to forget what I should wear when it's 70F out.
@@vegigun honestly the temp measurement is way worse in imperial than the distance for me since how it makes sense in metric, water freeze=cold=0 degrees/ water boiling=hot=100 degrees. wtaf is 100 degrees f fgs, makes zero sense.
Same goes for all of us in the Eurozone who had to switch to Euros on some random Jan. 1st. I grew up with Francs, but now hardly know what it is because we learnt to use euros and cents. The days of converting everything are long gone. Does it take time and efforts? Yes. Is it impossible? No. Look at how Sweden suddenly had to learn to drive on the other side of the road in 1967. It seems impossible to me to drive in left-hand traffic, but it isn't; plenty of Brits seem to be doing just fine when they visit too.
Agreed. Reducing intellectual expectations of a nation to the lowest common denominator never leads to global progress for our civilisation. Another moment I'm proud to be Irish.
Yep, I moved to Australia as an adult. Swapping over was strange at first with lots of mental maths, but now I think in metric and it’s strange to talk to my family overseas when they use imperial hahah. A huge one for me was cooking and buying food, grams for everything works so well.
My parents and grandparents grew up using the imperial system fahrenheit, miles, pounds, the lot. They 100% switched to metric in the late 70s and now do not internally know the distance of a mile... Canada did it 🤙
The only reason I know about the imperial system is because I go to America to visit family.
I'm of the age where we transitioned to the metric system while I was in school in the 70's and when it comes to metric vs imperial, my brain is scrambled, I visualize some things in imperial and some things in metric, it's actually a pain and have to constantly pull out a ruler or tape measure or google the conversion of things. For example, if you tell me something is 270mm, I can't visualize it but if you say something is about 10.5", I can visualize it. Very frustrating.
Canada still uses specific imperial units for a lot of day-to-day things, at least in my neck of the woods. Distances are measured in centimetres, metres, kilometres, etc., but human height is in feet and inches (when people from other metric-using countries say things like "I'm 170 cm tall" I don't have any real intuitive mental understanding of how tall that is, aside "180 cm is roughly six feet" and then having to do mental math from there. Admittedly, a lot of that might be from not meeting a lot of them in person - most of the people I know in the real world are Canadians or Americans, and not being able to look at how tall they are to map that "I'm 170 cm tall" statement to a real-world height you can see probably hurts on that front). Human weight also tends to be in pounds. Most other weights are in grams and kilograms, except for meat and produce at the grocery store, which is in pounds (although boxed goods like cereals and the like are in grams again)... temperature measurements seem to be based on how recently you bought your appliances like thermostats and ovens (which can lead to weird things like thinking about the outdoor temperature and weather in terms of degrees celsius, but indoor temperatures and cooking temperatures in degrees fahrenheit). A lot of recipes still use measurements like teaspoons and tablespoons and cups (when I get measurements that *do* use grams I feel like I'm back in a chemistry lab). Formal settings all use metric, but there are still some informal day-to-day uses where imperial seems to be more common. Oddly I can't think of any places where imperial volume measurements are used in Canada these days: even canned soft drinks say things like "355 mL" instead of "12 fluid ounces" even though the imperial measurement is the more precise one for that container (the can is exactly 12 ounces, so it's technically 354.882 mL, and they just round to the nearest whole number since mL are tiny anyway).
@@dosdont eh 270mm is just 27cm
@@cewla3348 I understand that, but I think you missed my point
The biggest problem is the learning curve to move from metric to imperial. To move as an entire country from the imperial system to the metric system can be easily accomplished in a half day course or maybe a full day course if everybody in the country were to take it. To move all of the metric intelligence and the people that know and live metric systems daily, to try to explain the exact measurements of a yard, miles, and other distorted methods of measuring things imperiorly (like a tablespoon or a teaspoon, I mean come on, these are not all the same size regardless if they are different entities) would take weeks if not months or years.
As a US physician, I think about fevers and body temperature in Celcius, because that is what I see in multiple patient's charts every day for years. However, when a family member says they have a fever of 101 F, my immediate thought is "what's that in Celcius?" When it comes to ambient room temperature though, I need Fahrenheit again.
