Being only used to the metric system myself, I am always struggling when I have to convert centimeters, meters and kilometers into inches, feet and miles. As far as temperatures go, I do know that 32 degrees Fahrenheit is the freezing point of water and that 110 degrees is really, really hot. Everything in between is somewhat vague for me. I can come up with the formula when I absolutely have to, but it’s always a hassle.
You know more about the American system than the average American knows about the metric system.
If inches, pounds, and gallons were good enough for Jesus, they’re good enough for everybody.
Most people have no idea how to do calculations with any measuring system. Ask them to tell you how many inches are in a mile and they will look at you blankly.
So, what confuses them about the Metric system is no how “easy” or “hard” it is, but the fact they they don’t have much of a “feel” for the units.
(I’ve never been able to convince my wife that there are two *completely unrelated * ounces. She won’t believe me that an ounce of water (liquid) has no relationship to an ounce of chocolate (weight).)
There are fluid ounces and ounces. They are two separate measurements, one of weight and one of volume. It is possible to have an ordinary ounce of water that is greater than or less than a fluid ounce depending on the temperature.
Many of us who straddle the two systems can think easily in both Metric and Imperial.
Who knows what the Imperial measure of mass is without looking it up? I did my first such calculations in Imperial, but no-one measures mass on Imperial any more.
Not just two! There’s also Troy ounces!
Y’all are aware that every American child learns the metric system in school, right?
Then they promptly forget it, like cursive.
It’s not really confusing per se. Everyone learns basic arithmetic in school, so people don’t have trouble with the idea that there are 1000 meters in a kilometer or whatever. Mechanics working on cars aren’t stumped when the service manual tells them to use a 13 mm socket instead of 1/2 inch.
It’s unintuitive in the sense that **beowulff ** mentioned–not growing up using it in daily life, we don’t have much of a “feel” for it. If someone tells me it’s 20 degrees C outside, I have no idea whether that means I should wear a jacket or not. If somebody tells me a car is going 50 km/hr, I have no idea whether a head-on collision would kill me on impact, or whether I could open the door and jump out of the moving vehicle with nary a scratch.
(There are two senses in which I think it is a bit less intuitive. The first is that it’s more intuitive for the human mind to keep dividing things in half: half an inch, 1/4, 1/8, etc. But with the metric system, you quickly start getting into decimals, which aren’t as intuitive. The second is that, and this is more a function of the way the metric system is used in practice than the way the units are defined, with the metric system we’re supposed to talk about mass rather than weight, for instance, measuring ourselves in kilograms. But the phenomenon we experience in our daily lives is weight, not mass. What determines whether I can lift an object without hurting my back is not its mass, it’s the gravitational force the earth exerts on it. I realize that’s a function of its mass, but it’s not the same thing. We could have chosen to talk about Newtons rather than kilograms, but nobody does this.)
Some units we see enough to learn. quarts and liters are pretty much the same thing. We know that because Soda is sold in 2 liter bottles. A yard stick is about the same as a meter. Anyone working with tools runs into metric wrenches. That forces us to learn millimeters. Doesn’t take long and we know a half inch wrench is pretty close to 13 mm. A 3/8 inch wrench is 10mm. 5/16 is an 8mm.
I have no real frame of reference for centimeters. Never use them. Clicks or kilometers Nope. Grams Nope. If I was in a chemistry lab I could measure something on a lab scale in grams. Convert to milligrams by shifting the decimal. But there’s no frame of reference for what that weight represents in real life. Stuff we measured for chemistry experiments was always so tiny. It never represented anything we measured in real life.
I personally dislike Celsius because the number range is so tiny. 90 F is 32C 75F is 24C
That tiny little change from 32 to 24C just doesn’t convey the difference in real life temperature. 90F is hot! You’re sweating like a pig. 75F you’re loving life. Perfect weather. That wider scale makes it clear. You know its time for a windbreaker jacket if it’s 50F. 10C sounds like you need a heavy parka and scarf. The C scale ranges are just so odd.
I recall when there was an effort to convert to metric. I was teaching in a military setting at the time and was somewhat amused by the methods employed. They would give a student a construction drawing that was in metric, then tell them to convert it all to English in order to do a material list. I tried to point out that if the drawing is in metric, the material list should also be in metric; also the tape measures should be metric and construction should be done using said tape measures and material. They looked at me like I was crazy.
