Comments by "GH1618" (@GH-oi2jf) on "Is The Metric System Actually Better?" video.

  1. We didn’t. The name of the nation is the United States of America. People the world over say “America” to mean USA because it’s easier. It isn’t our fault. Many of my ancestors came to America before the USA was founded, so it was correct usage then. Most immigrants to North America came to the United States or what would become the United States, so I suppose the shorthand became associated with the USA from the beginning. I prefer the term “Usania,” but it doesn’t seem to be catching on.
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  2. Thermodynamics was developed in both English and metric units, because the principles are independent of units. Real scientists know that units are arbitrary.
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  3. The conversion is easy. Subtract 32° and divide by 1.8 to get Celsius. Almost 32°C. A hot day.
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  4. Only a small percentage of people use such lame arguments. For most of us, it is just a matter of necessity and practicality. We use metric units where necessary and don’t give it a second thought. But we are happy to use Customary units where there is no good reason to change and where a change would be impractical. For example: tire sizes. We have to use mm for width because the tire industry converted. The old sizes in inches are obsolete. But the rim sizes are still in inches everywhere. Why? Because it works perfectly well and switching to new metric sizes would be a monumental task. Nobody is bothered by this except a few cranks in online forums.
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  5. Unusual, but not crazy. There was likely a reason for it, but you didn’t say what was being measured.
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  6. jacob lansman — Even though, in the USA, most people know how many feet are in a mile, in practice, one almost never needs to know that. For large distances, such when driving to another city, one just wants to know how many miles it is. For short distances, such as to the next freeway exit, one wants to know that is 1/4 mile ahead.
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  7. The US Navy still knows what a yard is.
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  8. Wrong. People who object to the mask rules are not only fools, but antisocial. A million people died in the USA alone from the pandemic. Responsible citizens cooperate with others for the public good.
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  9.  @DangerB0ne  — Units are arbitrary. Any unit will do.
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  10. No.
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  11. The Apollo guidance was done in Metric units.
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  12. I guess you don’t use a socket wrench, because the square drive is inch-based worldwide.
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  13. This is a contrived problem, typical of the sort of thing Metric monotheists use to try to make some obscure point. The first problem with it is that the precision is biased. A mm is only about 1/25 inch. We don’t use 64ths much. The second problem is that we don’t necessarily express fractions as ratios. The third problem is using multiple units to express the length. The number in US units would be better expressed as 91.4 inches, where the precision is .04 inch. One half of that is 45.7 inches, which is as easy to do in your head as half of 2422. Carpenters, who do express fractions of inches as ratios, have other ways of finding the center than arithmetic. The diagonal method is a common way.
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  14. Metric units have had legal standing in the United States since 1866.
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  15. It is used all over the world, as is the 12-hour clock. Use whichever you prefer.
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  16. Rack-mounted instruments around the world use the 19-inch rack.
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  17. There are several things used worldwide which are designed using inches. The ones most commonly used are automobile wheels, Schrader valves to inflate tires, threads to mount cameras to tripods, and square drives for socket wrenches. I have learned that there is a Metric alternative to the 19-inch rack. I think it is a little larger, so any equipment designed to fit in a 19-inch rack would fit in the Euro rack with a suitable face plate. Even the ordinary 19-inch rack was partially Metricized. The original design had threaded mounting holes built in. Current ones can be used with either US or Metric hardware.
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  18. That does not sound like a “real engineer” to me. Engineers are practical people. They use what works. A great deal of good engineering has been done in English units.
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  19. Precision does not depend on units. A machinist measures an inch to 1.000 precision, or even 1.0000. A thousandth of an inch is much more precise than a millimeter.
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  20. It is very rare for cousins to marry. I think Einstein married his cousin, but that was when he was in Europe.
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  21. He wasn’t encumbered. Most of his work would have been done in one unit of length — feet with decimal fractions. It is no different in complexity than working in metres. Units are equivalent.
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  22. That’s a lame argument. The reason we have a strong military has nothing to do with units. The armed forces use metric units a great deal today.
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  23. We think the Imperial gallon is bizarre. In olden times, “gallon” was not a fixed volume. It was a container for liquids and there were different gallons for different liquids. The US gallon was the British wine gallon. When the British formulated the Imperial System, half a century after the United States had left the Empire, they chose to standardize on a different gallon. Why they didn’t check with the USA first I can’t imagine.
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  24. In American (US) English, we write “meter” for the unit of distance. Most words borrowed from French which end in “re” are changed to end in “er.”
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  25. When measuring gold, one specifies it in Troy ounces. A fluid ounce is not a measure of weight at all, it is a measure of liquid volume.
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  26. The Soviets bore the brunt of defeating the Axis.
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  27. Nobody actually counts in base 12. Base 10 is universal worldwide except in computing, where base 8 and 16 are sometimes used when easy conversion to binary is needed.
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  28. Tool and die. In the USA, we use US Customary units, not Imperial. Before 1959, machinists actually used the industrial inch, not the US or Imperial inch. In 1959 it became the international inch, used throughout the US and the British Commonwealth. There must be many old machine tools still in use which cannot be adapted to metriic. Modern tools are dual scale.
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  29. The units were defined long before they were tied to physical constants like the speed of light. The reason for redefining units in terms of physical constants is to avoid the problem associated with using a physical prototype as the standard, namely that the change in physical objects by use, no matter how careful, is greater than the precision of measurement. A physical constant gives a rigorous, unchanging definition. It has always been the objective, when refining the definition of units, to minimize disruption by making the new definition so close to the old definition that nobody except metrologists using their most precise instruments would notice. That is why numbers with many significant digits sometimes come into the definition. These numbers are carefully chosen, not arbitrary.
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  30. US Customary units have been defined in terms of Metric units since 1893, but that isn’t what all the discussion is about. It is about whether people in the US should use Metric units in the ordinary commerce of daily life.
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  31. Those everyday conveniences are the reason English units persist in everyday life.
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  32. The United States adopted the metric system in 1866. People are free to use it as they will, and it is used by some for some purposes.
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  33. Actually, there is a pound-mass. We use both lbm and lbf, even engineers. Also kgf (see Engineering Explained). Purists may not like it, but it is perfectly legitimate, at least in the United States.
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  34. The United States has never used Imperial units.
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  35. Irrational numbers have no exact representation in any base. A repeating decimal fraction is a rational number.
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  36. Who are “we”?
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  37. Accuracy does not depend on units.
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  38. If someone doesn’t understand significant figures, he will make arrors of that sort in any system of units.
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  39. Those disasters had nothing to do with units of measurement.
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  40. What do you think the thread for the tripod mount on your Leica cameras is?
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  41. There’s nothing funny about it. It makes perfectly good sense to tie the systems together. It would be a nuisance to have to adjust the conversions every time metric units were adjusted, and expensive to duplicate standards activities.
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  42. Whether a number is irrational does not depend on base. You mean it doesn’t have a finite fractional representation in binary, which is not the same thing.
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  43. Automobiles are metric now. I don’t know why you think a nonmetric bicycle would be a challenge. I’m pretty sure my first Schwinn used SAE hardware. It’s basically the same.
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  44. Air traffic control organizes the vertical space into steps of 1000 feet. Steps of 1000 metres would be inefficient. Steps of 100 metres would dangerous. Steps not expressed as powers of ten would be cumbersome.
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  45. The cost isn’t the main reason, though. There just isn’t any point to changing from miles to km for road distances.
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  46. We do not use the Imperial System in the US. US Customary units are based on earlier English units.
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  47. Hours and minutes aren’t part of the Metric System at all, so you are off the reservation. Actually, seconds likewise are not Metric, although they are S.I. They are a legacy unit.
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  48. It is used quite a bit in the United States. Liberia and Burma both use Metric units. Where isn’t it used?
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  49.  @jmwadding  — Originally, the gallon was not a unit of volume generally, but only for a particular liquid. The US gallon is based on the old English wine gallon. I don’t know why the Imperial gallon is different, but the British obviously didn’t bother to check with the newly independent United States.
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  50. You may use Metric units to your heart's content. We (in the USA) are bimetral.
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  51. dAdventure1 — Any Usanian cook knows that it is weight, not volume, for tomatoes, and that 12 oz is just a normal can of tomatoes, almost. Of course, a lot of people fooling around in kitchens are poor cooks. And cooking isn’t the same as chemistry lab. Most cooking does not require high precision.
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  52. That aircraft had a malfunctioning fuel indicator. Since that incident, airlines now require that it be fixed before flying.
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  53. It isn’t circular because the method was reversed. We used to define mass by a reference object, then determine Planck’s constant experimentally. Now we define Planck’s constant exactly, then use it to define the kilogram. The physical reference object is no longer in the calculation, so there is no circularity.
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  54. No, it is based on 360 degrees in a circle. A nautical mile is one minute of arc, or 1/60 of a degree, at the surface of the ocean.
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  55. I have a vernier caliper with both inches and mm. It’s no problem. The inch scale is a decimal fraction, just as the mm scale is. They work the same way.
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  56.  @globeforever9777  — We weren’t really quick to change spellings. Spelling standardization proceeded independently in Great Britain (Johnson) and the United States (Webster). While Johnson was a little earlier, he didn’t have any special status in the US. Both of these efforts were private endeavo(u)rs which gradually became official. Benjamin Franklin was the radical spelling reformer. Had he got his way, the situation would be much worse than it is today.
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  57. I don't recall ever having to be taught how measurement works, because it is so easy and because it was so long ago. That applies to both systems of units and to conversions between them. That some people are slow learners is no reason to drop a system that most people in the US find useful.
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  58. In American English, most French words ending in “re” are changed to end in “er.” There are many spellings which differ between American and British English.
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  59.  @kaydenthat8222  — No, they are “English” units. The Imperial System was introduced half a century after US independence from the Empire. Although many units have the same name in both systems, the values were not exactly the same, because they were independently defined. Some were substantially different, for example the gallon. Others were very close, yet different, such as the inch. The disagreement in linear measure wasn’t resolved until 1959, when the British Commonwealth and the United States adopted the international inch.
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  60. English units, whether Imperial or US Customary, continue to be used because they are convenient for their intended purposes.
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  61. No, there is a lot more to it than highway signs.
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  62. The various sizes are just historical. The large variety of sizes with varying nomenclature isn’t a problem, because it is self-correcting. As long as a particular size is used in sufficient quantity, it will continue to be manufactured. If it falls into disuse, it won’t. It shouldn’t matter to anyone which ammunition another person likes.
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  63. Electronics run on electricity.
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  64. I 'm a (retired) computer professional. The only thing I hate about dates is how they are sometimes affected by Daylight Saving Time. DST is a stupid and unnecessary complication to timekeeping, which is otherwise fairly well-defined. A common paper clip weighs about a gram.
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  65. No.
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  66. Because you would rather have an 11 mm wrench than a 1.1 cm wrench. It is better to use the same style throughout a set of wrenches.
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  67. When you say one system is “real” and one is “fantasy,” you are not making a substantive argument but metely displaying a bad attitude. Units are arbitrary. A great deal of real work has been done in US Customary units. You may not like them, but you don’t seem to be able to make a “real” argument to say why.
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  68. Any competent engineer can use either system of units and make any conversions as needed.
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  69. For one thing, change of scale is not a common operation in everyday usage. Nobody uses “pico” anything around the house. For another, we would move the decimal point, not the comma.
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  70. https://www.marinedepot.com/dn20-coupling-fitting-20mm-x-3-4-inch-metric-to-standard-slip-adaptive-reef?utm_source=mdcsegooglebase2&utm_medium=cse&utm_campaign=mdcsegooglebase2&utm_content=ADR62723&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_umExpGg8QIVi5OzCh1EygiiEAQYAiABEgJ3B_D_BwE
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  71. That line just makes this a screed instead of a thoughtful analysis of the differences.
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  72.  @donald-parker  — I have comments all over the place on this subject, which you are welcome to seek out and read.
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  73. So? Colour is not a well-defined property anyway. What we see as colour is the response of our visual system. We use three wavelengths of light to synthesize colour only because we have three kinds of receptors in our eyes. It is an approximation to what we see from an object illuminated in sunlight, but it works fairly well.
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  74.  @FrodoOne1  — In US cooking, we use the US cup. A cup of 250 ml is a “metric cup.” I have no opinion on that. Most things measured in cups don’t have to be precise.
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  75.  @MilkT0ast  — The Shuttle Columbia disaster had nothing to do with units.
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  76. We have never used the Imperial System in the United States. It was introduced half a century after we left the Empire. I think an Imperial pint is too much beer to drink in one serving.
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  77. bimetral
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  78. We (in the US) would use KPH, not KMPH.
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  79. Don’t expect anything serious from “Real” Engineering. This is the site that thinks engineering is “insane.”
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  80. There’s no reason to switch, for most things. If you take medicine, the dosage will be in mg, but the practical unit is the “pill.”
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  81. Nothing to do with rounding. Maintaining precision is no great difficulty. Precision does not depend on units. Anyway, whenever there is a significant reason to use one system of units rather than another, businesses choose the one which is better in that context. For example, US wine makers all use the 750 ml bottle which is accepted worldwide. It would be uneconomic to have different bottles for domestic and export use.
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  82. Luigi Fontana — One small advantage of using steps of 64ths is that it is a bit more than twice as fine as mm.
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  83. We (in the USA) understand Metric units very well and use them in many ways, however we are a free people with freedom of speech. If some of us think Kph is a useful term, then they will use it. The use of language cannot be controlled. Whether others trust us or not is of no importance. What does that even mean in this context?
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  84. It's 1.5 inches. Can you handle that? If not, what do you make of a Metric socket marked 5.5 mm?
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  85. If you actually do buy fruit in pecks, you would know what it is. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter.
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  86. We fought a war to defeat fascism. We will not give up our individual liberty easily.
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  87. Not true. The US Navy uss yards to estimate distance between ships, and they have 5-inch guns on the foredeck of many ships.
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  88. Precision does not depend on units.
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  89. Baking is one area of cooking for which measuring by weight gives more consistent results than measuring by volume. Most cooking is not that critical. This has nothing to do with the system of units, however.
