“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” ― Josh Bazell, Wild Thing
The only metric to imperial conversion I remember is kilometers to miles since it’s pretty close to the golden ratio.
Even if you don’t remember that the golden ratio is 1.6 and a bit, you can approximate it by using successive terms of the Fibonacci sequence.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …
So 8 miles is about 13km (actually 12.87)
Its 2.54 cm to the inch. Its close to 2.5 and as an engineer in America I am stuck doing that conversion a lot
If it makes you feel any better, most pipe standards around the world are based on the American system, as well as bloody valve coefficients.
I am far too aware that 1" is 25.4 mm :(
And I’m in Australia. Grumble
This has blown my mind
The only positive thing I see about imperial is that things are easily divisible by 3 and 6, but that’s about it. Then again, if doing the same with metric, you’re usually fine rounding to the nearest millimetre, and if that isn’t accurate enough, it’s probably not supposed to be done by hand anyway.
Not in defense of the imperial system, but if you’re curious why it’s so arbitrary, it’s a crazy story about untangling a ton of proprietary guild measurements. The mile itself isn’t quite proprietary (it was defined as 8 furlongs, and you can blame the English for ruining a perfectly good roman measurement) but they needed to make it a certain number of chains, rods, yards, and feet, plus a few other obscure measurements I forget about. Naturally that results in a stupid conversation rate (mostly vs yards and feet since it was basically a different system).
Why we still use it, dunno. I can see an argument for keeping feet and inches for things like carpentry (in the similar way I like hexadecimal in programming) but miles is not that. It’s about as logical as this point as fahrenheit, which is to say it’s outdated nonsense.
To me, Fahrenheit is a lot like inches and feet for carpentry. As in it’s fine for things like describing the weather and setting my house’s thermostat. It mostly falls apart for must other things, though it’s still okay for cooking and baking. From a scientific perspective, any temperature scale that isn’t zero at absolute zero is nonsense, so it’s pretty much Kelvin or bust.
If you want to convert between imperial units, going straight from feet to miles is impractical. You’d be better off knowing the chart of survey units, and they’re all small numbers so they’re easy to remember.
12 inches in a foot
3 feet in a yard
22 yards in a chain
10 chains in a furlong
8 furlongs in a mile
Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.
Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.
Did the metric system kill your family or something?
Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.
You monster.
The dark side can be a pathway to many abilities some might consider … stupid.
the only thing more aggravating than using imperial is having to listen to all the complaining about how metric is better. We get it, bro; it’s out of our control at this point
Why not just keep it simple and use the 5.4 microseconds * speed of light approximation? People just love making things overly complicated.
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Heeey, I’m currently living in Northglenn. Same, it’s forever etched in my memory.
Just remember God giving you a single grain of sand. “One thou sand”.
Not a easy to remember as 5 tomatoes.
Me watching a BBC TV show: “The suspect’s home is five miles away.”
shocked pikachu
there’s a very important video on the measurement rules in the UK, if you haven’t seen it: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNh9z3IzG8t/
What about a nautical mile?
So whose foot exactly?
Some European king or another. We didn’t invent the system, we just decided it was too expensive to bother with changing it.
Did someone say feet?
It’s not helpful for us seriously distracted people. To remember a number, I must remember a smaller number. Damn, how many was it? Three tomatoes? Eight tomatoes?
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