this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Hot take: imperial units are fine for normie stuff (as in, not engineering or math or whatever)
They come in useful sizes! Feet are handier than meters and gallons are better than liters. And unit conversion between feet and miles, pounds and tons, etc. isn't something that ever happens in day-to-day life. It sounds silly to say that a mile is 5280 feet but I'm pretty sure that ratio was decided retroactively for the sake of making the system consistent. As in, no one knows or cares about converting between the two because we already know how long a foot is and how long a mile is. Also no one uses the obscure units like gills and barleycorns.
Wrong, youre just used to them. I roughly know what a liter of something weights, usually around a kg. A gallon tho? wtf i would know? I can easily compare meters of length to my arms or height, but i need more complex divisions for feet
A foot is as long as my forearm and a little longer than a literal foot, unless you've got big feet. An inch is as wide as my thumb which I have used to measure things cuz it's pretty exact. You're right that I don't know how much a gallon is in pounds though. It's like... more than a bag of apples but less than a box of soda
If you keep this nonsense up I will convert litres to kilograms and back into milligrams, I will. Right in front of you
Do it chump! I'll proceed to not read it because I don't know how much any of those units are 😤😤😤
1 litre of water weighs 1 kilogram. It also takes up a space of 1dm^3, or a cube that's 1x1x1dm. How is this possible? Because 1 times 1 times 1 always equals 1, so your cube is always 1 cubic decimetre. Or 0.01 decametre. Or 0.001 metre. Of course we can change some sides of this cube and still get 1dm^3.
I can do it the other way around too, 1 kilogram of water weighs 1 litre! And I can do it as many times as I want to!
1 gallon fills around 20 glasses which is about 10 tummies worth of fluid which if drunken all at once will make you weigh 1 baby heavier and produce 1 toilet worth of vomit.
I don't want to do it the other way around
I can do it with other units too. 1l of water at 20C heated by 1C converts to 1 calorie. The average glass holds 330ml of fluid, so I need to expand 0.33 calories to heat that glass up by 1C.
I actually kinda like the idea of the gallon due to how much beer that represents in a small unit, 1l is tiny.
1 cup of water takes 2 minutes of microwaving to make 1 serving of instant hot chocolate which contains however many calories idk I'm not gonna read the label.
Admit it, we have the superior measurements.
I can actually buy that instant hot chocolate
Brazilian here. You're just used to it because objects around you are imperial sizes. I live in a metric country so objects around me are metric sized. So I can easily eyeball metric units.
Haha yeah in case it wasn't clear from my other comments, I don't actually think imperial is a better system. I just don't think it's as bad as everyone says it is. Like you said, you understand the size of these units relative to things irl and can just intuit them.
Converting between units doesn't come up often because like, when are you gonna need to know distances in coins? I mean it's cool that you can easily do that in metric but I couldn't care less that I can't switch between feet and miles.
P.S. do beans weigh as much as cabbages in Brazil? :0
Hahahhahaj, you were victim of my bad English. I meant a bag of beans! Hahahaha.
I was just giving an example of how you could have an intuitive idea of metric units by the using objects around you if you eventually need it.
Haha no problem, your English is waaay better than my Portuguese! I understood what you meant and that's the point I was trying to make too. I don't need to do any conversions to figure out what a mile, gallon, etc. is because I already know, just like you already know what a kilometer and liter are.