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  90. In the United States, we put down the coup attempt. The seditionists are the ones who will suffer, mostly.
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  91. We (in the USA) don’t often use fractions of 32nds or 64ths. When using miles, we generally use tenths (such as on automobile odometers) or fractions with only 1/4 mile granularity, such as the distance to the next freeway exit. In horse racing, eighths of a mile are used. Nobody uses miles, yards, feet, and inches in one measurement except people making contrived arguments in forums on this subject.
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  92. In the first place, we don’t use Imperial units in the United States, we use US Customary. In the second place, industries are not all of a like mind. Any industry may choose to use Metric or US units, as needed. Those which do business internationally are more likely to use Metric units, or those which have federal contracts which require Metric.
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  93. That’s not accurate. Secretary of State Jefferson wanted copies of the standard meter and kilogram, but The United States wasn’t about to convert. Jefferson later became President but did nothing further to encourage the use of Metric units. It was 1866 when the US got around to adopting the Metric System, and then not exclusively.
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  94. Measurement is not mathematics, even though it requires elementary mathematics.
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  95. The ramble man — We still speak the English language also (approximately). It would be weird if we stopped using something which works so well.
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  96. Hurri — The United States was a participant, however.
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  97. Nobody actually fights about units outside of forums like this one. In the USA, we just go through a day using whatever units are needed in a particular context. We buy groceries and gasoline in US Customary units. We buy whisky and wine and medicine in Metric units. Mechanics use Metric wrenches for most automobiles and bicycles, and SAE wrenches for most other things. Nobody gets stressed over units.
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  98. Nobody measures their yard like that.
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  99.  @Gstrangeman96  — Lots are commonly described in whole feet, but a surveyor will measure to a tenth of a foot. Inches are not used for that purpose.
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  100. Even aspirin is marked in mg these days, so I don’t see why customary units would come up much. Why memorise? There are software conversion tools for this.
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  101.  @simonjohn9525  — No, someone went through a convoluted process to convert 2500:1 to feet and inches. It is not a realistic problem, because engineering drawings would generally be in feet and hundredths of feet.
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  102. It is decimal, not metric. We don’t measure it, we count it.
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  103. Measurement for cooking was well established long before there were inexpensive scales. The only scale my grandmother had was a 50 lb spring scale suitable for weighing a sack of potatoes. I’ve never had a scale for cooking. It isn’t a matter of cost, but lack of necessity. Modern US bakers do tend to use scales, because baking requires greater precision than ordinary cooking.
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  104. Precision Metric rules are marked in .5 mm steps. Some have .25 mm steps. The latter are constructed by having multiple rows of marking holes for 0, 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4 mm offset.
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  105. Real engineers are practical.
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  106. I have engineering degrees. Every place in the world uses the same system of timekeeping. If you think it is difficult, imagine the difficulty of having two different systems. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. Try switching to Swatch time and find out directly for yourself.
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  107. If you did that, you would end up with people who were confused by Customary units. That would not be good. It is better that we be fully educated in all systems of measurement.
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  108. In Metric, the smallest unit is the meter (or mètre). Cm and mm are fractions. Same thing. We can use microinches in US Customary units.
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  109. If you are in the business of repairing machines, do you really want all the old machines built to SAE spect to be scrapped instead of repaired?
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  110. Imperial is British by definition. The US does not use Zimperial units.
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  111. I’m with you. I designed my kitchen cabinets in the customary way, using inches and fractions (to 1/8 inch precision). Machinists, of course, use decimal fractions of an inch. Surveyors use decimal fractions of a foot. It’s all good.
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  112. It hasn’t failed, though. There is a great deal of metric usage in the United States. The only thing that has failed is the appeal from metric purists to give up our customary units in everyday use.
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  113. No. The American revolution was not about units of measurement.
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  114. Most technology? Hardly. That was a period of only about a decade. I have a couple of Alvin drafting rules from West Germany. Inches only. Very nice.
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  115. The kilogram is the fundamental unit of mass simply because a gram is too small to be practical as the size of the physical master standard. Now that the physical standard has been retired, it doesn’t matter.
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  116.  @cy9nvs  — We do not “constantly convert” units. We just use them.
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  117. Money is decimal, not Metric. It has nothing to do with linear measure. Decimal notation is much older than the Metric System.
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  118. The size of a person’s foot has nothing to do with the unit nowadays anyway. It’s a convenient size, that’s all.
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  119. No. The scientists who pioneered rocketry were Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth (Von Braun’s mentor). Von Braun was an engineer.
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  120. Machinists working in US units have used decimal fractions of an inch forever, and have produced a vast amount of high-precision machinery. Carpenters like fractions expressed as a ratio of integers and, likewise, have built countless structures. We are practical people and we use what works.
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  121.  @OggeViking  — The controversy is not about using metric units for internation trade, but only about what we use for ordinary purposes in our everyday lives.
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  122. I don’t see why a folding rule is “infamous.” I have a vintage folding rule which I find well-made and useful.
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  123. That isn’t really due to choice of units, though, but to discipline and choice of tools. If you used an Aldrich Engineer tape, you could measure to a twentieth of an inch, which is only slightly coarser than a mm, or to a fiftieth of an inch, which is about half a mm. Even with a carpenter-scale tape, anyone needing more precision can get one marked in sixteenths. There is no reason to settle for eighths.
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  124.  @FrodoOne1 — We (in the USA) did adopt the Metric System in 1866, without requiring its use. When one adopts a child, one does not kill all the children which came before.
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  125. We do not use the Imperial System in the United States.
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  126. You can get a tape measure which divides a foot into ten segments, but they aren’t inches. They are tenths of a foot.
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  127. The money is decimal, not metric. We don’t measure money, we count it.
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  128.  @a.thales7641  — Of course I do. So what’s your point then? Precision does not depend on the unit.
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  129. There is a slug unit for mass, but it is also true that the pound can be used for either force (lbf) or mass (lbm).
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  130. It was 1/10,000,000. All that really did was to set the scale bcause, as you note, the distance could not be known precisely.
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  131. Fortunately for you, we don’t use the Imperial system in the United States.
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  132. No, the Treaty of the Meter was not about the US converting. It was merely about the development of a new international standard. There is nothing in it to suggest that member nations should abandon their customary units.
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  133. Metric units, generally, but physics can be done in any units. Physics is about the relationships between things, not the units used to measure them. Isaac Newton used English units, so if you wanted to study his original writings you would have to understand them. Renowned physicist Richard Feynman gave some public lectures in which he used Newton’s theory of gravitation as an example. He presented it in Newton’s units, without comment on the units. Real scientists (and engineers) know that units are arbitrary.
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  134. We do not use Imperial units in the United States. That is not a recognized unit in the US.
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  135. US spelling is sometimes different from British spelling. We (in the USA) usually spell words borrowed from French which end in “re” with an “er” ending. Most people know that because there are many examples. Even the French metrology laboratory uses the US spelling on its English-language pages.
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  136. Units are arbitrary. It doesn’t matter what units you use.
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  137. The United States does not use Imperial Units, which were introduced after rhe American Revolution.
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  138. That isn’t a flaw. Those things just aren’t included.
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  139. Precision does not depend on units.
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  140. The use of “12pm” is an error. Twelve noon is the meridian, neither am nor pm. Similarly, 12 midnight. Careful writers do not use “12pm,” but they might write “12:01 pm.”
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  141. Do you have an engineering degree? I do. Engineers are practical people, capable of solving problems requiring calculation. Unit conversion is a trivial calculation.
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  142. The international pound is 0. 45359237 kg.
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  143. The second is not a Metric unit. It is a legacy unit and an S.I. unit.
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  144. You just learn the things you actually use. Don’t worry about things you don’t use. If your watering hole has Belgian beer on tap, you might notice that it is served in its own glass marked 500 ml. For distance, if you drive, your car probably has a speedometer marked in dual units. If so, you must have noticed that 60 mph is about 100 kph, so the factor for km to miles is .6. To go the other way, it’s 1 2/3. For sq ft to sq m, a factor of 1/10 is close enough and easy. It’s 10 going the other way. If you only need the conversion once in awhile, you convert; if you need it all the time, you will get used to the unit without having to convert. Don’t worry about it.
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  145. Precision is independent of units.
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  146. No. We (in the USA) adopted the metric system in 1866. We are officially bimetral. What you need to ask is whether the US should prohibit the use of US Customary units. The answer is still no. Why would we do that? We believe in liberty.
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  147. Metric purists don’t care much for history and facts.
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  148. This illustrates the true character of metric hard-liners.
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  149. For horses, yes.
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  150. It was widely reported that a contributing factor in the “Gimli Glider” incident was that the 767 was Boeing’s first metric aircraft. I have read elsewhere that there were US and metric versions of some Boeing airplanes. I suppose the metal parts would be specified in inches with decimal fractions, but would parts of some aircraft be metrc such as fasteners? In the case of the Gimli Glider was it just the fuel measurement that was metric? It seems more complicated than I thought.
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  151. “Half a dozen” is a problem? There are rather few unit conversion that are needed in everyday life, and children learn them. Twelve inches in a foot and three feet in a yard. For weight, sixteen ounces in a pound. Volume is a little more complicated, with cups, pints, quarts, gallons. Mostly, cooks have to use all those, butchildren learn to cook. The units of measure are not the difficult part of cooking. It is ironic that you used the term “dozen,” a distinctly unmetric number. I happen to have a refrigerator made in Europe. It is adapted for US power, of course, but the rack for eggs holds just ten.
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  152. @Charlie Bamford — I am well aware that international trade requires the use of metric units. That’s why we put our wine in 750 ml bottles. We in the US have no problem with using metric units where necessary.
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  153. Surveyors in the US conventionally use decimal fractions of a foot. The US Survey Foot is becoming obsolete, if not already, but if someone needed figures in Survey Feet, presumably that would be because they had to be integrated with US Survey data. The International Foot replaces the US Survey foot, when practical, but fractions will still be decimal. Why wouldn’t you want decimal fractions?
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  154. You actually use US Customary units, not Imperial. Since about 1960 that means the International foot and pound. As an engineer, you probably use decimal fractions of those units, which is important. Some Metric advocates think the difference is in how fractions are denoted. It isn't. Fractional notation is a separate issue.
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  155. It depends on what you mean by “work.” Studies have shown that the incidence of influenza was reduced when COVID-19 restrictions went into effect, which was evidence that the measures were effective in reducing the spread of viral infections.
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  156. Because the automotive industry is international. Even though there are cars assembled in the United States, parts are often made elsewhere. It is an advantage to use consistent units everywhere within the industry.
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  157. The common bottle for wine and spirits is 0.750 l, which is very close to a fifth (of a US gallon). For the consumer, the unit is the “bottle.”
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  158. The best way to remove the ambiguity is to spell the month. I write 1 May 2022. If someone else writes May 1, 2022, that works, too.
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  159. So seek anger management counseling. Anger is bad for your health.
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  160.  @FrodoOne1  — Calling it “US Customary” is not merely a matter of renaming. The United States formed its own bureau of standards, so the units were not exactly the same as the British units even when nearly so.
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  161.  @FrodoOne1  — We didn’t “tweak,” the standards, it’s just that in the era when the standards were physical objects, two implementations could not be exactly the same. The United States decided to simplify the problem of refining the standards for US Customary units by referencing them to Metric units in 1893. The small differences between Imperial and Customart units weren’t resolved until 1959, when the international inch was adopted by the United States and the British Commonwealth.
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  162. Imperial (and US Customary) systems use base 10. There are 12 inches in a foot, where 12 is a base ten representation of the number of inches. People keep using “base” incorrectly on this subject. We all use base ten, except, as you noted, computer programmers in some circumstances.
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  163.  @anothergermanmapper7754  — He didn’t say he ignored the conventions of other countries. He just said he is comforable with Customary units. I’m sure internationally, chemical engineering uses metric units.
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  164. The metric system has been used in US schools for a very long time. It is essential in science classes.
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  165. That, and convenient sizes of units.
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  166. Yes, that’s just a bonehead assertion. Accuracy and precision are independent of units, and anything done by humans is subject to error.
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  167. Anybody interested in science ought to learn that units are arbitrary. The science is not in the units but in the relationships between things.
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  168. The metre was originally defined in a completely different way, then the standard metre was represented by a physical object. The fact that the speed of light is close to 300 million metres per second is merely a coincidence. As advances in technology permitted, the standards were refined to maxe them more stable and reproducible, but without making a change which would have a significant effect on ordinary commerce.
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  169. French words ending in “re” are usually spelled “er” when borrowed by US English.
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  170. The United States adopted the metric system in 1866.
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  171. Since 1959, the US and the British Commonwealth countries all use the international pound (and foot).
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  172. clive lamond — There is nothing in the U. S. Constitution about the metric system.
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  173. We don’t use Imperial units in the United States. We use US Customary units. but the foot and inch are international, so the same in the USA and the British Commonwealth. If you don’t understand the international foot and inch, you just aren’t trying. That’s ok, you don’t have to. We (in the USA) know what a meter is: 40 inches or 3 and 1/3 feet (approximately). Perhaps our education is better.
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  174.  @FrodoOne1  — I know the definition. We don’t need exact conversions for estimating distance. If you want to estimate a distance by pacing it, you can calibrate your pace to any unit, but it won’t be accurate to several decimal places.
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  175. The Fahrenheit scale is designed to put the range of air temperatures nearly always experienced on a scale of 100 steps. We think that is more convenient for common purposes than a scale designed for laboratories. We use Celsius in laboratories like everyone else.
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  176.  @abhishekkumarsuman422  — One hundred steps is more convenient because two digits suffice. Three digit numbers and negative numbers are rarely needed. If the temperature is over 99°F or below zero, it is better to just stay indoors. Celsius is convenient for temperatures above freezing, except the scale is compressed. Finer steps are useful, as long as not too fine to be discriminated. A Fahrenheit degree is a more useful degree of fineness. You could have a household thermostat with steps of .5°C, but I don’t think anybody does that.
