Comment on Banana for scale

• SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  First off, I want to point out that imperial measurements originated in Europe, not the US. No need to get upset about where the standards are from or who use them, we aren’t talking about that, as I want to eliminate patriotism and tribalism, and isolate the subject to just the differences between the measurements.

  Secondly, whether or not something is used commonly or not doesn’t define if something is humanistically intuitive. And I think you misunderstood what I meant by that, anyway, and might be twisting my words away from their original meaning, by using those specific words wrongly in a strawman fallacy, thus making two blind jumps away from my argument and essentially arguing against something that I never really said, which is a waste of both of our time and energy.

  I’m saying that the units are human-intuition centric first, not other reference point first.

  If you base your 0-100 measurement of temperature around the freezing and boiling points of water, that’s fantastic, but it’s significantly less relevant for what temperature it is outside. Sure, you can divide and multiply it well and it’s a range that’s relevant to water.

  But the 0-100 being based around what temperatures span from really cold to really hot to humans (and temperate zones where most humans exist), you’ve created a unit that is significantly more relevant to weather and how it feels and affects us. People who use Fahrenheit basically never, ever use decimals for weather or cooking food, because those are the things that most people REALLY do day to day.

  They’re just different philosophies in how to measure stuff, and a lot of people use both at will, because we like to just use the best thing for the job. If people younger than me want to use all metric or all imperial, cool, I don’t give a shit, they’re all available. Whining about units is bizarre. Like, just don’t use them if you can’t be flexible. It’s like language: the person who speaks the most language wins because they understand the differences, pros, and cons. Whereas the person who only understands one language is limited in perspective and understanding, and when that person rages about other standards, they look ridiculous.

  Speak your language, if it works, fantastic. But don’t piss over here because you don’t understand the differences. I’m just trying to get through life and I bet you are, too. If you want the truly weird conversions, though, go between imperial and metric ;) those are awesome.

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  • BambiDiego@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    1. The origins don’t matter, every civilization, region, and town made its own system, I’m referring to the fact the the US and the UK are the only developed nations that still USE imperial, when there’s an easier, widespread, more sensible system available right next to it.

    2. That’s not a strawman fallacy as I didn’t deny your input by miscategorizing your personal value, if anything it approaches a bad reason fallacy or an antecedent denial fallacy, but it’s neither because we both made our points of view on separate foundational assumed beliefs without addressing proofs or evidence. One could also throw an appeal to emotion or an appeal to ridicule fallacy in there with my silly joke about imperial units but we’re not debating a verifiable, objective truth. Neither are we attempting to find some higher level of human understanding of our spaient peoples world, we’re just wasting time on an internet forum, as in “they’re just opinions, man.”

    3. Every unit of measure that humans created to measure the world we live in, like metric and imperial, is human-intuition centric first. Imperial units were created just as formally, and informally, as metric. The imperial system is based on a different system, based on another system, that was based on the science at the time used for pharmaceutical, military, and crafting applications. Just because imperial used hands and feet of SOME guy doesn’t make it less or more arbitrary than the measure of “one liter of water.” A system, based on a system, based on science at the time that is just easier to understand in the base 10 system we live in.

    4. The 0 - 100 hot-cold argument for Fahrenheit is just incorrect. It was made by SOME GUY and 0° was the freezing point of HIS brine in HIS basement. 0 F° isn’t cold, it’s deadly, and 100 F° is not. That seems just as arbitrary as 0 - 40 C°. If the scale was the same people would actually refer to Celcius as -32 - 40 C° instead, and that’s just not the case. Decimals are not scary, they’re equally simple to use by any person who uses the base 10 system, unless the argument is that people who use Fahrenheit also struggle to make change when handling money.

    5. Measurements are not one-to-one comparable to language, but when most people who are familiar with both tell you that one is clearly superior, and most of the world’s educated people agree, and it’s an easier system for children to understand, then it’s fairly safe to call one system better. Maybe some languages are better at one thing than another, but language is interpretive, flowing, changing, adaptable. Measurements are not, they need to be universally, unambiguously understood.

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  • wieson@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Yeah everyone had their archaic human-derived measures but every city on the Rhine had a different system.

    If you were a cologne cabbage trader and had 100 cologne pounds of cabbage, the would be 104 pounds in Düsseldorf, 98 pounds in Mainz, 91 in Karlsruhe and 102 in Frankfurt.

    Wonderful human derived measurements.

    I get the impression some people think the whole world was English imperial units and then we started to turn metric on a whim.

    Metric is wonderful for international and interregional trade and communication. There’s practically only one blank spot on that map.

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