I had no concept of how long a kilometre was until i started driving around using maps. Siri saying “turn right in 900 metres” “turn left in 50 metres” really helped me understand what those measurements actually meant! Could be helpful if you are struggling to get it!
It is a matter of practice. It may take some effort, as you have to deliberately try to implement metric in daily routine. But at the end, this will make it easier to interact internationally.
Or if you run with a smart watch make it a habit of running 5k or 10k which are pretty standard running distances. Highway exits usually have signs at 1200m and 400m, so every time you see ¾ mi just think 1200m. That being said, metric is "okay" but I DO prefer PARTS of the imperial system for it's mathematical bases. Having things based on 12 and 16 makes things really nice to work with. It's just too bad the French didn't choose to standardize the number system away from decimal and use dozenal (base 12). Would have made things so much better.
Thats funny, I have gotten angry at google when it tells me to turn in 400 feet. How long is that? 1/4 mile I can understand. Metric would make that easier.
@@fulltimemonti EXACTLY this. I mean, in REALITY, it doesn't matter how many METERS an exit is away either, it's just that 1200m is more clear than 1.2km. due to the decimal point, which really should be avoided when designing large signs that have to be read VERY quickly. That's why signs in the USA stick to MILES for everything, and you see ¼ mi and ¾ mile signs. Ironically, many metric architectural blueprints only EVERY use one unit anyhow... mm. a 2.5m wall is written as 2500. This avoids any confusion. Also, both the US and Canada standardized on teaching cm as a kind of base unit, but mm is just almost always superior. You almost NEVER need to get smaller than a mm in day to day life. cm were added to make an approximation to an inch... and it's an imperfect comparison and you end up using fractions a lot anyhow.
@@TheNewGreenIsBlue dozenal is thrash, you can't easily make conversions since the base of usual numbers is 10 by 10. It would give something like hours to minutes and days, and that's a PITA to convert. I enjoy a base 10 way more for easy conversions.
I'm an English carpenter. When I first went to school, we used Imperial units so I know both units. Believe me, metric is SOOOO much easier than Imperial. Nowadays when I watch American joiners or carpenters on KZhead and they start doing calculations in inches and feet, I just think - hey guys, why not make things easier for yourself and use metric?
Because for many of us, calculations in imperial aren't hard.
@@dalyclose7815 I do not think you find it easy. How many gallons does a 2 feet wooden cube hold? It's easy to answer how many liters a 0.6 meter wooden cube holds. I can assume that sometimes you need to build for volume.
@@rxappdev In situations like that we just use cubic feet
@@rxappdev In what context would I need to know how many gallons a 2 foot wooden cube holds? Sincerely curious.
We fought the English for a reason. Keep your Imperial units.
Everyone seems to think the advantage is that the multiples of units are powers of 10. The larger difference in convenience is when you convert physical quantities to other units (e.g. unit of energy per unit of time) they end up still being 1 derived unit. 1J/1s = 1W, no multiplications anywhere.
Exactly. Some asshole was telling me I don't understand metric because I said "it's easier to convert things in metric". I brought this very concept up in response.
I understand! 20 years ago, we in Europe (I’m Dutch, so one of the first metric countries), we switch from our Guldens to the Euro (money, just one unit). It too me more than a few years before I could estimate the value in Euros before calculating it to Dutch Guldens. The metric system is about weight/ mass, distance and so many more, thus, I can imagine that it is like reading the sign in China. I also understand why we, Europeans, think the Imperial system is crazy difficult 😊 Strange enough, some thing are still Imperial in the Netherlands. The rim size of a wheel is always listed in inches, and a record is 12 inch, which I don’t know how many centimeters!
The UK is the best for this. Everything metric... EXCEPT... HAHAHA Miles, Gallons, Pints. The important daily stuff. :D
rim size is in inch over here in Germany as well :D
It's the reverse for me, I am French but studied urban planning in the US and I was always struggling with sqft, yards, acres... always secretly converting them to sqm, meters, hectares... to get a rough idea of what our teachers were talking about 😀
Vive la République, vive la France!