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  177.  @FrodoOne1 — The United States adopted the Metric System in 1893. When one adopts a child, one does not banish children which came before.
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  178. “Changing” doesn’t make any sense because we (in the USA) are bimetral. We adopted the Metric System in 1866 and anyone may use it for trade.
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  179. What I would do is calibrate my pace for a tenth of a mile. You could do that on an American football field easily. One twentieth of a mile is 88 yards. Pace it off, then double it. Or pace 100 yards, then 76 yards back. Easy.
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  180. The universe? Do you think alien civilizations, if they exist, use our metric units? Our astronomers don’t even use metric units exclusively. They have the astronomical unit and the parsec, for example. And the light-year. A metric purist should use light-seconds.
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  181. All examples intended to show how cumbersome customary units can be are contrived.
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  182. No, we are not waiting for a change. We are bimetral now. Individuals or groups of individuals may choose their units as they please. If you have a modern thermostat and a modern bathroom scale, you may find that they can be set easily to use metric units. You are free to change yours.
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  183. What you are overlooking is that it is not the original definition. When standards are improved, it is always the policy to minimize disruption of current practice. That is why some numbers have lots of significant digits.
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  184. No, Fahrenheit is a more convenient scale for atmospheric temperature. Celsius is too compressed.
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  185. The Fahrenheit scale is the most logically defined unit in common use. It has the convenient property that the temperature of the outside air almost always falls between zero and 100.
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  186. Russia has switched to using the flight levels measured in units of 1000 feet.
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  187. We have never used the Imperial System in the United States. We use US Customary units, mostly.
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  188.  @FrodoOne1  — I didn’t write that Britain “should have” been consulted. Obviously, we had parted ways. But I am glad that the United States and the British Commonwealth have since agreed on the international inch, foot, and pound. The problem with liquid measure will never be resolved, but it doesn’t matter. Your last statement is just wrong, but I won’t belabor the point.
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  189. Not going to happen. Even if we started buying fuel in liters and food by the kilo, what would be the point of changing the dimensions of a sporting field? I read that the Australians actually changed the length of their horse races. This strikes me as zealotry.
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  190. We don’t. We measure with rules and tapes like everybody else. A football field might be used for comparison, but that isn’t measurement.
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  191. If you were curious, you could look it up in the time you spent remarking that you “don’t get it.”
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  192. Other companies in the USA are free to make their own choice.
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  193. In the United States, we spell it the way it is spelled in the English language pages of Laboratoire National Metrologie et d’Essais.
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  194.  @chrisstephens6673  — Did you check what I wrote? The measurement laboratory in France spells it “meter” when writing in English.
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  195.  @chrisstephens6673  — We (in the USA) spell borrowed French words which end in “re” in French with the letters reversed, usually. That’s just the way it is. Some US people spell it “metre” just to avoid silly arguments like this one. Sometimes I even do it, but then I write “le mètre.”
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  196. Not true. The vast majority of Usanians don’t pay any attention to what people in Metricized countries say about us. We just go about our business to suit ourselves. The number of people who participate in forums such as this one is miniscule.
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  197. You are way behind the curve on this one.
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  198. Where’s the funny part? Using the carpenter’s scale, fractions to quarter-inch precision are common. For example, 3/4” plywood is common for cabinetry, so you would need 1/4” granularity for the project. Generally, one would only go down to 1/16” in that notation, although 1/32” and 1/64” can be used. Machinists, who do high-precision work at a small scale use inches with decimal fractions, so 1/4” is 0.2500. The form of the fraction is independent of the unit.
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  199. The abbreviation “lb” is from Latin “libra pondo.” The abbreviation “oz” is from Italiam “onzo.” You are wrong about industries in the USA resisting change to metric. Some might, but others do not. Automobile makers use metric hardware. Wine and spirits come in metric bottles. It is up to individual businesses or business groups to decide what to use. We believe in freedom of choice in the USA. A business will usually adopt metric standards when it is in their interest to do so.
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  200. devo1977s — Accuracy does not depend on units.
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  201. The point of reference for all Metric units is le mètre, an arbitrarily defined length.
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  202. Medicine in the United States is almost entirely metric.
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  203. The nautical mile is just a different unit used for navigation. There are many units, but some units are only used in a restricted context. For example, the “hand” is used only to measure the size of horses. The “nautical mile” is used for air and sea navigation, but not on land.
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  204. It’s not about conversion. You work in one system or the other.
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  205. “Serving size” depends on the item. It could be a (legal) cup or a count.
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  206. The war of independence was not about units. English units were widely used in trade at the time. Even Britain remained a trading partner after independence.
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  207.  @FrodoOne1 — Today, the United States ships many commodities in Metric tons. It isn’t complicated.
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  208. You are doing what every critic of Customary units does — contriving problems which never come up in practice. US Customary units are convenient when used as intended. People know what they need to know to do what they need to do. Nobody needs the fluid ounces in a gallon on the tip of their tongue.
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  209.  @thecarman3693  — You should have hired a better fence builder. I’ve never heard of anyone having trouble getting a fence built.
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  210. The second is not a Metric unit, it is a legacy unit which everybody uses, so it doesn’t fit neatly.
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  211. Good point! Were the specifications written in US or Metric units?
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  212.  @JacoDeltaco  — NASA was not fully Metric in the 1960s.
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  213.  @JacoDeltaco  — Which is why I wrote “not fully.”
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  214. I write today’s date as 4 March 2021. I’m not going to use a 24 hour clock, though. ISO date format is for computers.
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  215. Many people know that, but it is beside the point. The controversy is not about how our units are defined, but about what units we should be using in daily life for a particular purpose.
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  216. If extraterrestrials arrive, they will exterminate us. When terrestrial aliens come to the USA, most of them adapt to US units. When we Usanians move to alien territory, we adapt.
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  217. We have never used the Imperial System in the United States. It was introduced half a century after US independence.
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  218.  @bababooy9370  — US Customary units, mostly. And metric.
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  219. Usanians
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  220. US engineers would use feet with decimal fractions.
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  221. There are good reasons for the tire size system, but you have to be open-minded and practical to appreciate them.
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  222.  @Paul_VanGo  — There is an online tool that makes it easy to compare tire sizes in all dimensions.
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  223. Tire sizes are mixed units, as you say, but I have never met a person in the USA who was frightened, or bothered in the least, by the arrangement.
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  224. @Aries — No, that is not the “reason” to have Customary units. We have them for historical and practical reasons. I have a graduate engineering degree and I don’t care what units people use, as long as they are defined. By the way, you are wrong when you say approximation is not good enough for an engineer. In fact, engineers know the significance of their data and understand that there is no point in pretending to be more precise than the data allow. Civil engineers, for example, may measure things they are building to a hundredth of a foot, but probably not a thousandth, except perhaps in structures requiring such precision. Machines are built to higher precision, of course, in inches, thousandths and tenths. It is generally better to work in whatever units are customary for a particular application than to convert them to another system.
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  225. Normanby — Probably because a 25th of an inch was too close. What do you think it should be and why?
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  226. The German zoll today is the international inch, exactly.
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  227. We use both Customary and metric units in the USA. Metric units are used on export producrs where necessary.
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  228. I’m sure you could learn the Fahrenheit scale if you didn’t have a bad attitude about it. I grew up with Fahrenheit, but had no trouble learning Celsius.
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  229. The slug isn’t used much. Pound is used for both force and mass.
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  230. Lidge1994 — Surveyors have been using decimal fractions of a foot since the founding of the republic. Engineers have been using decimal fractions of an inch since the industrial revolution to design all kinds of things. I don’t see how you could make anything without fractions. One inch precision just isn’t good enough to make an automobile engine. We made millions of them, though.
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  231. Correct, but Metric monotheists never bother to get their facts straight.
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  232. We do not use stone in the US.
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  233. A “nanomile” is not a useful unit. You have missed the whole point about customary units. It is not about changes of scale, it is about having convenient units for the purpose at hand.
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  234. I think you mean fluid ounce, and it is 4%.
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  235. U. S. Customary units are defined in terms of metric units, so they are always as well-defined as metric units.
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  236. Exactly. We already allow conversion by industry, because both are legal systems of units in the United States. Most hardware on American cars is metric nowadays, for example.
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  237. Metric partisans use only seconds for time because that allows them to ignore the fact that time isn’t decimal.
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  238. I am an old American (Usanian) and I have never heard or read anyone using “football fields” as a unit except in forums like this where people sometimes complain about it. We normally estimate distances in “blocks” or, for longer distances, “miles.” A city block is often about 200 feet, although there is a lot of variation. It isn’t used when great accuracy is required. Only artillerymen need accurate range, and they have ways of measuring it.
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  239. It is 1760 times three.
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  240. There are many ways of representing energy, but everybody uses “calorie” and “Calorie” (kcal) for small units, such as the energy content of food. How it relates to other units is unimportant except in chemistry.
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  241. Not likely. The astronauts were involved in the design of the Apollo spacecraft. Anything pertaining to how they operated it would have been scrutinized.
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  242. In US English, we generally change the spelling of French words which end in “re” to “er.” Even the French web site LNE uses the US spelling on their English-language pages.
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  243. jon ho — Good catch. I would say 0.4536 kg.
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  244. Accuracy does not depend on units.
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  245. A sixteenth of an inch is larger than a mm, by a little more than half, so if you can measure to the nearest mm you can certainly measure to the sixteenth. Provided you can count. Can people from predominately metric countries count?
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  246. Our US Customary units are based on English units.
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  247. I set the thermostat in my apartment to Fahrenheit degrees. Why should that make you angry? What business is that of yours?
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  248. John Długosz — Exactly right on temperature. It’s a mystery to me why anyone likes Celsius for weather. It is useful in chemistry labs.
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  249. It used to be that “gallon” meant a standard container for a particular liquid, and the size varied depending on the liquid. The United States adopted the wine gallon as a standard for all liquid measure. Later, when Great Britain defined the Imperial system, they chose a different gallon. It is just a quirk of history.
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  250. Precision does not depend on units.
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  251. For what purpose? It depends.
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  252. I’m a Usanian. There is very little confusion about units here. Mostly among European tourists, I expect.
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  253. All he is doing is allowing people to use Imperial units.
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  254.  @jamesbovington8218  — Tolerance. Coercion and intolerance are bad on their face. Here’s how it works in the USA. I sit at a bar and order a beer served from a tap. If it is a domestic brand, it will be served in a glass sized in US fl oz, possibly a US pint (16 fl oz), but it could be something else. Most likely the glass will be unmarked. But if I order a Belgian beer, it might come in a glass used only for the particular brand of beer, and it will likely be marked in ml. Nobody cares. We just want to relax and enjoy our beer.
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  255.  @jamesbovington8218  — US Customary units benefit me because I am surrounded by things built to Customary dimensions and assembled with Customary hadware. Sometimes I need to measure or repair these things, so I have the tools to do it. But metric tools also benefit me because now and then I encounter something which uses metric hardware. It isn’t a problem. Metric units just mean there are more sizes of fasteners.
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  256.  @jamesbovington8218  — When you say the two systems are “incompatible” that is a sweeping generalization. It is true in certain contexts, but in others the two systems can coexist easily. For example, if I give you one dimension of a plot of ground in feet and the other dimension in meters, then ask you for the area, that doesn’t make sense. The dimensions must be in the same units. But if I give you a wheel size in inches and a preferred tire width in mm, you would have no trouble finding tires which would fit.
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  257. That’s wrong. If that were so, nobody would be complaining about US units.
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  258. We do not use the Imperial System in the United States. We use US Customary units.
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  259. You obviously haven’t worked out the problem in detail.
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  260. The UK aren’t actually going back, they are just doing away with the coercive aspects of metric use which came from the EU.
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  261. Yes civil engineering is done with the engineer’s scale of feet, tenths and hundredths.
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  262. We have never used Imperial units in the United States. We would do well to put more emphasis on history and spelling and punctuation.
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  263. The United States has never used the Imperial System.
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  264. Actually, Canada has backed off from mandating conversion to Metric everywhere. They still use Imperial units to some degree.
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  265. In the United States, you are free to learn and to use Metric units. We are bimetral. Both US Customary and Metric units are legal in the USA.
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  266.  @FrodoOne1 — We are, but I don't know what you mean in your original remark. Ampere, Volt, and Watt are based on the Metric System. Some chip packages are dimensioned in inches. Is that what you mean?
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  267. They are not. They are merely being tolerant, allowing people to use what they please. Remember when the EU tried to prohibit British pubs from selling pints of beer? That kind of nonsense will stop. Tolerance was not a “dark ages” virtue, by the way.
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  268. Not really. Engineers use decimal fractions. The calculations using feet with a decimal fraction are the same as when using meters with a decimal fraction.
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  269. Not only that, he doesn’t seem to know that US surveyors working in US Customary units use feet, tenths, and hundredths, not inches.
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  270. Because it is more convenient. If it weren’t, they wouldn’t do it.
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  271. You don’t have to, generally, but you do in certain circumstances. If you want to work on a car you need metric wrenches, because those are the ones that fit (unless it’s a very old car).
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  272. That was such a rare failure that people use it over and over for kack of other examples. NASA/JPL actually have a remarkably successful record of unmanned space missions.
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  273. US Money is decimal, not metric. Even so, the most commonly used coin is the quarter.
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  274. There are many units because there are many situations in which units are used, and one unit may be more convenient than another in a particular situation. English units embrace this aspect of measurement, whereas metric seeks to minimize the number of units by using power-of-ten prefixes instead of different unit names for change of scale.
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  275. A lot of engineering has been done in US Customary or Imperial units. Units are arbitrary.
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  276. You must have lived a sheltered life.
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  277. It is not a real engineering channel, despite its name.
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  278. Fahrenheit is the most carefully designed of all the customary units. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense.
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  279. The United States does not use Imperial units. We use US Customary units.
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  280. Decimalization is an entirely separate topic from Metrication. We use decimal fractions with US Customary units in many contexts. That doesn’t make it Metric.
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  281. You should know both. This is nothing to whine about.
