Seriously I am fine with the metric system for measurements that have to be absolutely precise. Where it falls down is in casual ball-park estimates. You can say “a few miles” or “a few kilometers” and that’s fine. What about “a few feet”? What about “a few inches”? “A few centimeters” is not the same.
Also, I tried to convert a recipe from…some other country, I don’t remember–to an actual dish in my kitchen. It drove me nuts. It looked to me like the dry ingredients were measured one way and the wet ingredients a whole other way. I couldn’t figure out the proportions or how to cut it down or double it, or anything. It was horrible.
I have never found kitchen measurements had to be absolutely precise. There’s a lot of stuff that I just don’t measure at all. A tablespoon of Dijon mustard? I’ll squirt some in, okay that’s about right…and it works. Please don’t take my tablespoon away.
You are right, in Metric countries we struggle massively with an inability to breakdown units to smaller ballpark ones. It is a miracle we can get out of bed in the morning.
I mean for love of fucking God, have you actually read what you wrote? We’ve gone from at least trying to pretend something accurate has more meaning to your life to utter inaccuracy.
A few centimetres.
Twenty centimetres or so.
Half a metre or so.
A few metres.
A couple of millimetres.
Ten centimetresish.
Fuck, you can put ‘or so’ and ‘ish’ at the end of fucking anything and make it a ‘ballpark estimate’.
And for the record, I’m British. I grew up with Imperial units.
To repeat what many have already said, you are coming up with more and more bizarre justifications for the simple concept of ‘I’m just used to them’. Just admit it, it is OK. There is LITERALLY NOTHING you can do in Imperial that you can’t do in metric. NOTHING. And that very much includes ballpark estimates. You just think it ‘isn’t the same’ because you aren’t used to it. I am. I lived for twenty five years in a country where ballpark estimates are done in Imperial and then fifteen where we do it in metric. It is the fucking same.
Jesus, how often do we have to have these moronic threads?
Edit fail, okay, in the “right” parlance, how tall is my dog who is about two feet tall? How big is my horse who is 15 hands? FTR I don’t know or care the exact measurement but these approximations tell me something.
For what it’s worth, metric building materials, cabinets etc are usually measured in 300mm increments. 300 is easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 20, 30. More ways than a foot.
I’ve never really bought that as a good argument for either side though. Yup, you can evenly divide your benchtop into 6 equal parts. So? How does that help?
I’m glad my general superiority came through to you lesser beings that can’t even come up with your own units and have to use the ones that we came up with for a laugh when drunk, much like our pre-1970s money.
Well, the question posed on the OP was “How do you feel about the metric system,” and this is how I feel (good for scientific stuff, not so good for casual imprecise measurements), so I’m not wrong.
Neither one of those measurements would tell me anything without a calculator. If a hand is exactly four inches, then exactly how many cm?
How many stone do you weigh anyhow, or is it stoneS? Does it say “stone” on your scales?
For longer distances I’m pretty much fluent in both thanks to the military. I tend to be a little bit more accurate in assessing moderate distances in meters than yards because that’s my experience. I can’t really visualize small distances in metric but mentally know the conversion factor ( a .50cal bullet is 12.7 mm even if I temporarily lock on 1 inche = 25.4mm). I was part of the let’s bring in the metric system generation and can’t remember most of the less common metric prefixes. I didn’t really remember them for longer than a test involving them (deci or deka…which was which again facepalm)
Nothing prevents usage of decimals in place of subunits regardless of arbitrary chosen measurement units anyway.
These days I have no idea, I live in Sweden and the scales are all in kilos. Growing up in the UK our bathroom scales read stones, as I believe they still do. There’s a switch underneath to choose between stone, pounds and kilos.
You’re going from your ballpark shit to wanting it exact now? Make your mind up. For the record, iirc, an inch is 2.54cm, so it would be 10.12cm. Not that it matters.
And for the record, your claim was that metric was useless for ballpark estimates. Not for you, just in general. Which is wrong. To say it again, just because you are used to one thing doesn’t mean the other thing is rubbish for it.
I glazed over at a lot of the thread. Have we had the “I need the granularity of Fahrenheit to heat my home correctly/dress properly” shite argument yet?
So back in 1992 I had to install some rear spoilers on some then brand new Volvo 850s. This entailed finding the centerline of the trunk at the front and rear measuring back from the front of the trunk along that centerline three different distances for three holes for the new third brake light. Then measuring over so far from the center line and establishing a parallel line to the centerline near each edge and calculating where the mounting screws went.
Simple job, right?
Nope not when I was trying to do it in English and dividing numbers like 33-17/32" in half to establish the location of a line.
Let’s see 33/2= 16-1/2". 17/32 divided by 2, well can’t divide 17 by two evenly so convert to 64ths. 34/64 divided by 2 = 17/64. Now just add 16-1/2 +17/64", no wait we have to convert 1/2 to 64ths so it’s 16-32/64 + 17/64 = 16-49/64". Now we get into the tape measure isn’t calibrated in 64th so we have to reduce to 32nds so we need to measure 16-24-1/2/32" over from the centerline.
I laid it out 4 times. I could not get the same hole locations twice. Gee, I wonder why?
I said fuck this went and got a metric tape measure. Width of the trunk? 852mm. Half of that? 426mm, I can do that in my head.
I had the first car laid out in 5 minutes tops and the rest in about 3 minutes each.
When I went to put laminate flooring in my kitchen ( which requires cutting pieces for length and width) I didn’t even try to do it in foot/inches/fractions. I went straight to metric. Easy? It was Sofa King easy.
Using metric measurements you will never hear some say 6 feet, 5-1/2 inches plus 3 little marks. Yes I actually head those exact words on a construction job once.
To be fair, the use of fractional inches doesn’t have anything to do with US Customary units as such. I frequently do work in decimal inches only. Decimal rulers and tape measures are easily obtained. Machine tools (mills, etc.) generally use thousands of an inch. Cutting tools are about the only thing that seem to universally use fractional inches, though even then it’s not really as bad as it seems–I need a wall chart anyway to figure out things like how big a drill to use for tapping (tapping an M4x0.7 screw… now where did that 3.3 mm drill go? Or the #30 drill? Or 5/32?).
English money wasn’t decimal until 1971. There used to be 12 pence in a shilling, and 20 pence in a pound. It used to work ok. Then they decided that the system was holding them back. Here’s one area where the US has been ahead - we decimalized in the 1700’s, very soon after independence.