Americans use 9 millimeters at school all the time.
Everyday, as an American
Submitted 11 months ago by Bob@midwest.social to [deleted]
https://midwest.social/pictrs/image/b0568131-351c-41d9-98ce-a557d5fd9deb.jpeg
Comments
woelkchen@lemmy.world 11 months ago
readthemessage@lemmy.eco.br 11 months ago
There is a business opportunity there for 0.35 inches Freedom Guns
01011@monero.town 11 months ago
Hilarious.
Thade780@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Agent641@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I am once again asking for yyyy-mm-dd
bitwaba@lemmy.world 11 months ago
ISO8601 crew represent!
dellish@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I get SO frustrated when I see a date like 4/3/2024 and have to spend time trying to figure out if it’s the 4th of March, or if some US company wrote the software I’m using and it has defaulted to silly format.
smeenz@lemmy.nz 11 months ago
Try working for an American company I have spent years trying to convince my US colleagues to please use unambiguous date formats when sending email to a global audience. But no… they just can’t see why it would be necessary or even helpful to do that.
HootinNHollerin@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
As a mechanical design engineer in America having dual systems creates unnecessary complexity and frustration every day. I full force embrace switching to metric
KreekyBonez@lemmy.world 11 months ago
as a mechanic working in a hodgepodge US/EU factory line, I have to suffer through always carrying double the tools to service metric and SAE machines. and after so many years in the industry, I still slip up and say 3/16 when I mean 3/8 sometimes, because fractions are a shit system for wrenches.
oh, and some of our linear encoders readout decimal-feet, because fuck it, why not?
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 11 months ago
My condolences. I’m already annoyed with the times USC units are presented in Australia (our nominal pipe sizes are often talked about in inches, and sometimes valves and such have USC flow coefficients because the manufacturer is American).
So I cannot imagine the pain you must be subjected to.
Aux@lemmy.world 11 months ago
There are three sizing standards used in the UK right now: metric for newer homes, imperial for older homes and farmer’s sizing for fuck you, that’s why.
FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Metric yes please. Also for fucks sake use the 24 hour clock. Some of us learned it from the military but it’s just earth time and way easier than adding letters to a number
ulterno@lemmy.kde.social 11 months ago
the 24 hour clock
I switched to it in my later teens when I realised how many cases it would be better in.
Conversion during conversation might be an extra step, but I’ll be pushing for the next generation to have this by default.Also, much better when using for file names.
Also, YYYY-MM-DD
FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The conversion is pretty much the only hurdle I ever hear about, but that’s easy enough. How many songs/films talk about “if I could rewind the last 12+12 hours”…it’s just a matter of making it fit in context people can understand when they know a day is 24 but are used to 12.
ISO and while we’re at it, the NATO phonetic alphabet for English speakers. “A as in apple B as in boy” means fuck all when you’re grasping for any word that starts with that letter, and if English isn’t your first language fuckin forget about it.
uis@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Conversion during conversation might be an extra step
Conversion is always extra step, but you don’t need it if you use same timezone as other participant.
vic_rattlehead@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Why no base10 clock?
Inductor@feddit.de 11 months ago
base12 has the advantage of being divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6, while base10 is only divisible by 2 and 5.
s_s@lemm.ee 11 months ago
You don’t need to add or multiply time very often. Division is super important tho, and base60 is better than base10 for that.
FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Too easy. Plus we put in the 3/5 “compromise” so you can’t expect old white racists to learn proper math
bluewing@lemm.ee 11 months ago
The French did try it back when they were in the process of changing to the metric system in the 1700s. Even THEY quickly determined that, much like the creation of the universe, it was a very bad idea. And it was very quietly dropped. French tried hard to scrub that moment of insanity from the history books. But well, the internet is truly forever in both directions I guess.
Metric time quickly got out of sync with the periods of light and dark. Mother Nature evidently doesn’t like humans dicking around with the time periods of her celestial movements. (Dozenal for the win!)
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
The 12 hour one is just so wildly dumb and inconsistent.
Why does it go from 11 AM to 12 PM to 1 PM?
letsgo@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Why would you demand metric everything and not metric time?
FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Cause then we’d be thinking we’re monkeys on a spherical rock in a vacuum instead of calibrating clocks to a radioactive element to make sure everyone tunes in to wheel of fortune on time while this oblate spheroid tumbles around
Also, it’s hard enough getting people to equate Km and C with known quantities, Americans can’t handle base unit shifts like that
Jentu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
If America is going to go through the trouble to convert everything to metric, might as well switch to base 10/decimal time as well lol
lobut@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
I love the 24 hour clock and living in London, UK I used it all the time. However, I remember one time I bought movie tickets at lunch for 17:30 and my brain thought it was for 7:30pm and I called my friend at the last moment saying: “you have to leave work early if we’re gonna make it!”
whoisthedoktor@lemmy.wtf 11 months ago
There was a beautiful time back when I was young where we tried to change to metric and schools taught us nothing but. Now I’m ~50 years old and don’t even know how many pints are in a gallon. Or feet in a mile. Always forget whether it’s 12 or 16 that’s inches in a foot / ounce to pound. Always have to look that shit up.