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  282. We have never used the Imperial System in the USA. I do have some Robertson screws, however.
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  283. No American (meaning in the USA) grows up using Imperial. We have never used the Imperial System, which was introduced by Britain after the American Revolution. We use US Customary units.
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  284. If you have the problem of working on a machine which has mixed units for things like set screws, that's the problem. If it is mutiple machines, some Metric and some Englush, that is not a hard problem. Allen wrenches are cheap. You just need to assemble a set of wrenches to be used for a nachine and attach it to the machine, for each nachine.
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  285. El Guiñolo — We do not use Imperial units in the USA.
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  286. So you should have plenty of time and energy to learn to spell and punctuate.
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  287. No, the founding fathers used English units themselves. The revolution was not about units.
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  288. The FAA do not have the authority to tell aircraft makers which bolts to use. It is not a safety issue.
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  289. The “big push” wasn’t very big. I never heard about it.
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  290. Real scientists know that units are arbitrary. There is a video on YT of Dr. Feynman explaining Newton’s law of gravity. He uses the unit “inch” (which Newton used) without apology. He didn’t say he used it only because Newton used it. He didn’t say we would do it today in meters. He didn’t say he refrained from converting it only so you rubes would understand it. He just used it without being bothered in the least by it. His purpose was to communicate an idea of physics to a lay audience and he knew that they would understand the unit. Physics is not in the units but in relationships between things independent of units.
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  291. No, you don’t have to divide. If you don’t know, just say so, or ignore them.
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  292. Exactly. In fact, there are applications for which we prefer to use one unit with decimal fractions rather than mix units. Machinists work in inches and thousandths. Surveyors work in feet and hundredths. Anybody who drives knows the odometer usually gives miles and tenths.
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  293. Nobody struggles with the number of inches in a mile. It happens to be 5280x12, but nobody needs to know that. If you need to know that, you work it out. Do they teach multiplication where you went to school?
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  294. No, because we do use Metric units in some places. The United States was one of the participants in Le Convention du Mètre in 1875, which created the international standards body.
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  295. I was thinking about this myself recently. An eighth of an inch is a little more than 3 mm, so it would be comparable (but incompatible) to have square drives of 7, 10, and 13 mm for our common sizes. I suppose the tool makers just don’t want to make twice as many socket types. I wonder what they call the drive sizes in metric countries.
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  296. Isaac Newton had no problem using inches. Physicists know that units are arbitrary.
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  297. We spell it the way it is spelled on the English language pages of Laboratoire National Metrologie et d’Essais.
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  298. I have been oriented toward science my entire long life (I have a graduate engineering degree). The prevalence of US Customary units in everyday life doesn’t bother me in the least. It doesn’t bother real scientists, either. When Feynman (a Nobel physicist) talked to the general public, he would use a unit like “inch” when needed, without seeming to be bothered by it. I’m sure he bought gasoline by the gallon and potatoes by the pound. Anybody who understands science knows that units are arbitrary.
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  299. The resistor codes are decimal in the United States like they are everywhere else. The area of plots of land is usually given in acres and tenths or hundredths. Nobody cares how many inches are in a mile. It is 5280 times 12. work it out if you want it.
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  300.  @sonicvenom8292  — In practice, there is very little confusion and very little conversion.
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  301. Nobody uses 5/6. Where did you get that? When I started working on things — my bicycle, then my first cars, I couldn’t afford a full set of wrenches (spanners). I bought just two box wrenches at Sears as a starter: 7/16 — 1/2, and 9/16 — 5/8. Those four sizes fit most of the nuts. I didn’t have to use them much at all before the sizes were familiar by sight. Now and then I would have to buy another wrench or a socket.
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  302. Maybe his Metric sockets are 3/8” drive.
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  303. A kg is 2.2 lbs. That’s pretty easy. You can use 2.0 for rough estimates.
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  304. One “cup” in cooking is a particular volume, half a U.S. pint. We generally use different measuring cups for liquid and solid measure, but that is just for convenience. A liquid measure cup has headroom and a pouring spout.
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  305. “Best” doesn’t mean anything. All systems of units are equvalent, but they are optimized for different purposes. US Customary units work well for many things and Metric units for many things. We use both. There are often advantages to sticking with legacy systems, and sometimes advantages in making a change. We (in the USA) have decided to be bimetral, so that’s the way it is.
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  306. If you are building something from parts specified in English units, why would you design it in metric units? Or why not get your parts elsewhere?
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  307. Of course we don’t. The Imperial System was introduced half a century after the United States left the British Empire. It isn’t our fault the British chose not to follow our lead.
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  308. I definitely think US Customary is better than Imperial.
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  309. Yes, precision does not depend on units.
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  310. There are many differences in usage between British and US English. This one is of no importance.
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  311. Not really. The United States participated in the Convention of the Meter in 1875, the only English-speaking nation to do so. The French have never been our enemies.
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  312. Medical practice in the United States is almost entirely metric. Doctors, nurses, and others use metric units as a routine matter, not because some patients are more familiar with metric units. All medicine, even aspirin, is marked in metric units.
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  313. Base 8 was widely used in the computer industry before the 1960s, and continued in use much longer.
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  314. Celsius is structured for fish. People live in air, so the Fahrenheit scale is structured for humans. But really, people are most at home with the scale they grew up with. They are equivalent. It is just a linear transformation from one to the other.
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  315. The way to get finer degrees of temperature is just to use the Fahrenheit scale.
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  316. Not really. That may be true for people who count on their fingers, but engineers can manage quite well with English units. The Industrial Revolution wasn’t impeded by English units. The main motivation for conversion to Metric is only to enable international cooperation. A world economy with many products being manufactured in multiple countries requires it.
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  317.  @edhernandez4344  — Construction in English units would be easier if it were done with the engineer’s scale: feet, tenths, and hundredths.
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  318. It is better to leave such things to experts. What you are proposing would bring world-wide chaos.
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  319. “Metric System” is understood by all to mean SI. Système International is just more formal.
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  320. Because we don’t spend much time in science class. Most of us are through with science classes.
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  321. Kumaran John — But a light year is not a metric unit. I expect an astronomer would use parsecs, which is likewise not a metric unit. The most distant observable galaxy has a proper distance of 9.8 billion parsecs.
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  322. Most aren’t. The fact is, we don’t worry about units much. For everyday use we use US Customary units, such as “cups” to measure liquids in the kitchen. But when we buy a bottle of wine, which is 750 ml, it doesn’t faze us.
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  323. The United States adopted the metric system in 1866 and was a member of the Convention of the Meter in 1875.
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  324.  @FrodoOne1  — You are just quibbling over words. The bottom line is that both metric units and US Customary units are legal for trade, and both are used.
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  325. Not really. The automakers changed to metric units across the board, for international compatibility. I question whether the engines are designed in metric units, though. My engine is marketed as 2.5 litres, but 150 c.i. is closer to the actual displacement.
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  326.  @richardjones4662  - People who want big engines know the sizes. V8s start at about five liters. Six liters and up gets into large displacement range (for a passenger car). Automakers don’t market displacement in liters for any reason other than they have switched to Metric generally. They publish the US Customary equivalents openly.
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  327. You mean spelling. We spell it with an “er” because most French words with a similar “re” are changed to “er” when incorporated in American English. You can even find the “er” spelling in English pages on French websites.
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  328. You are making identical posts in different channels. Lame.
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  329. The fact that everybody uses hours, minutes, and seconds for time in practically every situation is indication that it works well. It is far better defined than "elephant sneezes."
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  330. I have a graduate engineering degree. A lot of good engineering has been done in US Customary units. A competent engineer can work in any system of units.
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  331. Yes, the base unit is the kilogram. The reason, I suspect, is merely practical. When the Metric units were represented by physical standards, the gram was just too small to be practical for that purpose. “Base” meant the starting point for making reference objects to be distributed. Now that the physical standards are gone, that interpretation of “base” seems obsolete as well. But I suppose you just mean the the kg mass should be the unit without a prefix. But we do use small units of mass. If the gram were 2.2 lbs, then our drug dosages would be in micrograms. The ones that are now in micrograms would be in nanograms. I’m not sure that would be better.
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  332. Specific impulse has units of seconds.
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  333. chinapig71 — Precision is independent of units. Usanian machinists have been building automobile engines for a very long time, in large numbers.
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  334.  @HelyoG  — You don’t even know that we do not use the Imperial System in the USA.
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  335. No, you aren't. You are just making a lame joje.
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  336. What is stupid is assuming that something unfamiliar is stupid without learning anything about it. PSI is a useful unit for inflating tires, because the numbers are convenient. Atmospheres are also useful for comparison, such as Martian atmosphere as a fraction of Earth’s. Even industries which are almost entirely metric sometimes use special units when they work better than SI units. Medicine in the United States, as elsewhere, is metric. But ophthalmologists measure pressure in mm of Hg. Millimeters are metric, of course, but there is no power of ten conversion from Pascals to mm of Hg. They use it because it works for them.
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  337. The fact that US Customary units are defined relative to metric units is irrelevant to the substantive question: should one use customary or metric units in any particular application? Only metrologists need be concerned with how the units are defined.
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  338.  @FrodoOne1  — Actually, it is now the international pound.
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  339. Yes, second is a legacy unit. It isn’t actually metric, but it is part of S.I. because there is no practical alternative.
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  340. You left out 3/4”.
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  341. Von Braun did not invent jet propulsion or rocketry.
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  342. There is. “Hecto” is the prefix for 100. If “hectometers” isn’t used much it is just because it isn’t particularly useful. Most people would rather say “a hundred meters” just as we would say “a hundred yards.”
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  343. Gadget — I don’t think I have ever heard anyone use “football field” as a unit, although I’m sure someone has. It is natural to describe distance in comparison to something that can be visualized.
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  344. To get a metric unit at a similar scale, you would have to use 1/40 mm. That’s not very neat. What would you use, 0.01 mm? That’s a finer scale than needed. How about 0.02 mm? Call it a “dil.”
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  345. You mean the resolution of the scales differs. If the devices are otherwise identical, there is an inherent precision independent of scale. My vernier caliper, for example, has two scales on the one device. The inch scale resolves to 0.001 and the mm scale to 0.02, so the mm scale is a little finer. But the precision is inherent to the device, before there is any scale marked. One could invent a new unit chosen to give the finest practical resolution for the device.
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  346. We do not use Imperial units in the United States. We use U. S. Customary units (and metric). Any engineer should know this. A great deal of engineering has been done using inches. I doubt many engineers get worked up over it, they just do what is needed.
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  347. I don’t know what you mean by “verifiable standatd.” Metric units are rigorously defined in terms of the base SI units, as are US Customary units. All of the units we use are rigorously defined.
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  348. Measurement is not mathematics. Isaac Newton was rather good at mathematics, and used the inch when it suited him. Remarks like yours are just childish, with no substance.
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  349. The metric system is entirely a creation of humans. There is nothing fundamental about the definition of le mètre or the second. The units were merely tied to physical phenomena long after being defined for practical purposes, in order to make the values more stable.
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  350. The German engineers worked on just one part of the technology, the rockets. Most of the technology was developed entirely in the United States by US scientists and engineers. The computers were just one such area of US technology. The pioneers of rocketry were: Goddard (USA) Oberth (Germany) Tsiolkovsky (Russia)
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  351.  @franzzrilich9041  — There were a lot of German immigrants in Pennsylvania (including my ancestors), but it would have been in addition to English, not instead of.
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  352. We use US Customary units, not Imperial. And Metric units. Large volumes of water are given in acre-feet.
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  353.  @DarkBraveStuff — No, Imperial and US Customary are not the same thing. You ought to learn the basic facts before commenting on this subject. The difference has been explained many times in various forums.
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  354. Even Russia changed to use standard flight levels. There are good reasons why the flight levels based on feet have survived.
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  355. The Tobi Sakin — To Usanians, it’s just eau off a canard’s back.
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  356. But if you calibrate your scale with a standard kilogram, then use the scale in the same location, a kg of weight is a kg of mass.
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  357. In US Customary (and Imperial) we divide by powers of two, not numbers like 18 and 94. The advantage for someone marooned on an island without measuring tools is that you can divide by two without measuring. You can’t divide by ten so easily. In any case, we do sometimes use decimal fractions in US Customary. The manner of representing fractions is independent of units.
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  358. The fuel gauge was malfunctioning. That’s why they were doing a manual measurement.
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  359. That is not an inherent limitation, though. Using steps of 0.5°C makes the Celsius scale slightly more precise than a Fahrenheit scale in unit steps. Accuracy and precision do not depend on the units, but in how the units are used.
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  360.  @HenriStosch  — The question is, how do toolmakers make them accurately outside of the United States? Do they calibrate their equipment in fractions of a millimeter? To what precision? The common 3/8” square drive would be 9.525mm, for example. So the precision needed is thousandths of a mm. Of course, either the drive or the square hole must be a little off the nominal size for it to work. I’m not sure what the precise specification is. What interests me is what people in fully metric countries call the 3/8” square drive. I would just call the various sizes #1, #1.5, #2, #3, #4, and not tell anyone the unit was 1/4 inch. Here’s an interesting example of a German square drive adapter: https://www.tools-giant.com/item.php?id=58524091&lang=en&curr=USD&ref=froogleus&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI9rehupem7wIVAojICh1-IAP9EAQYAiABEgJZffD_BwE What is curious is that their nominal sizes for 3/8” and 1/2” are 10 and 12.5 mm. Those are way off the actual dimensions. But the German company is being practical by just calling it what it is, 3/8” to 1/2”. I have a nice pair of drafting rules from Germany, marked in inches and fractions only. I like it when engineers are practical and don’t treat measurement as if it were religion.
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  361. This isn’t actually a “real engineering” channel. Other posts on it are similar.
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  362. Money is decimal, not metric. It has nothing to do with le mètre.
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  363. Neither is insane. Insanity is characteristic ascribed to humans not things. It means that a person is not criminally culpable for reason of mental illness.
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  364. Accuracy does not depend on units. Civil engineers can design in feet with decimal fractions to whatever precision is required.
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  365. Too much variability in size.
