Unit Confusion · 12:40am Apr 26th, 2013
I just need to get something off my chest: English units are awful. Who on Earth decided that the basic unit of length should be the foot? It's twelve inches, or 1/3 yard, or 1/5280 mile; what sort of numbers are those? The slug is a terrible unit for force, and whoever decided that the British Thermal Unit was a sensible idea should have been politely informed that he was a monumental idiot. SI units make sense! They're all chosen to make the maths as simple as possible. The hardest part is keeping track of powers of ten, rather than worrying about arbitrary, useless coefficients. Now, I can't fault the people who created English units; as far as I can tell, they're based in economics, rather than physics. They all made sense to the time and culture that produced them. I can, however, deride those who continue to support them (such as all of my current engineering courses. Oh, and the US government, too).
One day everyone will use SI...one day....
After all there's only so much illogical stuff a sane man can take
I live in Canada and I don't know shit about imperial measurements lol. Metric system owns.
I personally prefer the metric system, it's easy once you get it. Only problem I see with North America switching over is people might freak out when they realize how expensive a liter of gas costs.
onomiyaki, I went to Canada once and I was surprised how expensive it seemed. Ok it was expensive, but you get my point?
Ever tried working on a car using Imperial measurements?
It's really, really complicated trying to decide if you need a 9/32 wrench or an 11/16 wrench. There's so much mental math involved that isn't necessary at all...because guess what? It's really, really easy to decide if you need an 8mm or a 12mm wrench.
America does a lot of things just to be different, and that's stupid. Spelling, names of sports, measurements...we need to stop being such hipsters and be sensible.