Guess what I NEVER have to look up? The measurements that tell you in their fucking prefixes how many X are in Y. What a concept.
candybrie@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Don’t worry. You likely wouldn’t remember even if you were taught. 5280 feet/mile is just not worth the brain space. Neither is 8 pints/gallon. I don’t think you would convert between the two often enough to make it useful information to just know.
And I do have to look up those prefixes for the less used ones. It’s exa then peta or peta then exa and what’s bigger than them? What’s smaller than nano? I don’t remember because it rarely comes up. But I’m in tech, so it’s starting to more.
linja@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I remember 5280 despite being Australian because I saw that stupid mnemonic tweet. I remember the SI prefixes because of xkcd.
rayyy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
We should have gone metric in the 70s. This year will be the 45th anniversary of the Metric Conversion Act, which was signed on December 23, 1975, by President Gerald R. Ford. You may have even seen a map that has been incriminatingly illustrated to show how they are out of step with the rest of the world. It’s a compelling story and often repeated, but you might be surprised to learn that it’s simply untrue!
OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Metric has been legally “preferred” in the US since 1975. We just don’t use it.
Also while I was looking up that year I came across this wild factoid:
In 1793, Thomas Jefferson requested artifacts from France that could be used to adopt the metric system in the United States, and Joseph Dombey was sent from France with a standard kilogram. Before reaching the United States, Dombey’s ship was blown off course by a storm and captured by pirates, and he died in captivity on Montserrat.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 11 months ago
If you pretend to be a confused foreigner you can make them do math
Bob@midwest.social 11 months ago
Suddenly trying to convince all my friends and family I’m from France.
linja@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The irony is a real foreigner could probably do maths better than them.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
You can’t have it because of peer pressure from dead people. You gotta take them seriously, motherfuckers will haunt your ass and say shit like “thirty fathoms, gold dubloons and schooners, twenty nickel shillings”. We have the metric system in our country and the ghosts suck, they don’t even try to come up with sensical nonsense phrases for the sake of the bit, the lazy bastards.
Zorque@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You could always use the metric system, that was always allowed. Most food (I’ve seen) has both imperial and metric measurements. Most digital measuring devices and lots of analog ones will have options for both. Speedometers generally have both.
Really, the only one stopping you from using the metric system in your daily life is you. Unless of course you’re saying you want other people to use it. Which is a distinctly different proposition.
Septian@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
I’d argue the two greatest barriers for the average, non-STEM individual adopting metric in America is the speed limits being in mph and the temperature being in °F. Both are convertible easily enough, but when you constantly have to do so to engage with critical infrastructure or safety (cooking temps, etc.) It provides a barrier against adoption for anyone without the drive to make a concerted effort to use metric.
bitwaba@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Between the two, I think temperature is the harder one. But strangely, it also brings weight and volume back into it: Cookbooks.
So many recipes are finely tuned balances of measurements that just look plain alien when converted to metric.
Kushan@lemmy.world 11 months ago
In the UK we’re mostly using metric with the odd exception (we still love a pint of beer), one of which is that speeds are measured in MPH. It’s not really a big deal, there aren’t many customers between miles and kilometres and anything less than a km is still usually measured in metres.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I think we were the first with metric money? We still pay for things in centidollars.
Aux@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Why do Americans call the decimal system “metric”?
johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I dunno, it’d probably be better but there’s nothing stopping people from using metric in places where it makes sense. I write most of my recipes in grams because it makes them easier to multiply or divide.
TheRealKuni@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I switched all my devices to Celsius, learned it, and haven’t looked back since.
johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s fine right up to when you’re complaining about the temperature to an american.
uis@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Congrats!
Jumpingspiderman@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m a scientist. I’ve used the metric system since grade school. In fact, I convert Imperial measurements to metric to do estimates.
assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Engineer here, I just use whatever’s convenient. It’s handy to know both.
That said, I did confuse a poor coworker of mine this week when I was using bar for tank pressure and psi for the safety reliefs. That’s totally on me though.
ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 11 months ago
and that’s why challenger blew up. or was that the hubble screw up?