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  366. Mixing units is not a big issue at all. Everybody knows that automobile tires are sized for wheels measured in inches while the tire width is given in mm. It isn’t a problem because most people replace tires with the same size which is already on the car. Those who want to make a change in tire size need to make sure that the width of the wheel, as well as the diameter, is compatible with the tire, but that is not a big deal. You just look up the specification.
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  367. CONSTANTINO — We do not use Imperial units in the USA.
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  368. Even the medical industry, which is almost entirely Metric, doesn’t use the S.I. unit of pressure. They use mm of Hg.
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  369. I don’t see a dry ounce listed in the (former) National Bureau of Standards publication Units of Weight and Measure, so if you are measuring dry chemicals by volume in oz units, you are doing it wrong.
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  370.  @FrodoOne1  — Nobody calculates it that way. I know the number, but if I had to calculate it, I would start with the fact that before track went Metric, middle-distance runners ran the 880 (yards), which is a half mile. So 880 x 6 is 5280. This illustrates the weakness of the argument of Metric monotheists. They resort to sarcasm and contrive artificially awkward problems to compensate for their inability to articulate a good reason why people should not use feet and inches though they find them convenient.
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  371. It isn’t an engineer’s point of view, generally, although some may share it. Engineers are practical people who can work in any system of units. I have a graduate engineering degree and my point of view is that the two principal systems of units are equivalent. One or the other may be more convenient for a particular purpose.
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  372. Yes, it is ironic that a channel called “Real Engineering” presents things in this way. I have a graduate engineering degree. Real engineers do not look at problems in measurement that way. Engineering is about making things work. Any mechanical engineer can design using an inch scale or a cm scale. There is no difference except the conversion factor. Arguing that one design is “better” merely because of the units is politics, not engineering.
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  373.  @Goldshot123  — Allen keys are units of 1/64”. That’s one of the few uses of 64ths. I have a lot of tools but rarely need an Allen wrench. When I need a small one, I just try them until I find the one that fits. When one has an Allen set screw that needs occasional tightening, it is better to keep the key with the equipment to avoid figuring it out every time. Allen keys are inexpensive.
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  374. The radian is useful in mathematics. I don’t know if there is any practical application. But there is something to be considered here. You don’t speak for “we,” meaning everybody. If mathematicians want radians, they may have it. There is no principle which holds that there must be only one way to measure angles, or anything else. People in a free country may use whatever they find convenient for their particular purpose. Alas, some places are not so free.
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  375. That is incorrect. Many countries besides the UK and USA use the decimal point.
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  376. "America" is used as shorthand for "United States of America" around the world, like it or not. Usually, the meaning is clear from context.
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  377.  @p.willram1968 — It isn't a mistake when it is used intentionally.
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  378. Neither does the United States.
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  379. Metric hardware on US manufactured automobiles is no surprise. I think we started doing that about 40 years ago.
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  380. I don’t know who people mean when they say this. Queen Elizabeth II married her cousin. I suppose you should make an enquiry to Her Majesty’s spokesman.
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  381. Russia now uses the 1000-foot levels used internationally.
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  382. In US Customary units, dry pints and quarts are not cooking measures. They are fractions of a bushel (64 dry pints). Dry measure is used for selling some produce, e.g. a bushel of apples or a pint of blueberries. In my long life (I’m retired) I have never encountered any confusion about how to measure things in a US kitchen. Both a dry quart and a liquid quart are two pints, because there are dry and liquid pints.
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  383. Nautical miles and knots are a coherent international standard for global navigation and have been for 400 years. The flight levels in feet are just a legacy system which works well and which would be difficult to change safely.
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  384. The second has been defined for a very long time. When such definitions are refined, the objective is always to make the change so small as to be insignificant. A change as large as you suggest to either the meter or the second would cause worldwide disruption.
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  385. Money is decimal, not metric.
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  386. Competent engineers are not bothered by dual systems of units.
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  387. Yes, critics who can’t get simple facts right have no credibility.
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  388. Real engineers get the details right.
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  389. The stone seems a rather large unit for weighing people. I can see how it might have been practical for weighing a wagonload of grain, or even a horse, but why would people use it? Losing a pound or two is easy. Losing a stone is hard work.
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  390. In Latin, “libra pondo” meant “a pound by weight.” Although we use the second word for the name of the unit, we derive the shorthand notation from the first word.
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  391. Nobody uses his actual foot to measure.
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  392. Nobody converts inches to miles, and if you are working with lengths of thousands of inches, you wouldn’t be using inches in the first place. This is typical of examples purporting to show the difficulty of customary units — it is contrived. Actual real-world examples are never used, because customary units are easy when used sensibly.
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  393. Converting to right-side driving (for those countries which drive on the left) would be far more useful than universal conversion to metric. There must be a huge cost associated with making a car configurable (in manufacturing) for either right or left side driving.
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  394.  @FrodoOne1  — Manufacturing cars which can have the steering wheel on either side requires more parts. Probably not many, but the real problem is that driving in a country which uses the opposite convention is dangerous. Steering a vehicle relies on training the muscle memory to respond in real time to the flow of traffic. An error can be fatal. Being confronted with a different system of units is trivial by comparison. You just need to get out your calculator if necessary to know the temperature precisely.
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  395. Everything else on that tank was designed in US Customary units.
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  396. Canada mandated conversion for a time, then rescinded the mandate. Australia was faster to convert because they mandated conversion an stuck with it. Rulers marked in inches are contraband in Australia. In the United States we don’t like coercion. We are bimetral. People are free to use whichever system of measurement they please.
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  397. I don’t know any Americans who get angry about units. The angry people are always the metric hard-liners.
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  398. Zashius Grigsby — The United States units were in agreement with Great Britain at the time of the Revolution. The Imperial units were a later revision.
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  399. In fact we (in the USA) are bimetral. Both US Customary and Metric units are official and legal for trade.
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  400. I don’t see any need to do a conversion. I would measure on the drawing using an engineer’s rule marked in inches and hundredths. I would multiply by 208.33 to get feet and hundredths. I would measure the actual structure with an engineer’s tape marked in feet and hundredths.
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  401.  @simonjohn9525  — Engineers understand notions of precision, significant digits, and cumulative error. Engineering drawings do get used to produce actual structures all the time, with sufficient precision, and countless things have been built using inches and feet. I have engineering degrees and I don’t see the problem you are having with understanding this.
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  402.  @simonjohn9525  — The finest divisions of an engineer’s steel rule are 0.01 inch. If you prefer, you can get one with 0.02 resolution.
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  403. And your point is? A cubic inch of water isn’t good for much. A gallon of water is about 8 lbs. That’s a useful number. A lot of products are packaged in 5-gallon pails. I can easily estimate how many pails will approach the load limit on my pickup.
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  404. We have never used the Imperial System in the United States. When was “back in the day”? In my school days (1960s) we used Metric units as well as US Customary.
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  405. I never defend the Imperial System. I think the US pint is a better unit than the Imperial pint.
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  406. It is far easier to learn than a language.
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  407. Where did you get that idea?
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  408. Do you think if the US went fully metric and prohibited the use of Customary units that all the equipment with inch-based Allen set screws would suddenly disappear?
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  409. It depends on the application. I think US Customary is a better system for some applications. Building a house, for example.
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  410. The US Army uses it because the other NATO countries use it. Scientists use it because they do extensive calculation over a wide range. Neither reason is relevant to a US resident going about routine daily activities, like buying groceries.
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  411. The inch is the width of the thumb, though, not the length. For me, anyway.
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  412. Change it how? Define a foot as ten inches? That would create a huge mess. Better just to use metric units if you prefer.
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  413. Money is decimal, not metric.
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  414. We (in the USA) don’t struggle with Metric units, we just don’t use them much. Except in auto mechanics and medicine, where we use them without difficulty.
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  415. The wheel dimensions being in inches is just a legacy from the early days of automobiles, dominated by the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Consider that making cars, wheels, and tires involves three industries. Now suppose you have a business in one of those three industries, and you propose to start using wheels sized in cm. Work out what the sizes will be and what you will have to do to get the other industries on board. Anticipate the objections they will have. Estimate what it will cost. Report back when you have worked out the details.
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  416. You are wrong there. Some years back it was thought the US would start using metric for everyday commerce, but there was resistance. Both are legal systems and people are free to use either. Some industries use metric, but many do not.
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  417. My wife is an elementary school teacher. She says questions never come up. Children that age just learn it. It isn’t as complicated as some people here seem to think it is.
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  418. Exactly. And when you set aside the comments that are no more than lame jokes and insults, then set aside those that don’t get basic facts right, there is very little left.
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  419. The international foot.
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  420. Anyone who runs on that will lose more votes than he gains. It seems to me to be a strange thing to make your first priority, though. I can think of many issues which are far more important for a presidential candidate.
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  421. It’s the other way around.
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  422. The United States of America does not use Imperial units. We use US Customary units.
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  423. The engineer’s rule divides a foot into tenths and hundredths
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  424. No, I expect most people like whichever system they are using, and think you may use whichever you prefer.
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  425. No, we never used the Imperial System n the USA. US Customary units are based on earlier English units.
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  426. The United States adopted the Metric System in 1866. There is nothing more to do. We in the US are free to use Metric units wherever they suit us, and we do in many ways.
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  427. That’s not quite accurate. There are 12 Troy ounces in a Troy pound. Troy units are different from common units and used only by certain people dealing in precious metals. Nobody is confused by this because the Troy units are used only by specialists. You would always say “Troy” if you were using those units.
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  428. Hardly anybody references football fields outside of actually playing or watching football. I’m a senior and I’ve never heard it done. It seems to be a standard joke in forums on this topic, for some reason.
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  429. The statute mile and the nautical mile are international units.
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  430. True, but your second statement is not exclusive. Engineers in the USA use whichever system of units is appropriate for the task at hand. Civil engineers commonly measure in feet and decimal fractions, for example.
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  431. It’s a bilker’s dozen.
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  432. Wrong. The British Imperial System was introduced by the UK in 1824 (and extended in 1878) to standardize weights and measures throughout the British Empire. That is what “Imperial System” means today. The US system is US Customary and is different.
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  433. No, a great deal of engineering has been done in the United States using US Customary units. Your argument is nonsense.
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  434. Yes, but there are qualifications: “(1) Metric usage shall not be required to the extent that such use is impractical or is likely to cause significant inefficiencies or loss of markets to United States firms.” (from EO 12770)
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  435. For volume, the unit is “fluid ounces.” When we say “ounces” for “fluid ounces,” we are using shorthand and the meaning is clear through context.
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  436.  @FrodoOne1 — The important units, inch and pound, are now international standards.
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  437. The idea is merely to tolerate the use of Imperial units in commerce, not to prohibit Metric units. That’s a good thing.
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  438. Get a grip.
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  439. The form of fractions is not an inherent requirement of US Customary units. The carpenter’s scale, based on powers of 1/2, is mostly used for wood and other things for which a coarse scale suffices. Precision work is usually done with the machinist’s scale, based on inches and decimal fractions to whatever precision is required and achievable. If you think about it for a minute, you will realize that a lot of machines requiring high precision have been built in the United States using Customary units.
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  440.  @manta__jochen  — In the US, we seldom need to know that. Those who don’t know probably don’t need to know. We know what miles are when we are driving. We know what feet are when we estimate the size of a room. We don’t often need both units for one context.
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  441. Units are arbitrary. They are all equivalent.
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  442. Nobody here is going to give up Fahrenheit. Modern thermostats support both scales, so individuals may use whichever they prefer in their homes.
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  443. The kg is the base unit for mass because, until recently, the mass standard was a physical object. The gram is too small to be practical for use as a physical standard.
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  444. No, it isn’t circular. The General Conference on Weights and Measures has rearranged the way the standards are defined. Formerly, Planck’s constant was determined experimentally from the standard kg. Now, it is a defined constant which is used to define the kg.
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  445.  @TheYolo20  — The Planck Constant is not a natural constant like pi, which has a particular value independent of everything else. The value of the Planck Constant depends on the choice of units. That is why metrologists were able to redefine it.
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  446. It isn’t exactly one foot.
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  447. I don’t think “intuitive” is the right word. It’s easy to remember, but it produces an inconvenient scale. The Fahrenheit scale persists because it is more convenient.
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  448. Anti-science sentiment has nothing to do with this topic, though. My education followed a scientific track and my degrees are from engineering schools. ( I’m retired now.) I am fully competent in the metric system, but, being Usanian, prefer US Customary units for ordinary purposes.
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  449. Jerry Chen — In order to change time to a decimal system you would also have to have decimal divisions of a circle. If you studied Euclid and number theory, you would know what problems that would present. Euclid showed that the side opposite a 30° angle in a right triangle is equal in length to one-half the hypotenuse. Let’s see your proof of that in a system with 100, 400, or 1000 degrees in a circle.
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  450. Such a change would wreak havoc worldwide, because the precision of machinery is finer than two parts in 10,000. It isn’t about conversion. Only metrologists need be concerned with the definition of le mètre. The rest of us just want interchangeable parts to fit.
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  451. You could make such an error in any units.
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  452. Oren Ben-Dov — People around the world use “America” to mean “United States of America.” It isn’t our fault.
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  453. We do not use Imperial units in the United States. We use US Customary units, mostly, and metric units.
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  454. Musk did not introduce the metric system in the USA. We adopted it in 1866.
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  455. The practical question that concerns most people in their everyday life is “how long will it take to bring this pot of water to a boil?”. It varies with the amount of water and the power of the stove, primarily and we learn it, approximately, by experience. We aren’t solving physics problems in our kitchens.
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  456. Plank’s constant was recently redefined to be an exact rational constant. The kilogram is now defined using Planck’s constant rather than the other way around. It is now exactly: 6.626070150 × 10−34 kg⋅m2/s.
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  457.  @BleachWizz  — It is now defined to be exactly that value. The standards people reversed the relationships. Instead of using energy (mass) to measure Planck’s constant, we now use Planck’s constant to define mass (energy).. For the first time, Planck’s constant is actually a constant.