@@siloetnatchanel Je m'appelle me Poo Poo!!
@@sdamer4609 ok I guess
Apprendre l'urbanisme aux USA ? Pire idée ever ?
@@huquui8789 t'façon à partir du moment ou ça concerne pas des armes ou des burgers c'est pas la peine
As a foreigner, I feel the same way you described at the end of the video about imperial, everything in my everyday life is in metric units, I'm not able to convert imperial units very efficiently bc I learned everything in metric growing up. I understand why metric doesn't really matter for your average American, but it is crucial for people that actually work in scientific fields.
Iam sad that he said "using the cubit to build the pyramids in 'cairo'" like why I know it is giza not cairo
imperial measurements are still widely used in aerospace engineering so.
@@Biriadan not outside the US
@@Biriadan, only in the US and probably very few companies altogether, ALL scientific ventures are now Metric across the world, so Metric is required in EVERY country, (US included) to be able to pursue a Scientific career, it is only a matter of time before the US ends up going Metric in everyday life. Suck it up and move on.
@@Biriadan Also, NASA lost a spacecraft by not implementing the right metric/imperial system. If the whole world uses metric this wouldn't have happened. It doesn't matter what the US thinks/feels, the rest of the world uses metric and the US should too.
Hehe, the logic behind both systems nicely explained. One makes more sense than the other, depending on the standpoint. OK. Nice algorithm KZhead :) Great video. Seriously. I'll keep loving the imperial despite using it only when talking about the hypothenuse of screens. The thing that I like best is the five tomatoes rule. Five-two-eight-oh, as in there are 5280 feet in a mile. I'm graduating to ounces shortly and looking forward to it. Thanks for this. It's an Antonio's speech for the metric system where Brutus is the imperial one. You have gotten yourself a new sub, sir. Love the narrative
Glad I watched this all the way through--you're definitely fighting an uphill battle.
Australia went metric in the 70's and as a schoolkid, we grew up with rulers (typically 30cm) which had inches on one edge and centimetres on the other. So we always had a good idea that 12" was about 30cm. Today, you can still buy tape measure which has inches/feet on one edge and (centi)metres on the other.
Same in India, we use metric, but also use some imperial units.
Same in Taiwan where the inch has never been used
Same in Kenya. In fact when I think of height I think of feet and inches not centimetres. Never have.
Same 🇨🇦
Same in England but they're being fazed out
What is interesting in this context is that both the inch (2.54 cm) and the feet ( 30.48 cm) are now defined on the basis of SI units (metric).
I believe you mean "re-defined."
@@PvblivsAelivs yes, because their old definitions were unreliable, and physicists don't care about them enough to give them their own definitions
Oh yes. Similarly, the pound is now defined as 0.45359237 kg
@@PvblivsAelivs isnt "re-defined" literally the same as "now defined"
well kind of, now they are both redefined using universal constants.
Interesting. I have no trouble with switching. I grew up with the metric system, but I live in the US now. I have an good intuition for both systems. I know what 72F feels like and I know what 10C feels like, or how far 3 miles is or 5km. I'm a pilot and I know how what it feels like to fly at 1000 feet vs 300 meters and so on.
As a pilot from central Europe,I use both systems and is true,I struggled at the begining,but now I can switch easily between
I'm an American expat living in Europe. I decided to take the metric plunge, and started with temperature. I found that if I simply never referenced Fahrenheit and always looked up the temp in Celsius, that before long I intuitively knew what the Celsius degrees felt like. Now I can usually guess the temperature within a degree. For other measurements I found volume the next easiest, then distance. Weight has been the most difficult.
That's probably the best way to do it. Weight isn't too bad for me to convert kg and pounds, but anything else would take some doing.
just remember distances are base 10s. 1Km = 1000m = 100000cm etc it even works going into small values 1cm is 10mm etc
You're not an expat, you're an immigrant.
@@saybrowt Do you even know what an expat is? And why is that the most important thing about his post?