Philharmonic3@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Look I get it, but also, I like fahrenheit and miles. They are more intuitive and closer to the ‘feeling’. 100 degrees is really hot. 100 mph is really fast. Maybe that’s my own bias from growing up with it though
Hubi@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yeah, I think it’s mostly just a familiarity thing. To me 0°C is cold af, 10°C is chilly, 20°C is nice and 30°C is hot. 100 km/h is fast but not really fast, though I’m probably biased in this regard from regularly driving on the Autobahn lol
businessfish@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
exactly! whenever anyone says imperial units are “more intuitive” and better reflect “how it feels to humans”, i can only think: obviously, you grew up with it. that’s what you know.
no matter what measurement system you were raised on, it will feel intuitive to you and reflect how you as a human experience the world because you are used to measuring things in those units. having said that, i’d much rather we used metric if for nothing else than the ease of unit conversion.
Soku@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The temperatures are intuitive for me because Celsius is all I’ve known. The car going 60km/h or 100km/ h I know the difference and how it feels sitting in the car. The speed of wind in the forecast needs to be m/s to make any sense. Over 20 m/s I better tape the windows so that the storm won’t break them
Theharpyeagle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Out of curiosity, what would you consider “too cold to go out”? Not really about the metric/celcius system, but 0c is light jacket weather for me.
themeatbridge@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Be the change you want to see in the world. Use the metric system.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Dammit people, we need to stay focused. First abolish DST THEN institute the metric system! We have to have our priorities in order and stay organized or we will never accomplish anything!
Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
A few years ago I started using Celsius in my everyday life. It’s been pretty easy, just remember that C scales twice as fast as F, and 32F=0C and you’re set for conversations. It helps to be quick with math, but finding it difficult may make it easier to convince other people to use it instead of F near you. To acclimate yourself you’ll want to change the settings on your phone to use C by default.
I haven’t switched over to m in everyday ise, because all the roadsigns are in Mph and doing that conversion while driving is bad juju.
I’m thinking of rewriting all my recepies in grams and liters If I can figure out how to get our stupidly-over-designed-yet-entirely-jank oven to use C, that’d be good too. If we had one with a bimetalic strip and a knob I’d be able to just print one with the new temperature scale.
01011@monero.town 11 months ago
The UK continues to use miles when discussing distance. The road signs use the imperial units.
zqwzzle@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
You could drive this one stretch atlasobscura.com/…/i19-americas-only-metric-inter…
iopq@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Actually, we’re on the metric system. The foot and inch are defined exactly by their metric conversion values, and so is the pound
We’re actually just using conversion factors
SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
Natural Gas companies: No, BTU/scf or bust!
blazera@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Fine, fine, Ill use celsius.
Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I’ll preface this by saying that this isn’t an argument in favor of the imperial system, nor is it an argument intending to detract from the usefulness of the metric system. But I have wondered if there is some merit to having a simple, colloquial, “human friendly” system of measurement — something that’s shown to be the best system for people to grok, and is the most convenient to use in day-to-day life. If you need precision, and well defined standards, then certainly use the metric system, but is the metric system easy for people to grok? Say you ask someone to estimate a length. Would they be more likely to accurately estimate the length using the metric system, the imperial system, or some other system? Likewise for telling someone a length and asking them to physically reproduce it. Would they be more likely to do so with the metric system, the imperial system, or some other? It’s an interesting problem, imo, and it doesn’t seem to get much attention.
It could very well be that people can, indeed, grok measurements the best when using the metric system, but I currently am unaware of any research that has been done to show that. If anyone is aware of any research that has looked into this, then please let me know! I’d be very interested to read it.
adam_y@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Rock it like a Brit. Most things in metric except for your height (feet and inches) and your car speed (miles per hour) and when you measure your manhood (inches… Or fractions thereof).
Also, milk is pints.
Land is acres.
And the ponies run furlongs.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 11 months ago
Technically the US is using the metric system. Per the Mendenhall Order of 1893, all customary length and mass units were redefined to be based on international metric standards. The Imperial system units commonly used in the US are just conversion factors of metric units.
don@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Again, who’s gonna pay for the conversion? Sure we could switch like the Aussies did, but no one wants to pay for new shit when the shit that already exists serves its purpose well enough.
Get the financing, and then come back.
MapleEngineer@lemmy.world 11 months ago
We have it in Canada. Do you rant to borrow ours?