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  458. The US Navy uses yards also, to set the range on their 5-inch gun.
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  459. True, but precision does not depend on units.
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  460. Most people are familiar with what they use, as one would expect.
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  461. You could use a dram or a gill if you prefer, but most people would not know what you meant.
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  462. Cecil J — A 64th of an inch is smaller than a mm, so if one uses 64ths, it is more precise. A 32nd is comparable to a mm, but slightly more precise. It is more common to use 16ths or coarser, but it depends on what you are doing. Framing a house does not require high precision, but making fine furniture does. Making precise joints is a matter of having special tools for the purpose. I assure you a lot of fine furniture has been made using US Customary units.
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  463. Actually, the United Kingdom held their own against Germany with very little help from the USA for a couple of years. The Soviets were also crucial in defeating Germany, at great cost to themselves. The Allies, working together, won WW II.
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  464. The United States adopted the metric system in 1866.
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  465. Everybody knows that the "foot" is a well-defined unit of measurement. Even you know that.
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  466. NASA is fully metric these days.
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  467. A lot of serious work has been done in US Customary and Imperial units. It is fairly recently that the USA has started making extensive use of Metric units. Our units did not prevent our participation in the industrial revolution.
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  468. You don’t understand units. It isn’t about conversion, or mathematics.
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  469.  @errorpixelyt — Engineering in US units is done with decimal fractions, so the mathematics is as easy as with meters and decimal fractions. Fractions expressed as a ratio are for carpenters, mostly. The fractions are the main objection people have with US units, not the units themselves.
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  470. I can understand your not wanting to use US units, but not your opposition to education. If you want to be a hard-liner on conversion to metric units, explain to me what you will do with all the photographic euipment that uses UNC threads to mount cameras on tripods. Will you somehow convert everything or just throw it all out? The same problem applies to countless other things as well.
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  471. It doesn’t. Where did you get that idea? The lb-mass equals the lb-force only at standard conditions.
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  472. That’s just baloney. We are all the same species. We are all equally able to decide what is easiest for us, individually. Most people in the United States have no reason to buy food by the kg instead of the pound. Businesses in the US sometimes do decide they need to use metric units in certain situations. some individuals decide it is useful to learn some metric units. Others just don’t need to and don’t want to.
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  473. Laboratoire National Metrologie et d’Essais uses the US spelling on its English-language pages.
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  474. Why do you care how many inches are in a foot? I’ll bet you don’t even use feet.
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  475.  @FrodoOne1  — I have engineering degrees myself. I just think Von Btaun is being overestimated by comparing him to an actual scientist. Oberth taught him rocket theory and he applied it, helped by many others.
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  476.  @FrodoOne1  — Von Braun was important, no doubt, but the scientist was Oberth. I think von Braun was a bit of a self-promoter. The Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program was carried out by many thousands of people, a large share of them engineers. Nearly all of them were unknown to the general public, but we used to read about von Braun all the time.
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  477. We use Metric units a great deal more than your made-up unit.
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  478.  @michaelmckinnon2906  — baloney
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  479. Flight levels are in units of 100 feet for a very good reason — it works well. If you think flight levels could be changed to Metric units without adverse consequences you just haven’t thought the problem through.
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  480. MirandaAB — We aren’t nearly as good at dominating the world as we used to be. We are just now trying to put our own house in order. But, speaking of domination, the USA is not trying to get any one to convert to US Customary units. It is always the other way around. Our industries which sell products internationally use metric units. A wine bottle has been 750 ml for quite a long time.
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  481. Right. It makes sense. If you calibrate your scale with a mass of one kg, then when it reports a weight of one kg, it will be a mass of one kg.
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  482. Exactly.
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  483.  @N00B283  — There are more than a thousand languages. It is clearly impossible for most people to learn them all. There are only two systems of measurement for nearly all purposes in the United States. It is easy for any person to learn both, since the principles of measurement are the same. We do not have two grammars of measurement, just two sets of units.
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  484. You don't have to. You can just use whichever you prefer and ignore the other one.
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  485. Mat Fa — Many Usanians love French things.
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  486. Yes, we spell most similar French words by reversing the “re” ending.
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  487. In the US construction industry, a lot of materials come in a standard 5 (US) gallon bucket. Do you use the same bucket in Canada, marked in litres, or is there a different Imperial or metric bucket?
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  488. It is only a few cranks who don't know the facts of US usage of units, and who insist on displaying their ignorance for all to see.
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  489. You might get different answers fom machinists depending on which system they prefer, but the fact is that a great deal of precision machinery has been manufactured using inches as the basic unit.
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  490. Precision does not depend on units.
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  491. The narrator said “volume combined with mass,” whatever that means.
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  492. We (in the USA) do use both systems.
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  493. The advantage of using body parts is that you always have them with you (let’s hope!). My shoe is almost exactly one foot and the span between my outstretched thumb and little finger is six inches. Very convenient!
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  494. Yes, “intuition” is misused by people who argue for one system or the other. Most of either system is learned. Even our base ten number system is learned. You might say that counting on one’s fingers is intuitive, but the abstract concept of “zero” as an essential part of a positional number system had to be invented.
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  495. Decimals are also fractions.
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  496. It is not a “mistake,” it is US style. We (in the USA) think it odd that Europeans use “.” and “,” in numbers the reverse of how we do, but we don’t get worked up about it. We just deal with it.
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  497. Not really. Most of them went to Argentina. The ones who came to the USA lied about their wartime activities, which was grounds for deportation. A handful of rocket engineers were an exception. They were admitted for their specific expertise.
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  498. Possibly because the scale is compressed compared to Fahrenheit, avoiding the need for 3-digit numbers. Another reason might be that the freezing point is critical for aircraft, because icing will bring down an aircraft. Celsius draws more attention to the freezing point. I am just guessing, however.
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  499. No irony there. It is precisely because we love freedom that we use both metric units and US Customary (not Imperial) units. People may use whichever they please. Countries which use metric units exclusively prohibited the use of legacy units. I think Australia even requires metric distance for horse racing. How does that work? Did they change the length of the races or do they express traditional lengths in metres?
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  500. Yes, many slavs, Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Ukranian have contributed to technology in the United States. Sikorsky was born in Kiev, but he is usually described as Russian. Kiev was part of Imperial Russia at the time, before the Russian Revolution. Ukraine did not exist as a nation then. Sikorsky came to the United States in 1919, after the Russian Revolution but before the formation of the USSR. I am not sure what his first language was, but he had Russian friends. Sergei Rachmaninoff helped him get established in the United States. We are all one, fundamentally. I wish all people would get along.
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  501. No, that is not Metric. It is just counting. It has nothing to do with linear measure. Metric units are derived from le mètre. The prefixes are defined by SI, but not used exclusively for Metric units. For example, we use K for force: KIPS are units of 1000 lbs. Is that Metric. We also use microinches. Is that Metric?
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  502. We don’t use Imperial. We use US Customary. We also use metric in places.
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  503. S.I. is not the same as the Metric System. For example, the “second” is an S.I. unit, but not a Metric unit. It is a legacy unit which predates the Metric System. The Metric System comprises le mètre and those units derived from it.
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  504. The United States adopted the metric system in 1866.
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  505. You must understand the practicality of flight levels being in units of 100 feet.
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  506. That incident was not as significant as people often make it out to be. The United States would not have converted to the Metric System then.
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  507. I don’t believe all Europeans are slow learners. I think those who post complaints in forums on this subject are not representative.
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  508.  @FrodoOne1  — An accurate summary of the (measuring) “cup.” In the US we don’t much care about the difference between the customary cup and the legal cup, because we don’t measure that precisely. How Europeans use the metric cup doesn’t matter to us, because we wouldn’t exchange goods in cup units.
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  509. For some things, yes. For other things, no. For a lot of things, it’s a wash.
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  510. We don’t use the Imperial System. We use US Customary units.
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  511. The origin of the units is as you say, but they are all now rigorously defined by physical constants. They certainly won't be changed just because we have sent spacecraft beyond the solar system.
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  512. We are bimetral in the United States. We adopted the Metric System in 1866. Those who prefer to use it may do so.
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  513. A “pace” is two steps.
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  514.  @Derna1804  — Where I looked up marching info, the word “pace” wasn’t used at all. That is better than confusing the definition of “pace.” There is a good reason why Boy Scouts and such use a two-step pace: it compensates for asymmetry in the length of the left and right steps.
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  515. I found TC 3-21.5 DRILL AND CEREMONIES MAY 2021 online. It seems that it doesn’t even use the term “pace.” Under “Steps and Marching” it discusses the 30-inch step and 15-inch half-step. Nothing about pacing. Pacing is different than marching, anyway. The purpose of pacing is to estimate distance, not to keep a group walking in unison.
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  516. We do not use the Imperial System in the USA. We use US Customary units and the Metric System. Your children will be better educated by learning that there is more than one way to measure things. Units are arbitrary.
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  517. You know the English language as well as as Finnish. Why would you object to your children learning two systems of measurement?
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  518. I have a graduate engineering degree and know the metric system very well. I think US Customary units are better for everyday nonscientific use.
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  519. I Don’t know anyone who says that. Perhaps some would, jokingly. But we don’t like coercion. Both metric and US Customary units are legal in the USA and we are free to use whichever suits us.
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  520. Nautical miles and knots aren’t just a US thing. They were created ca. 1600 and are used by mariners everywhere.
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  521. If you don’t understand the nautical mile, it doesn’t matter. Just leave navigation to navigators.
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  522. The switch to Metric by the US car companies was motivated solely by the international nature of the business, not by any shortcoming in the US Customary system of units. Countless items of precision machinery have been manufactured in the USA using US Customary units.
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  523. We (in the USA) have never used the Imperial System.
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  524. We (in the USA) know how soccer (futbol) is played. We don't "insist that (our) game is the actual football." The fact is, I never in my long life have heard anybody argue about that. It's just a game, and that's what we call it. The reasons for the name are buried in history, but not many people care enough about it to figure it out. I don't care for either variety of football, myself.
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  525. People the world around use “America” to mean “United States of America” and there is nothing that can be done to stop them. I have been promoting “USAnia,” but it hasn’t caught on yet.
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  526. It is one ten-millionth. I thought the metric system was supposed to make it easier to avoid errors in calculation.
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  527. That has been mentioned by many people on many different videos on this subject, but we keep getting comments from people who don’t understand the difference. I don’t understand how this started. Sixty years ago, or so, nobody in the USA called them “Imperial” units. We called them “English” units. Mechanics called their wrench sizes “standard” or metric, when there were only a few cars that used metric. Now, they call them “fractional.”
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  528. You are wrong. Astronomers have units like the parsec, which has no relation to le mètre. Real scientists know that units are arbitrary. While science does use SI units predominantly,, a practical scientist will use whatever helps him or her get to the result.
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  529. We do not use Imperial units in the United States. We use U. S. Customary units, mostly. We did not adopt the Imperial system, which was introduced after the American Revolution, because we were independent.
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  530. You are more likely converting to US Customary than Imperial because we have never used Imperial in the USA. But if you hate it, why don’t you stop doing it?
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  531. In the United States, French words ending in “re” are usually spelled “er.” Our National Bureau of Standards document on units spells it “meter.”
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  532. In the US we mostly use metric units in science classes, especially in physics.
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  533. Any comment can be removed for any reason, at the whim of the owner of the channel.
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  534. Oren Ben-Dov — The term is “Usanians.” I’ve been promoting this for awhile, but it hasn’t caught on. Our astronauts did land on the moon, several times.
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  535.  @FrodoOne1  — We (in the USA) do not use feet for road distances.
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  536. In the United States, we spell the unit “meter.” We follow that convention for many words of French origin ending in “re,” such as “center” for “centre.” Many American spellings differ from British spellings.
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  537. How do you fill up your gas tank? The US gallon is not the same as the Imperial gallon.
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  538. We use both US Customary and Metric units in the USA.
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  539. The nautical mile is much older than aviation. It was recognized at the time that long ocean voyages began that a nautical mile was useful. It is interesting that the international civil aviation regulations contain a section anticipating Metric flight levels, but nothing has ever been done in that direction since the regulations were first published in the 1940s. It is an example of safety and practicality winning out over abstract notions of Metric purity. People who don’t understand this haven’t tried to work out the details of the problem.
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  540. Yes, decimals are also fractions, but they are not unique to Metric measurement. We also use decimal fractions with US units when it serves our purpose. Who hasn’t seen an automobile odometer showing miles and tenths? My bathroom scale displays pounds and tenths.
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  541. No, the difference is, in the United States, we don’t like coercion. Nations which have eliminated the use of customary units did so by prohibiting them.
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  542.  @fredjansen2770  — No, there is some usage of legacy units in many countries, even though unofficial, and much usage of Metric units in the United States, where they are official.
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  543. I’ve never heard of an 11/18 spanner (which we call a wrench). An 11/16, yes. It comes between 5/8 and 3/4 inch.
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  544. The pipes are the same, there are just different names for the sizes. But the threads might be different. Mixing old and new should be at worst a matter of having adapter couplings where the thread type changes, or having a pipe threading machine with cutters for any needed thread.
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  545. That’s really strange. Maybe you need anger management counseling.
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  546. Hardly anybody uses the slug. The fathom (6 feet) isn’t widely used, but it was a useful unit for mariners. It may be obsolete, but nobody has to use it. Stones are not used in the US. Their persistance in the UK is a mystery to me, at least as applied to people. I can’t imagine why you would think a BTU was worse than any other English unit. It has its uses, mainly to compare the heat output of furnaces.
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  547. henk harry — We would measure if we needed to know. I’m sure Europeans would do the same if they needed mm precision, or guess if they didn’t.
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  548. Loki Fenrir — Standard time is not a problem. Daylight Saving Time is.
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  549. I don’t understand what, exactly you want. Something like this? https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-C13-a8ff2e478908a0307a1b097ecfe6a1cc/pdf/GOVPUB-C13-a8ff2e478908a0307a1b097ecfe6a1cc.pdf
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  550. My shoes happen to be very close to one foot long, so the unit is convenient for me. The basis for the metre was equally arbitrary, but much less accessible: one ten-millionth of one quarter of the Earth’s circumference along a line of longitude. Today, the definitions of both units are equally rigorous, since one is defined relative to the other.
