Mostly true. However, we in metric countries don’t use thumbs, hands, feet and spans even in the absence of a tape measure. Inches, feet etc. are stuff only known from history books and fairytales, they belong in the realm of blunderbusses and chastity belts. A person raised in a metric culture has the centimeters ingrained all right. A guy eyeballing something the width of a palm just says “about 10 centimeters”. A gal estimating room height thinks: “about 2,5 meters.” The beauty of the metric system is everything is dividable by ten. How long is a kilometer? Just picture the school sports track and it’s 100 meter dash, and think a distance ten times that. Ten meters? 10 % of the same dash. In very small measurements, millimeters have it all over fractions of an inch, as they are just evenly-sized blocks of the basic centimeter, as easily thought of in percentages as in cms. The metric system cleared all the fuzzy, arcane clutter the old system had, that’s why it was adopted.
Inches and feet are often said to be organic and natural, and I guess they are. Like most things in nature, stuff like thumb widths and foot lengths vary wildly. Even if they’re based on ‘natural measurements’, they have to be arbitrarily standardized for any real use. A thumb can be 18 mm or 29 mm wide. An adult foot measures anywhere from 20 to 35 centimeters or so. The post-apocalyptic, tape-measureless person is out of luck, anyway.
“Fourteen inches to a foot, and some odd number of feet to a mile. Ounces and pounds. Oh, Bog!”
-Heinlein, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
I’d much rather teach my kid metric measurements than 12 inches to a foot, 16 (weight) ounces to a pound, 32 (volume) ounces to a quart and four quarts to a gallon, etc. Our system of measurement is, quite frankly, stupid.
I grew up on it, it’s the one I’m familiar with, but it makes even less sense than a QWERTY keyboard.
You choose your base unit such that you will not need to convert down the line. Anything that I can measure in feet, I can also measure in inches, and will if I’m going to be using inches in a later step. The boundaries are fuzzy, and there’s a lot of overlap where I can choose whichever unit I want and have it be functional.
This is only one small example, but it is a good example of what can happen when the rest of the world uses one system (or even a combination of systems) and the US doesn’t.
We all know the rules for flying are liquids go in containers no bigger than 100ml, placed in a 1 litre resealable bag. Attempting to convert this for US audiences caused the following confusion:
As long as there are boundaries, someone will end up needing to traverse them. If not individuals in their everyday lives, then perhaps businesses.
I don’t think the metric system stands out as particularly superior when the scope is narrowed down to a single measurement, or a very small set of similar measurements, but in my experience, a lot of common jobs involve conversion between adjacent scales of unit, or calculation of area or volume based on linear measure, etc. And imperial measurements just are not naturally convenient to work with like that.
Here’s an example. You have a waterbad and a tape measure (in both inches and centimetres). You need to figure out how heavy the waterbed will be when it’s filled with water, so that the floor doesn’t cave in when you fill it. You know how much extra mass/weight the floor can support (in a real-world situation, that would probably be the hardest information to find).
The waterbad has a bag inside a frame of four large pieces of wood. You measure the inside of the frame to get a maximum volume for the water, then calculate the mass and weight of the water.
In metric:
Measure dimensions in decimetres (units of 10 centimetres). Multiply to get cubic decimetres. This is the same as litres, and each litre masses 1 kilogram, so the number of cubic decimetres is the number of kilograms. There’s the answer!
In Imperial or US units:
Measure dimensions in inches. Multiply to get volume in cubic inches. Check reference for weight or mass of a cubic inch of water. Maybe you’ll have to convert inches to feet, or cubic inches to cubic feet, or even to gallons (US or Imperial?) if your reference doesn’t have the mass of a cubic inch of water. Still quite doable, but involves an extra step to check references that the metric doesn’t have.
Google: 76 x 80 x 6 (king sized waterbed) = 36480. Google auto-search results: “36480 inches cubed in gal” = 157.92… gallons which I’ll round to 158. Auto-complete gives me 160 liters (rounded). I already know that that’s about 2.2 lbs, so 352 pounds of water doing that in my head, but I know that a liter is a tad heavier, so I’ll round that up t 360 pounds of water.
With Google, there’s not even a need to know how to convert units!
Except for the floor is built to codes that are in inches and feet, with 2” x 8” floor joists a certain amount of inches apart. The floor is covered in 4’ by 8 sheets of ¾ inch ply, and the maximum pressure that can be applied to the floor is in pounds per square inch.
Well, with everyone having google implanted in their brains these days, maybe metricating the States isn’t as needed as it was. But metric is still easier.
I agree it is easier, we already teach it and use it in the sciences. With the global economy it will slowly take over business. After that it will just be a quaint fun thing about America like Germany has Oktoberfest, or the cafes in Paris.
Or maybe we will just have another fifty years of Europeans bitching about the Americanization of their own country while at the same time bitching about the exceptionalism America shows by not changing the American culture to reflect their values.
It’s not just Europe though. Quite literally, almost every other country on the planet uses the Metic system. The only four that don’t are the US, Liberia, and Burma. Jamaica is in the process of switching over to Metric, I believe.
Then we will just have to build parking lots next to the first MPH sign coming out of the international airports so we can sell the tourists T-shirts while they take pictures.
Monocultures are good for streamlined science and global business, but they suck for entertainment value.
…but the stuff it described is in Imperial! And we build our (small residential) buildings in Imperial! But if you look at plans for non-residential things like railway underpasses, they’re in metric! Arrgghh! We need to finish converting!
To me, metric proponents sound a bit like (what I imagine would be) arguments in favor of Esperanto. Yes, it’s nice to have a logical system, and yes, it’s nice to have the same language as people half a world away. But really, unless there’s a compelling application for it (e.g., trade or scientific measurement), there’s nothing really “superior” in its everyday use. Describing myself as 183 cm rather than 6 feet tall doesn’t make me a better or more sophisticated person, and I’m capable of using two different systems as the situation calls for, thank you.
It wasn’t until I was 17 that I learned that the first part of the address told you the cross street. So if 17497 lived on 8th avenue, their cross street was 17th st and if I’m looking for their house, I can find 8th avenue and drive until I cross 17th st and then start looking. A small thing but a nice thing to know.