The reality is that the US uses the metric system but everything is translated into freedom units for the general population. Another situation where you believe against all evidence that you have something that you really don’t have.
over_clox@lemmy.world 11 months ago
We measure in whales, giraffes, and hamburgers around here homie.
uis@lemm.ee 11 months ago
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
While we are at it, let’s all (as in the entire planet) switch to 24hour UTC and the YYYY.MM.DD date format.
zqwzzle@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
ISO8601 gang
MewtwoLikesMemes@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Represeeeeent!
dan@upvote.au 11 months ago
Some ISO8601 formats are good, but some are unreadable (like 20240607T054831Z for date and time).
cmhe@lemmy.world 11 months ago
While we at that, lets switch to the international fixed calendar as well.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
That one feels kinda meh to me. It solves a handful of non-issues with our current calendar (I don’t care that the month starts on the same day, nor do I care that each day of the year is always the same day of the week). Each months having the same number of days is an improvement. It persists the problem that you still can’t use months or years as a real mathematical unit of measure and extends it to weeks, which is the biggest annoyance with calendars, although it reduces how often that becomes significant. Adding two days that have neither a day of the week nor month would mean significant changes to every computer system that needs to deal with dates, and is just hateful.
The 1st of a month to the 1st of the next will always be one month, but it depends on the month and year how many days that is. So a month as a duration will span either 28 or 29 days. A week is now sometimes 8 days, and a year might still have 365 or 366 days, depending on the year.
How do you even write the date for the days that don’t fit? Like, a form with a box for the date needs to be able to handle Y-M-D formatting but also Y-YearDay. Probably people would just say 06-29 and 12-29, or 07-00 and 01-00, although if year day is the last day of the year it kinda gets weird to say the last day of the year is the zeroth day of the first month of the next year.
There’s just a lot of momentum behind a 12 month year with every day being part of a month and week. Like, more than 6000 years. You start to run into weird issues where people’s religion dictates that every seventh days is special which we’ve currently built into our calendar.
Without actually solving significant issues, it’s just change for changes sake.
kn33@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Since we’re breaking everything, I want to use dozenal with the Pitman symbols and “deck/el” pronunciations.
amelore@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
Move New Years back to march 1st, then the Latin roots will be accurate again.
itsnotits@lemmy.world 11 months ago
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 11 months ago
YYYY.MM.DD and 24 hour for sure.
Everyone using UTC? Nah. Creates more problems than it solves (which are already solved, because you can just lookup what time it is elsewhere, and use calendars to automatically convert, etc.).
I for one do not want to do mental gymnastics /calculation just to know what solar time it is somewhere else. And if you just look up what solar time it is somewhere, we’ve already arrived back at what we’re already doing.
Much easier just looking up what time (solar) time it is in a timezone. No need to re-learn what time means when you arrive somewhere on holiday, no need for movies to spell out exactly where they are in the world whenever they speak about time just so you know what it means. (Seriously, imagine how dumb it would be watching international films and they say: “meet you at 14 o’clock”, and you have no idea what solar time that is, unless they literally tell you their timezone.)
Further, a lot more business than currently would have to start splitting their days not at 00:00 (I’m aware places like nightclubs do this already).
Getting rid of timezones makes no sense, and I do not understand why people on the internet keep suggesting it like it’s a good idea.
Loki@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
I’m pretty sure they don’t mean “give up on time zones” but “express your timezone in UTC”. For example, central Europe is UTC+1. Makes almost no difference in everyday life, only when you tell someone in another zone your time. The idea is to have one common reference point and do the calculation immediately when someone gives you their UTC zone. For example, if you use pacific time and tell me that, it means nothing to me, but if you say “UTC-8” I know exactly what time it is for you.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s good for file/record sorting, so let’s just use it for that
For day to day, DD.MM.YYYY is much more practical.
bitwaba@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Hard disagree.
Least specific -> most specific is generally better in spoken language as the first part spoken is the part the listener begins interpreting.
Like if I ask if you’re free on “the 15th of March” vs “March 15”, the first example is slightly jarring for your brain to interpret because at first it hears “15th” and starts processing all the 15ths it’s aware of, then “March” to finally clarify which month the 15th is referencing.
The only thing practical about DD.MM.YY is that it is easier for the speaker because they can drop the implied information, or continue to add it as they develop the sentence.
“Are you free on the 15th” [oh shit, that’s probably confusing, I meant a few months from now] “of July” [oh shit, I actually mean next summer not this one] “next year (or 2025)”.
So the format is really a question of who is more important in spoken language: the speaker or the listener? And I firmly believe the listener is more important, because the entire point of communication is to take the idea you’ve formulated into your head, and accurately describe that idea in a way that recreates that same idea in the listener’s head. Making it easier for the speaker to make a sentence is pointless if the sentence itself is confusing to the listener. That’s literally a failure to communicate.
dan@upvote.au 11 months ago
It’s not though… It’s ambiguous as to if the day or month is first. With the year first, there’s no ambiguity.
If you want to use d-m-y then at least use month names (eg. 7-June-2024).
pumpkinseedoil@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
What about a format where we only have multiples of 10?
yeehaw_cosmonaut@reddthat.com 11 months ago
You mean base-10? My totally unrealistic pipe dream would be to have the world switch to base-12.
Pinklink@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Seconded.