@@MacNerfer Yes, an immigrant. Don't make up fancy words for yourself cause you consider yourself to be better.
You forgot to mention the temperature. We all use Celsius °C - 0°is the freezing point 100° is a boiling point. (37° is a normal body temperature). Again - simple and based on the most common and most relatable element - water. Also, I personally use the Japanese shoe sizing because it's literally your foot measured in centimeters which is more precise than inches.
Except the freezing point and boiling point can shift around based on pressure and salt content. Water boils at temperatures lower than 100C at altitude.
Except how often are you actually using that fact?
This is the perfect illustration of the mindset of metric people. They think they're being more precise, yet they fail to understand that the Imperial system is based upon established standards. It's every bit as precise to measure something in thousanths of an inch, they just refuse to believe it.
Calories are based on water too but they always label water as zero calories no matter what temperature it is. Tell me how that makes sense.
@@thereaction18 That is why we see a transition over to the physical unit Joule instead of Calories which is not based on water. Every label on every product within the EU shows calories as well as joule. Which one you want to use is up to you. The unit celsius is a bit wobbly since it relies on certain conditions like pressure and salt. I think that is the reason why temperature was not a topic in this video.
I live in Germany and experienced the same, when switching from "Deutsche Mark" to "Euro". The faktor is basically 2, so 2 Euro=4DM. When the EURO was introduced in everyday live, I calculated back to DM to get a feeling for the cost of something. It too some years to leave the habbit behind. It also helped that the DM prices I was comparing with were 10year old and thus no longer valid. For a length that would not be true, because there is no inflation in length measurements. The other measturement, that I try to get rid of is PS (Pferdestärken, bhp) for vehicles engine power and use the SI-Unit kW (kilo watt). I still have a feeling about a 200PS engine, but no feeling about a 100kW engine. The introduction of electric vehicles helps, because I am used to measure electric machines in watts, even though no daily electric machine up to know has a power bigger than 2-3kW (except for electric vehicles).
The Gimli Glider airplane-accident in Canada was also due to a metric/imperial miscalculation
We have to switch to fully metric in Canada, the imperial system sucks
I'm a metrologist and we strictly use metric in the lab. I really enjoy it over imperial. Best way to learn metric is having a relational thing to it. Just how it's done with any measurement system. Have objects that are normally a certain size, like 10mm for example. From there it's easy to start understanding how it works.
I grew up using the metric system. It's funny seeing how you don't automatically convert between units, probably beacause it's hard in imperial units. Here people would say 1cm instead of 10 mm.
@@KJPCox But have you ever encountered people casually using dm? Where I'm from, people use cm because that's a convenient human scale unit (bearing a relationship to inches similar to the relationship between Fahrenheit and Celsius) and mm for precision or scientific work. Without more context, I would understand "1cm" as meaning "probably between 0.3 and 2cm" while "10mm" would say to me "between 9.5 and 10.5mm"
@@KJPCox In my experience most sicence/engineering fields completly ignore the cm and just stick with the base 1000 units (mm, m, km, ect) but i agree, if someone were to tell me something is 300mm long i would convert it into 30cm in my head first.
@@rmsgrey That's true, dm is rarely used, same as hm (100 m). I don't really understand what you are saying about the rounding. If precision is important you can say 1.0 cm so you have two significant digits, but this applies to all numbers and units.
@@johnneedham7569 I'm no engineer, but as a physician I use cm a lot (size of lesions etc).
As a German who grew up with the metric system I don't visualize metric units. When I think about a liter I think about a milk box. You're not supposed to know how much a liter is. 100 liters is a bath tub. A meter for me is a long step. A kilometer is what I run in 5 minutes or the distance I can swim safely without rest. You have to relate metric units to real things in order to make sense of them. I would recommend to just look for those intuitive relations for yourself.
Exactly! I grew up with the metric system in Denmark and I agree on all your points.