I’m wondering if the metric system as taught in American schools today is that same old 1"=2.54 cm method, or if they teach applied math.
It almost undoubtedly feels odd to you because you grew up using Fahrenheit. 90 is “hot” because your brain has encoded that. Had you grown up using Celsius, you almost undoubtedly would have encoded 30 as hot, 24 as pleasant, 15 as chilly, etc.
One of my best friends grew up in Ireland, and moved to the States as an adult; sussing out what a particular temperature in Fahrenheit means is something which she’s struggled with for years.
No, 90 is hot because Fahrenheit is the real metric temperature system.
0F = really fucking cold.
100F = really fucking hot.
See how that works?
Of course, if you want to base your temperature system on the freezing and boiling points of water, that’s fine, too. But Fahrenheit is a very useful system for the weather.
There is absolutely nothing confusing or unintuitive about the metric system itself.
As an American, born in the USA and living here my entire life, I need to convert customary units to metric about once every never, so I tend not to give it much thought.
Well said. I was in elementary school when they were trying to convert us by teaching Imperial to metric conversions. In hindsight, I think that’s why the initiative failed so thoroughly. It’s stupid to convert back and forth. Just start using metric and don’t look back.
That being said, now that I’m old I don’t have any problem with the parts of metric that I have experience with, like kph when driving in Canada, celsius temperature scale, liters and meters. That sort of reinforces my conviction, though. Don’t convert, just do.
This rings true for me. I grew up between two systems. I am almost equally at home thinking in terms of inches, feet and miles or metres and kilometres. But for some reason, the Fahrenheit scale was already out of use here when I was a child (with the exception of medical thermometers), and so the Fahrenheit temperature means nothing to me unless I convert to Celsius.
The slug!
Yup. I have a “feel” for smaller units from working on engines, and for liters and ml from soda bottles, and from having to give injections. But I don’t know what a kilometer is-- if I were a runner, I would, though, because there are always 2, 5 & 10k runs for charity. I’m stymied by recipes that use grams instead of cups and teaspoons, because I don’t have a kitchen scale. At least I can find a computer conversion app. Which brings me to…
And miserably. All that converting was paper and pencil math. No calculators. We were supposed to remember formulae for tests, when we were in the third grade. Metric was grueling hours of hard multiplication with decimals (remember, I was 8), and long division, which we were hurriedly taught just for making the conversions.
If we’d been given worksheets that said things like “What is most likely to weigh 2kg? a rabbit, a bowling ball, or a cookie?” “How long is your desk? a little less than a meter, close to two meters, or less than half a meter?” “How far can you walk in 15 minutes? about a kilometer, about 100 centimeters, or more than 5 kilometers?” they would have been fun for 8-year-olds (yeah, I know it’s always the middle one in those examples, but the questions would get progressively harder, and no longer be multiple choice), and gone a long way toward giving kids a sense of metrics. I have a friend whose teacher tried to supplement the metrics curriculum with things like turning the kids loose in the school with meter tapes, and requiring them to measure five different things, then come back to class and share the results.
Giving people intuitive feel for metric units is definitely what was from my classroom. Ironically, the teachers started out my pointing out how much easier it is to count by tens than by twelves, so metrics would make life easier, and then three weeks of the most difficult math we’d had until that point followed. I think it actually made some people *anti-*metric.
Here’s an easy way to convert temperatures:
Double the Celsius number , and add 30.
or ,
Subtract 30 from the Fahrenheit number , then cut it in half.
It’s quick and easy to do in your head, and accurate enough for most purposes…
Small changes in F mean nothing. I’m equally comfortable at 61 degress as I am at 69. Same thing for 41 or 50F. A nine or 10 degree change makes no real difference. It’s basically the same weather.
It only matters at the extreme ends. 91 is hot while a 100F is OMG where’s my AC hot. 21F is more bitterly cold than 30. But everywhere else on the F scale it takes more than a 9 or 10 degree shift to matter.
C on the other hand. Geez 30C versus 20C is a big difference. That’s totally different weather.
I guess someone that grows up using C is accustomed to it and has that frame of reference for how comfortable or miserable it is outside.