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  551. Oren Ben-Dov — You are wrong.
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  552. The medical system is almost entirely metric. Aviation is certainly not entirely metric. Engine displacements are described in liters, but my 2.5l engine is closer to 150 c.i. than 2.5 liters. You are wrong about rulers. You just mean common rulers sold to school children.
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  553. I’ve never heard of 16,000 of an inch. Where did you get that? Perhaps you mean 16 thousandths of an inch. Machinists often work in thousandths because .001 inch is convenient precision for many things.
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  554. US Customary (it is not Imperial) is easy when you grow up with it. The people who find it hardest are those with a bad attitude about it.
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  555. Wikipedia is an authority on nothing. I don’t expect them to get everything right in detail.
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  556. Exactly.
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  557. If the Chinese are in control, there will be plenty to worry about.
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  558. In the United States, we use US Customary units for most common purposes. We have never used the Imperial System. People around the world use “America” as shorthand for “United States of America.” The distinction between the USA and the Western Hemisphere is almost always evident from context. Pretending that this is confusing is disengenuous and pedantic.
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  559. bimetral
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  560. The inch has been standardized internationally since 1959.
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  561. Wine bottles have been metric for a long time.
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  562. That is a common form, but we don’t have to write it that way unless the format is specified on the form. I write today’s date as 21 Apr 2023.
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  563. There are good reasons for it. Inches persist for wheel diameter because there is no advantage to changing it, and a huge economic disincentive to doing so. There are other things like that, such as square drive for tools and the 19-inch rack.
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  564. That was considered once, a long time ago, but it is impractical and pointless. Nobody wants it.
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  565. The cm and inch are already well defined. We won’t be changing anything.
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  566. Nothing wrong with the furlong. That’s just an eighth of a mile. It is convenient for horse racing.
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  567. Howard Gibson — You are wrong there. The Newton is a metric unit. The English unit is the slug. But you are also wrong because there is a pound-mass (lbm) unit as well as pound-force (lbf) unit. In everyday situations there is not an important difference, so we just use lb.
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  568. I guess you weren’t cut out for science. I took a lot of science and engineering classes and always found dealing with different systems of units to be trivial. And, by the way, we do not use Imperial units in the United States. We use US Customary units, mostly, which are a little different.
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  569. If you prefer, you can use gills. A gill is half a cup.
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  570.  @jonathanodude6660  — Where did you get that? In the US, there are three teaspoons in a tablespoon and 16 tablespoons in a cup.
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  571. This is not true. When the Metric System was first codified it was just as arbitrary as English units in defining its basic unit, le mètre. Over time, the definitions were refined to become defined by fundamental physical constants, but, in the meantime, US Customary units were defined in terms of Metric units, which means that the bases for Metric units and US Customary units are exactly the same. At least some Imperial units are likewise defined relative to Metric units, because we now use the international yard and pound in both the US and the British Commonwealth.
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  572. In the United States, the system is US Customary. The inch/foot/yard and the pound are international, since 1959. The fluid measures have always differed from Imperial.
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  573. We do. The local time right now is 3:37 PM. Three and thirty-seven are base 10 numbers.
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  574. We use both in the USA. Our units our not Imperial, but for the purposes of this argument it is better to say English units instead of Imperial, which comprises both Imperial and US Customary.
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  575. In the US we use US Customary units, not the Imperial System. In any case, neither requires that fractions be represented as multiples of inverse powers of two. Machinists and surveyors (and anyone else who wants to) use decimal fractions.
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  576. Somehow, I was able to learn to drive, and to drive all over the United States and Canada, before GPS was invented.
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  577.  @bubba842  — Calculation is largely independent of units. Area is length times width in any units. It isn’t the unit that complicates calculation of area, it’s the manner in which fractions are handled. That’s why surveyors use feet, and tenths or hundredths of a foot. Using two units is what causes complications, which is why, at a smaller scale, one would use only inches. There isn’t much calculation to do in ordinary activities of life.
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  578. There are ten chains in a furlong, so stick with those units and you’ll be good.
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  579. Physics is not in the units, it is in the relationships between things. Long ago, I had a high school physics lab which involved bricks, an apparatus, and the problem of determining the weight of something. I did it in brick units and converted to grams at the end, because there was a waiting line of students wanting to weigh the brick at the start. Any scientist knows that units are arbitrary.
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  580. What island was that? By the way, what is the system for driving sockets in metric countries? In the United States the driver connection to the socket is square and is 1/4”, 3/8”, 1/2”, or 3/4”, for both SAE and metric sockets.
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  581. We don’t “forget.” There is only one system of electrical units, so naturally they are part of SI. They are also customary units in the USA. We have never used other electrical units. Even though the physical definition of electrical units may be based in metric units, in practical use it doesn’t matter how they were derived. We do use legacy units for energy and power: BTUs and Hp, for example. Hp is a convenient unit to classify electric motors in the neighborhood of 1 Hp.
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  582. English units also have a ton. (two, actually). The Imperial ton, the US ton, and the Metric ton are all about the same, so we all know what a ton is.
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  583.  @FrodoOne1  — The US ton is not “way below” in the context you used, which was just having a sense of what a ton means. Many people know that an automobile weighs a couple of tons, but could not guess it within a few hundred pounds. That’s known as a “ballpark estimate.” When we want an accurate number, we weigh it.
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  584. The new meter stick would be unwieldy. Good luck with that.
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  585. According to Lancelot Hogben, in his comprehensive work Mathematics for the Million, Arabic scholars adopted Hindu notation, which is where the notation for “zero” originated, and he calls our present-day notation the “Hindu-Arabic number symbols.” That’s authoritative enough for me.
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  586.  @USA4thewin  — Hogben was a zoologist and medical statistician, and fellow of the Royal Society. His book on mathematics is a classic.
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  587. I noticed that Jason occasionally used lbm in his Engineering Explained site, when it suited his purpose. My view is that he is the “real engineer,” because he is interested in solving real problems, not in arguing about which units are “better.”
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  588. Laboratoire national de métrologie et d'essais uses the “meter” spelling in its English-language pages.
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  589. That’s why we use US Customary units in the United States.
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  590. That’s the US position. We are bimetral.
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  591. MondoTV — Most Usanians are tolerant of the differences. Keep in mind that the USA was a member of the original Convention of the Metre. Both Customary and metric units have been legal in the USA for 150 years.
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  592. All three are correct. Use whichever suits your purpose.
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  593. No, the Imperial ton is 2240 lbs. The US ton is 2000 lbs. These are also known as the long and short ton.
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  594. Some are. Auto mechanics use metric tools. Medicine is almost entirely metric.
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  595. Fractions of 64ths aren’t used much.
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  596.  @FrodoOne1  — There are plenty of things manufactured in each system. I don’t know how you would count them all to decide.
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  597. Metric monotheists are incapable of making a serious point on this subject.
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  598. A Metric ton is 2204.62 lbs.
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  599.  @FrodoOne1 I would not. Troy units are used only for particular things. They are well-defined, but I don't use them.
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  600. We have never used the Imperial System in the United States.
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  601. That’s the way I do it, except you have to write month in letters to avoid ambiguity: 11 Sep 2001
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  602.  @FrodoOne1  — No, it is ambiguous because it relies on knowledge of the order. You are just saying there will be no confusion if everybody does it your way. Unambiguous means incapable of misinterpretation. Of course if you are writing software and have a specification requiring ISO date-time format, then you write to the specification. Ambiguity is a problem in casual use.
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  603. This isn’t a serious analysis. It’s a screed.
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  604. We use customary units because they are convenient and no one forces us to stop using them.
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  605. When was that? I’ve heard that NASA converted completely to metric. Maybe they are only partially metric.
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  606. W do use it. There is a great deal of metric usage in the United States.
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  607. All the Metric Act does is recognize metric units as legal for trade. It does not change the status of Customary units. We do, in fact, use metric units for trade. Have you bought a bottle of wine in the last 50 years?
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  608. Congress delegated authority over weights and measures to the National Bureau of Standards long ago. That is where US Customary units are authorized. “U.S. Customary System of Weights and Measures—Commercial Weights and Measures Units A notice by the Director of the National Bureau of Standards [now National Institute of Standards and Technology] dated July 15, 1968, and published in the Federal Register (33 F.R. 10755, July 27, 1968), provided that: By virtue of the authority vested in the Secretary of Commerce by 15 U.S.C. 272 and delegated to the National Bureau of Standards by Department Order 90–A, the Bureau is charged with the responsibility for “The custody, maintenance, and development of the national standards of measurement, * * *.” The method employed for disseminating information on weights and measures units has been through official National Bureau of Standards publications. However, all such units have never been listed together in any Federal legislation or in the Federal Register. On February 27, 1968, in the House Committee on Science and Astronautics Report No. 1107, accompanying H.R. 13058, legislation to repeal the Standard Container Act of August 31, 1916 (39 Stat. 673; 15 U.S.C. 251–256), and the Standard Container Act of May 21, 1928 (45 U.S.C. 685; 15 U.S.C. 257–257i), and amend the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act of November 3, 1966 (80 Stat. 1296; 15 U.S.C. 1451), the following Committee view was expressed: Testimony revealed that although, standard weights and measures are defined in publications by the Bureau of Standards, these definitions are not defined by law nor have they been published in the Federal Register. Consequently, the Committee recommends that the Secretary of Commerce cause to be published in the Federal Register a listing of the common weights and measures used in normal commerce throughout the United States and relate them to the standards developed in accordance with existing law, 15 U.S.C. 272. Commercial units of weight and measure in common use are based on the yard and the avoirdupois pound. The yard and avoirdupois pound were last defined in the Federal Register of July 1, 1959, in terms of the national standards of length and mass: The meter and the National Prototype Kilogram. From the two units, the yard and the pound, are derived all other U.S. Customary multiple and submultiple units that will be found in ordinary commerce. They are defined as: ...”
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  609.  @joeyager8479  — Ok. It appeared to me that you were questioning whether US Customary units are duly authorized by law. They are, but indirectly through the Dept. of Commerce. Both SI and US Customary units have been updated from time to time. Of course we in the US use metric units for international trade, where required.
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  610. If your brain is that fragile, maybe you are not cut out for engineering. I have a graduate engineering degree (not CE), and my view of engineering is that it is problem solving. I don’t care how the problem is formulated. I will do my best to solve it in any case.
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  611. We do not use the Imperial system in the United States. People who can’t get simple facts right have no credibility.
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  612. That’s incorrect. It was 100, but the scale was later adjusted to have 180 steps from freezin to boiling and to tie those point to Celsius.
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  613.  @snobbingas189  — Wikipedia is an authority on nothing. I rely on Isaac Asimov’s discussion of the subject.
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  614.  @snobbingas189  — Doesn’t matter. It was different for awhile until it was synchronized with the Centigrade scale. It might have been both at different times.
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  615. The United States has never used the Imperial System.
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  616. In any case, it is the weight of the meat before cooking, and does not include the other things that make up the burger.
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  617. They might have started with the “verst,” which is very close to one km.
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  618. The inch is defined in terms of a metric unit, but is not quite the same as “based on.”
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  619.  @FrodoOne1  — Base 2 is inefficient, except for building digital hardware. Higher numbers give you economy of representation in a positional notation. Binary numbers are often represented in base 8 or 16 notation to get economy of representation, but with a simple conversion between base (used mainly by computer programmers). But base 16 and above starts to get cumbersome with respect to the number of symbols required. Base 10 has worked out fairly well in that respect, so base 12 seems close enough that it would have worked about as well.
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  620. You are not using the term “base” correctly. Both “22” and “7” in your example are expressed in base 10 notation. What you mean is that there are numbers which cannot be expressed in decimal notation with a finite number of numerals, although you can use repeating decimal notation as has been shown. There are also irrational numbers, which cannot be represented with repeating decimals. This is not an argument against base 10 notation, because irrational numbers are independent of the base used for a positional number notation. The problem of numbers which cannot be written in finite numerals exists for all bases.
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  621. We (in the USA) don’t even use Imperial.
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  622.  @theabyss5647  — All medicine is marked in metric units, usually mg. Wine and spirits are sold in 750 ml bottles.
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  623. I heard that, but he went wrong earlier. If you were an engineer working on the Golden Gate Bridge, all the drawings would have been in feet and decimal fractions of a foot, not in miles or inches. The problem is no more difficult than if it had been in meters and decimal fractions. And the engineers would have been better at math than he is. It is a typical contrived problem.
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  624. The Fahrenheit scale makes perfect sense to those of us who use it.
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  625. So our fundamental unit of mass should be the rest mass of a proton, or what?
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  626. dr2okevin — Why brag about being poorly educated?
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  627. The unit is the “TEU” for Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit. There are other international standards which are not Metric, for example camera mounts and air valves for tires.
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  628. You don’t have to. Metric units are legal in the USA. Go ahead and measure in meters.
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  629. That’s an easy conversion, because 30 cm is about a foot. So you just drop the zero and see that it’s a little more than 2/3 foot. If you are working with both systems of units, you need to learn a few simple relations to do estimates.
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  630. Not true.
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  631. Conversion between radians and degrees is trivial.
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  632. Everybody uses the same electrical units, so there is no issue at all, is there?
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  633. Nobody uses the survey foot except the US Geographic Service, and they are phasing it out. The United States foot is the international foot. Surveyors generally use feet and tenths, while machinists use inches and thousandths (or ten-thousandths). Learning the conventions of a particular trade is not a big deal. Every profession has its conventions.
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  634. US Customary units are defined in terms of metric units, so there would be no difference. Grains of barley are merely historical curiosities.
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  635. Your ignorance does not mean lbm isn’t a legitimate unit. Jason sometimes uses it in his Engineering Explained videos. Purists may object to it, but most engineers, at least of those who use US units, are practical people. We will use whatever works.
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  636. When I capitalize “Metric” I mean the specific metric system we all know and love, not any metric system.