@@AScareDK As a Swede, I only partially agree though. I do similar things, but I mainly rely on remembering images of measurement sticks (they do exist in different lengths after all, even though the vid only mentioned the 30cm one for some reason), as well as that measurement "tape" or w/e it's called in English, which is used very often for crafting things. As for a liter, I rely on pitchers with height measurements showing how much it is depending on how high the liquid goes inside it. (Milk cartons tend to have different shapes after all, so I never really found those to be reliable.) Even though these pitchers can have different shapes and heights as well, they're easier to remember precisely since they've each got those measurements showing on the side for a clear depiction of the amount inside it. So I use the same technique, just relying on different images in my head. As for weights, I just rely on stuff you can find in gyms. Although, in Sweden we still use the word 'Mile' (although we call it 'Mil'), which had various definitions but was then changed to 10,6km (or 10.6 for people using a dot instead of a comma for some reason) around 200 years before the metric system was introduced, which remained in Sweden after the introduction of the metric system because of sheer happenstance since it could be so easily converted, and was also changed to exactly 10km with the introduction of the metric system. So we use 'Mil' to refer to large distances, like for example distances between cities that matches or exceeds it, in colloquial speech. We use km for road signs and so on, because 'Mil' isn't accepted as a metric internationally, and Sweden doesn't want to confuse tourists and people coming here for work. Which is why it's limited to colloquial speech.
@@Joppi1992I think the point is, that when people used to the Imperial System lack a reference to how much e.g 1 meter, 1 litre etc. is, they need - as you, and I suppose most people do - a common object as a rough reference. Despite the different milk box shapes, I still use it as a refernce for 1 litre. I know basically how much 1 meter is, ever since we had this 1 meter ruler in my classroom in elementry school. Just as other people know how much e.g 1 foot is. It's not any different. It's just the reference that is different. Ofc. If you need to know an exact measurement, you use a ruler, a pitcher or the "tape" you mention (I know what you refer to) etc. All in all, I think we kinda agree :-) Btw. I live in Copenhagen and I visit Sweden frequently. I have actually on a few occations met swedes telling me, that this or that location is XX "mil" away. We also have a danish "mil" which AFAIK is a slightly different lenght, but it's never used in daily language.
@@AScareDK To be completely honest, it just bugged me that you'd use a milk carton since it's non-transparent and got those different shapes, so they're rougher to get a good idea from than a pitcher with measurements on the side. Then it turned into a bigger topic, and I just rolled with it. Had to make a lot of edits though, but I think I got everything covered in the end. 😆
@@Joppi1992 Haha 😄 no prob. Oh, we haven't even mentioned those annoying soft plastic milk bags, that was (or still is?) on sale in supermarkets years back. They were a real pain to handle 😀
As a French I want to offer you a standard meter piece of wood, the whole world was able to adopt it but the N°1 superpower is unable I wanna say "c'mon bro that's because you don't want it."
In Canada most people are taught both and they’re used quite interchangeably. I would say we actually use imperial system more in day to day conversation. They both work fine.
The worst feeling in my engineering classes is getting test questions using imperial units and having to remeber all these conversions
Imperial system makes no sense, simply because our math is decimal, we learn math as decimal for one simple reason, OUR FINGERS! We literally learn to count using our fingers, wich means our brains are hardwired to use decimal system, we been doing this since humans exist.
Yeah we humans like self torture.
Five tomatoes - how many feet in a mile
US engineering schools teach in imperial system ? So gross. Just move to another continent, trust me.
@@Kriss352 heard the Netherlands is a nice place
It's funny to see, as an adult, the metric sistem explained in such detail. It's very weird to think that there's people out there who struggle to understand something so simple.
It's even funnier when you find out how little Americans know about the system they think is "normal." As in the video above, where the woman thought a mile was 3,000 feet. You'd probably be hard-pressed to find anybody who could correctly answer that without looking it up. One of my favorites is the acre. That's a unit of square area, right? It's based on square feet, right? So how long, in feet, is one side of that square? IT'S AN IRRATIONAL NUMBER!
I think an acre is like 200x200ft? But I do know exactly how many feet there are in a mile as I have had it ingrained in my head for years. 5,280 You can not believe that I didn't look this up but I'll have you know that I didn't.
