this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Used to be worse, to quote messers Pratchett & Gaimon.
"NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee.
It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system
Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). Once Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated."
Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
As an American: What the fuck?
You get my angry up vote. But seriously how is the imperial measurement any better? I mean it is completely and utterly broken with not unified conversions and I can't imagine that learning all this as a kid wasn't challenging.
The nice thing about the imperial system is that the units are mostly in scales humans care about. For technical purposes, metric is undoubtedly better, but on the day to day, I’d posit that they aren’t that far apart.
The official metric measure of temperature is degrees Kelvin, though people use Celsius instead because the zero point isn’t useful in day to day life. On that same line, how often do you honestly need to know the precise freezing point of water? The Fahrenheit system of “0 is basically as cold as it usually ever gets, and 100 is basically as hot as it ever gets” is more useful in day to day life.
1 Cup (unit) of water being about the same amount of water in a cup (glass) is useful. The Pint-Quart-Gallon system basically only gets used when buying liquids as discrete units - a gallon of milk, a pint of cream, etc. Metric does the same thing with liters, half liters, and colloquial slang terms for 2 and 4 liters. For continuous measurement of liquids, imperial has ounces and gallons, and metric has milliliters and liters. The clean conversion factor between milliliters and liters is nice, but rarely needed in day to day life.
Functionally, in day to day life, people almost never measure things longer than like 100 feet. Miles are for distances travel, feet and inches are for measured things, and the trickiness in converting between the two rarely comes up. In exchange for that you get units that are relatively easy to visualize in terms of the human body (an inch is about the length of a segment in your index finger, a foot is about the length of your foot or forearm). I’m personally indifferent between miles and kilometers, though the 0-100 scale for how fast your car could reasonably go is kinda nice.
Don’t get me wrong, Metric is better, especially for anything scientific or technical, and having one global system of measurement would be nice, but growing up learning imperial really isn’t that hard, and in day to day life, there are some benefits to using it. Also, we learn metric in school and for anything technical, we use Metric here in the states too.
To be fair, Imperial it's a base 12 compared to Metric which is a base 10. The nice thing about a base 12 is you can divide it by 3 or 2 which is easier for day to day things. I'm sure also having uneducated masses made base 12 easier when you could do conversions of 3 or 2 units which is easier to understand.