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  637.  @FrodoOne1  — Whatever you call it, when it came into use in the USA it became US Customary. Our standards activities were independent of British standards until 1959, when the international inch and pound were adopted by both the USA and the British Commonwealth.
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  638.  @FrodoOne1  — The reason it was important that the name be different is that the standards activities were separate. Because of the separation, the British and US inches differed slightly. In 1959 we reconciled the difference so now the international inch is the standard everywhere.
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  639. Exactly. It isn’t about conversions. It’s about convenient units.
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  640. The US Customary system just defines the units, it does not specify how fractions of a unit must be represented. Thus, carpenters use a scale based on successive division by two, surveyors use decimal fractions of a foot, and machinists use decimal fractions of an inch.
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  641. Imperial and US Customary units were defined long before the Metric System existed, in many ways, but US Customary units have been defined relative to Metric units for more than a hundred years. The definitions are of interest mainly to metrologists. Most people who use units don't need to know how they are defined.
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  642. I use both systems and advocate for using both. Use the one that works. If you have set of Metric sockets, what size is the square hole for the driver? If want to mount a camera with a threaded hole in the base, what size screw do you need?
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  643. You making a generalization from only one machine, without even identifying it.
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  644. Usually, drills are purchased in a set, and stored in order of size. If you have an 11/64 bit, it must be for some particular purpose. The reference to hieroglyphics is exaggeration. Children in the US learn fractions. I never knew anyone who learned hieroglyphics.
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  645. The USA has never used the zimperial System.
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  646. The survey foot is being phased out. It is just an artifact of the Customary units being revised slightly when the International Foot and Inch were adopted to bring the US and the British Commonwealth into agreement. The US Survey had a vast amount of data using the old foot, so they couldn’t just switch over quickly.
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  647. We don’t need another law. Foodstuffs are already mostly labeled in dual units. Cars are metric. Lumber is Customary. We get along well enough as a bimetral country.
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  648. The United States does not use the Imperial System. We use US Customary units.
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  649.  @smarty265 We don't learn Imperial units in the United States, routinely. We use US Customary units, not Imperial.
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  650. John Hudelson — That is just evidence of the declining state of our education system. A lot of Usanian students don’t know to spell and punctuate, either. They can’t label the states on an outline map of the United States, let alone do the same for maps of Canada, Europe, or anywhere else. They don’t know elementary U. S. history and know next to nothing about civics. A machine shop should be using machinist’s scales in decimal fractions of an inch.
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  651. The nose gear was damaged.
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  652. We don’t often convert between yards and miles. Decades ago, short and middle distance foot races were measured in yards. The 440 was a quarter mile, so anyone interested in track knew the conversion. Today, it doesn’t matter much.
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  653. Grains of barley have not been used for measurement for a very long time. The international inch is rigorously defined relative to S.I. and has been for more than half a century.
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  654. Modern democracy? I don’t think so, although there is not a well-defined beginning. I would say the first two are French cuisine and la bise.
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  655. Real scientists are practical people, and they are smart enough to know that the science is not in the units.
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  656. The United States does not use Imperial units.
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  657. In US Customary (or Imperial) units, we also use decimal fractions in some applications. Surveyors and machinists use decimal fractions. The odometer on cars registers tenths of miles. The notation used for fractions is independent of units.
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  658. It was Thomas Jefferson, who was then Secretary of State.
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  659. Metric purists don’t want to hear practical arguments for customary units.
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  660. No, you aren't surprised. You would just rather make lame jokes than discuss the subject seriously. Units of time are very old and the units are universal world-wide. I'm sure you know that.
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  661. But they don’t measure height. The altimiter does that for them.
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  662. The United States did introduce the metric system in 1866 but has never tried to impose it to the exclusion of customary units, except in particular areas. It has nothing to do with intelligence. People are the same the world over. When metric advocates make such lame arguments, they merely expose the paucity of substantive ones.
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  663.  @glendelong1023  — You are correct about the 1970s effort hoping to get the country to accept metric units generally. It failed, because the people saw no advantage in changing, and because it was never compulsory. Nations which fully converted from English units to metric have done so by prohibiting the use of English units for trade. That is not how we do things in the United States. Despite our preference to use common English units in everyday life, there is a great deal of usage of metric units in various ways in the United States. Many people who argue the metric case in these forums seem unaware of that, or say that partial conversion is not enough.
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  664. As an American, you are free to use metric units.
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  665. The plan is just to be tolerant of the use of Imperial units in commerce. That’s a good idea. It has been that way in the US for a long time. If you buy milk, the units are gallon and quart; if you buy whisky, the unit is liter (750 ml, typically). Nobody cares.
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  666. The United States has never used the Imperial System and the American Revolution had nothing to do with units of measurement. Metric advocates should not make historical arguments, since they know so little about it.
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  667. The carpenter’s scale works well for those who inderstand it, but we can also use a steel rule marked in inches and fiftieths or hundredths, which is just as easy as mm.
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  668. But that’s the difference between the United States and most of the world. We don’t like coercion here. We are bimetral. Our citizens are free to use whichever system of units suits their purpose. What President Reagan killed was the US Metric Board, by declaring its work complete. Its purpose was education and encouragement, not forced conversion. We do know about Metric units, and some industries have chosen to convert. Others have not. That’s the way it should be.
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  669.  @FrodoOne1  — What you are overlooking is that the United States did standardize units of weight and measure, initially through the Treasury Department, later through the Department of Commerce. In the early days of the Republic, we used a variety of units, mostly based on English units. This was practical because Britain remained our most important trading partner after independence. The National Bureau of Standards, as it came to be known (now NIST) regularized the units, which became known as the US Customary system. By the time the United States adopted the Metric System in 1866 we were well into the industrial age. (The Convention of the Meter was in 1875.) Forced conversion in the nineteenth century would have caused a huge disruption without any real benefit, so in 1893 the Bureau decided to tie the US Customary units to Metric units. This was an eminently practical solution, as it allowed the two systems to coexist peaceably. Refinements in 1957 reconciled differences in linear measure and weight with the Imperial System, so today weights and measures are well-defined world-wide, at least for all units of importance to global trade. So the US Government has asserted its Constitutional power to regulate weights and measures, in a manner that respects the liberties of its citizens and which led to the dominance of the United States as an industrial power in the Twentieth Century, while cooperating with the international standards body (which we helped create) in refining Système International. This was the practical approach and it has been successful. We not only believe in liberty, we believe in practical solutions to problems.
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  670. John Birkland — Engineering Explained used slugs in one of his videos, but they don’t get used in ordinary commerce.
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  671. Nobody who actually uses fractional divisions of an inch is confused by 1/32nd.
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  672. Wrong. All conversions between units are rational numbers.
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  673. Do you have a specific use in mind?
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  674. I have two drafting rules made in Germany which are marked only in inches (and fractions).
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  675.  @nukularius  — I don’t think they are that old, but they were made in West Germany, so that narrows it down. They were made by Alvin, probably for export.
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  676. We do compromise. American wine and spirits have been packaged in metric bottles for a long time, for example.
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  677. Thach Manorom — You sound like one of those people who hate the designated hitter rule.
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  678. The Imperial foot is obsolete. Britain and the United States agreed to use the international foot in 1959. The US Survey foot is also obsolete. It exists only to represent surveys done before the switch to the international foot. It is of no importance to ordinary commerce.
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  679. BigAl 777 — I doubt that. Even Boeing is building metric aircraft.
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  680. There is no such thing as “American imperial.” In the USA, we use US Customary units. Imperial units were defined after the American Revolution, so we did not adopt them.
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  681. One can also use lbm, which is pound(mass).
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  682. We (in the USA) don’t, either. People who claim we do are not to be taken seriously. For purposes of comparison, people will use whatever conveys the information (“bigger than a breadbox”), but comparison is not measurement.
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  683. What is your case?
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  684. laboratoire national d’essai spelles it “meter” on their English-language pages. In US English we usually change a trailing “re” in French words to “er.”
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  685. Adrian Bray — My shoe (US men’s size 10) is very close to one foot. Convenient.
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  686. No, it doesn’t. I don’t believe you. A Swiss company, Swatch, invented a new unit of time, in partnership with one American professor at MIT, but it didn’t catch on.
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  687. Many words are spelled differently between British and US English. We generally change “re” endings to “er” for words borrowed from French, because that’s the way we pronounce them. The Oxford dictionary recognizes American variations.
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  688. The Imperial System uses the long ton. In the US, our Customary unit is the short ton.
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  689. Chieftain — Any Usanian knows what a measuring cup is. Children know that.
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  690.  @hamletksquid2702  — Very well explained.
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  691. baloney
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  692. There is no such thing as “US Imperial.” We (in the USA) use US Customary units.
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  693. Peter Klauß — There was a time when extremists proposed such things. Fortunately, such innovations did not catch on.
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  694. A “cup” of coffee is not a well-defined unit. A drip coffeemaker is marked in cups smaller than a cup measure, perhaps 6 fl oz. But a normal takeout coffee is 12 fl oz, 50% larger than a cup measure. The larger sizes aren’t “cups” at all.
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  695. Knut Knutsen — Exactly. Any real engineer or scientist knows that units are arbitrary. The science is not in the units.
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  696. Dave Compton — In the United States, we understand the value of sovereignty.
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  697. Check the English language pages of Laboratoire National Metrologie et d’Essais.
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  698. well put
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  699. Barleycorns haven't been a thing for hundreds of years. We do have a unit "grain," but it is rigorously defined. The league is not an official unit. There have been different definitions of it.
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  700. That’s not accurate. Originally, our common units were taken directly from English units. Later, Britain introduced the Imperial System, which diverged slightly. The USA common units remained the same simply because we were no longer part of the Empire. Then, as metric units developed, we joined the original convention on the meter and have participated in metric development ever since. Our Customary units remain in use because we do not believe in coercion when there is no point to it. Both Customary and metric units are legal and people are free to use whichever suits their purpose.
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  701. Engineers aren’t suffering. Real engineers know that units are arbitrary, and can work in one as easily as in another.
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  702. I doubt the foot unit changed when the king changed. In any case, the length of the foot was stabilized long ago. It was most recently changed by a tiny amount in 1959 to reconcile the difference between the US foot and the Imperial foot. That change was merely for standardization and had no practical effect on everyday measurement.
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  703. You are trying to make a semantic argument. That's just silly.
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  704.  @wtflmaa7842 — "Gauge" is not a unit, though. It is similar the word "size," which is just a general term, not a unit. "Size" for T-shirts is different from "size" for pizza. They might both be small, medium, and large, but they are different. You have to know the context.
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  705.  @wtflmaa7842 — Screws. There are many kinds of screws, and a screw has several properties. The designation #4, #6, #8 refers to diameter, not length. Say you need #6, a common size. You need to know the throead, so 6-32, a common size and thread. Then there is the length. If you buy them at a hardware store, the length will be marked on the box or bin. If you buy them online, there will be a place to select the length. You also have to consider head shape, drive type, and material. Of course it can be complicated, but that is true in either system of units. You can't make everything with just a few kinds of screws.
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  706. Nobody is interested in the number of inches in a mile. That’s just a contrived problem that metric manics like to pose when they don’t have a real one.
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  707. I do, but it isn’t an important number except to surveyors. Change of scale just doesn’t come up much in practice. That’s what metric advocates seem not to inderstand.
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  708. ApoJake — You are welcome to. Metric units are legal in the US.
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  709. No, an Imperial (long) ton is 2240 lbs. The US ton is 2000 lbs.
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  710. Not only scientists in the United States use metric units. There is much commercial usage as well.
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  711. It is mostly those who only use metric who get worked up about it. In the USA we have been encountering metric nuts and bolts since the 1960s and most mechanics can use either system with ease.
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  712. We know they are different words, but we generally spell them the same. Most words borrowed from French that end in “re” are changed to “er” in US English.
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  713. P R — Go ahead. Convert.
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  714. Because it is a more convenient scale for weather. It has the property that the temperature falls between zero and 100 for nearly everybody, nearly all of the time. That is what it was designed to do and the rationale is as sound today as it was when the scale was devised. The mystery is why anybody uses Celsius outside of a chemistry lab.
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  715. Some industries switched, for example wine and spirits. A general switch is meaningless, because we are bimetral. Individuals, or groups, may use whichever system of units suits their purpose.
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  716. There is also a metric ton.
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  717. The speed of light in a vacuum is now a defined constant, so it does not need to be measured.
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  718. There is also kilogram-force (kgf). Jason uses it in Engineering Explained now and then.
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  719.  @Obi61248  — No, we learn it. I was in a science track and know the metric system very well. I just don’t make much use of it. When I encounter a metric nut, I need to use the correct wrench. That’s about all.
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  720. No, they are not random. You do not know what a random number is.
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  721. Who was it who said “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”? (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
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  722. One whose fuel gauge was broken and who lacked the means to measure the fuel.
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  723. I never thought about that being the origin of “furlong,” but it makes sense. It isn’t used much in the US, though.
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  724. Our (US) ancestors came from all parts of the world.
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  725. Many US products sold internationally are measured in metric tons.
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  726.  @fork9001  — It is useful to have diffetent units at different scales. Acres are convenient for farmers because they have large fields. For a city lot or the footprint of a house, sq. ft. are more convenient.
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  727. At the time electrical units were first developed, the charge on an electron was not known. The original “volt” was just the potential difference accross one particular type of cell of the era. The units were refined over time, but the volt is close to the original. It doesn’t matter how SI chooses its base unit. They probably just found it convenient to define current rigorously.
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  728. Clinton Boucheix — The reason for such abbreviations is historical and can easily be researched. By the way, they are not acronyms.
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  729. Lebenspiel — There is very little difference in the survey units. Nobody but a surveyor is interested in them. I think they are being phased out, anyway. Whether a mile is nautical or statute is obvious by context, but, even though the difference is greater, it is of no importance to laymen. This complaintis contrived, as are so many on this topic.
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  730. Then you would have 3 1/3 metric feet per meter. The Metric monotheists wouldn’t know what to do with that.
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