I can certainly believe you didn't look it up, because I also have it ingrained, along with 8 furlongs to the mile, and 1760 yards. An acre is 1/640 of a square mile, or 43,560 square feet (you were only off by 9%) . That means, not only can you not lay out a square mile AS a square with an even number of acres along each side (it's an irrational number), but you also can't lay out an acre as a regular square with an even number of feet along each side. 36 sections (square miles) make up one township. That, at least, is a 6x6 grid. Even more fun, the definition of a foot has changed over time, so when doing cartography, you have to know the year of the survey information. I know the American system quite intimately, which is one reason I loathe it so much. People who think it's "just fine" are those who never need to really use measurements in their daily life.
It's not a lack of understanding, it's a lack of caring and need to. Why does is fking matter?
@@logic3686 I mean, we don't need to, but it would make a lot of things way easier, both in our day-to-day lives, and in professional and scientific fields. It's way more logical and easy than the imperial system.
Metric uses Si units for the most part. Even Celsius is essentially Kelvin with a different offset. It makes physics and all things engineering so much easier to calculate. You making your life so much more difficult.
Did you know that the calorie and the Calorie are metric as well? A calorie (little c) is the amount of energy it takes to heat one ml of water 1 deg C. A Calorie (capital C, and what is used in reference to nutrition, aka kcal) is 1000 little calories, or the energy it takes to heat 1L of water 1 deg C.
I moved to europe about eight years ago, metric is great that the principal is understandable immediately. It took about two or three years because most measurements you've ever known are imperial but my mind really appreciated the logic and much deeper context of metric and now the imperial units I grew up on seem foreign and illogical to me
OMG you've gone native lol! I had a sort of opposite experience, growing up in UK with imperial, then switched (mostly) to metric - then I moved to the US and I sort of liked having the old measurements again. Except, as was pointed out, the US pint is smaller than the UK pint. So I always feel I'm being scammed when I buy a beer :D
@@Skraeling1000 In the good old days, a Danish "inch" was different from a Norwegian "inch" (Actually, Tomme!), which operated with the same, insane system. So when the French found out to make a logical system we soon joined and actually got some of the finest measure samples which became made, to take home to Denmark
Just out of curiosity, have you enjoyed your move overseas? The older I get the more frustrated I've grown in the US and quite frankly I'm ready to gtfo of here. From those I've talked to a lot of them have been glad to have made the move. Really just seems to be what country to go to now...Thanks, any info appreciated
@@joenobody5913 Two main aspects stand out on the negative side - healthcare (of course lol) and the vacation (or lack of) system in many areas of industry. On the plus side, gas and cigs are cheaper here. What country to go to though - I think they are all having their own problems right now, but if you only speak English then the big three, GB, Australia or Canada. If you are fluent in Spanish then .. well, Spain!
@@Skraeling1000 Because the US doesn't actually use Imperial. It's uses "US Customary Measurements" which was adopted in 1833 but based on the already outdated "English Units" that had been replaced by imperial in 1826.
Fun fact: the definition of imperial units, as the US is member of the Bureau des poids et mesures, is directly dependent of the metric system. The imperial system is just a overcomplicated variant of the metric system
I don't find it complicated. I'm used to it, so it's more or less second nature. All the meter-meter-meter is confusing
Which Imperial system? US or British?
@@Aeronaut1975 The only one that matters anymore. US.
Fun fact: the definition of metric units, as defined by of the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, is directly dependent on immutable physical constants. The metric system is just an overcomplicated variant of real physical constants.
@@TheMoparmanTell me you're American, but without telling me you're an American. World Trade is done in Metric tonnes (1,000Kg)and not the US short ton. As far as I'm aware the USA is the only country that uses short tons, the same goes for a few other Imperial (US, not British) measurements.
Here in Philippines, we use both systems. No big deal.
Do you really think it was much different for the rest of the world to switch? In Germany, where I come from it was maybe a little bit easier, because all the little german states had there own measurement units, so metric was a good choice as the measurement system for the unified Germany. But what they first did was to use metricised units. For example the Badenian Mile (which was originally 8.889 km) was metricised to 8km.