Metric · 12:53am Jun 14th, 2022
Alrighty folks, this one comes with a quiz at the end! Which is weird, but it’ll make sense when we get there.
Meanwhile:
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Don’t actually drink kerosene, kids
For some reason, my manager hates metric. Like, I’m not talking about he doesn’t like to use it, but he sometimes tries to come up with arguments about why it’s dumb. We’ll get back to that later on.
I’m mostly not good at metric. We don’t use it much in our day-to-day lives in America, at least not directly. Obviously, some things tend to be in metric; for example, traditionally soft drinks came in 12oz cans, 20oz bottles, or two liter bottles. I don’t know when two liter bottles started to become mainstream over here, but I do remember when the bottom of the bottle was round and it had a plastic base glued on so it would stand up.
As a result, I’ve got a good mental image of what 12oz and 20oz is, as well as 2 liters. I can picture easily enough what 1 liter would look like, or 10oz.
For the most part, I tend to think in gallons or quarts, though.
In terms of weight, it’s pounds. And nothing but pounds; I have no idea how ounces work. Some number of them makes a pound and how many of them depends on what’s being weighed; it’s a really dumb system. But I can picture when something weighs x pounds about how much that is, if that’s reasonable for its size, etc. If it was in kilograms, I could do it, but I’d have to do some math. Assuming that I wasn’t going for an exact number, I’d just have half the number of pounds minus a few . . . ten pounds is probably about 5kg, 100 pounds is probably about 45kg, etc. Close enough for my purposes generally, and when I do need exact numbers for a blog post, well, I use an online conversion tool.
Interestingly, I tend to charge AC systems (which are charged by weight) in kg, because that’s usually an easier spec to find for any modern car, and it’s smarter to leave the AC machine set on one scale rather than switch back and forth as needed, and maybe make a mistake with units. Ask NASA (or any space agency) about making a mistake with units.
For distance/length, it’s feet, yards, and inches . . . until things get fractional.
I’m sure I’ve brought this up in a blog post or a comment a time or two, but fractional measurements are dumb and not intuitive. If my 11/16 wrench is just a little bit too big to fit on a bolt, which size do I actually need?
Some of it is probably instinctive. While I have owned cars that pre-dated metric cars, and I did learn which size wrench fit what on those particular cars, as long as I’ve been working professionally, everything we were working on that wasn’t an antique was almost entirely metric, so I pretty quickly learned to estimate bolt sizes in millimeters.
Just looking in my tool cart would illustrate that better than my words, honestly. My socket drawers are nearly all good-quality metric, and a few mostly-complete sets of Craftsman chrome fractional sockets for the rare occasions I need them [for some reason, automakers still like making brake line fittings fractional).
Point is, you get used to the measurements you use, and you can learn new ones, especially if you use them a lot. Twenty years ago, did I have an instinct for the difference between 8mm and 7mm? Nope. These days, I can usually tell.
And since we’re talking about mixing measurements, if you’re a halfway decent car guy (or girl), or if you’re at least a car enthusiast, you’ve probably got an idea of what size tires are on your car. Assuming it’s not a lifted truck, or something wicked old-school**, it’ll have a tire size like P215/65R15. And if you work with tires a lot, you’ll generally recognize about what the size is just by looking at the tire.
**If it’s wicked old-school and American, it might have a ‘standard’ bias size, like G78-15
If you’re a real pro (or just like doing your research), you’ll know that the tire size breaks down thus:
--215: tread (section) width in millimeters
--65: sidewall height, expressed as a percentage of the section width
--R15: rim dimeter in inches
Why that was the system that got picked, I have no idea. But it’s what we’ve got. Don’t even ask about speed ratings; those are alphabetic except when they’re not (for cars, it basically goes S, T, U, H, V, Z, W, Y, Z [’Z’ gets two places, because while all the others are ‘up to’ ratings, Z is an ‘over’ rating])
Which brings us back around to my manager’s hatred of metric. He’s tried to make the argument with me that imperial is more accurate than metric because the measurements are smaller, and therefore more precise. For example (he says), a thousandth of an inch is much smaller than a millimeter.
Which is true, but you can of course have a thousandth of a millimeter. Heck, you can have a thousandth of any measurement you want. You could measure a thousandth of a fathom if you wanted, or a thousandth of a chain. Not to mention, while there isn’t a specific unit name (that I know of) for things like hundredths of an inch, when you get tiny in metric there are names for it. Micrometers, nanometers, all the way down to attometers (10-18 meters) . . . and you could have a thousandth of an attometer, if you wanted. No rule against it.
[Semi-related, he also argued today that engines are now machined to the 100,000th of an inch, which I highly doubt to be true. Maybe a surface finish, but I can’t see any clearance having that precise a tolerance . . . correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.]
I’ve also pointed out to him before that the standard units of measurement for the Imperial system are metric, and have been for well over a century. So his much-vaunted standard tape measure that measures down to 32nds (so precise!) was manufactured on machines that were calibrated against a standard yard, which was calibrated against a standard meter.
Which brings us to today. Since he’s probably given up on me as a lost cause when it comes to debating metric, he tried it with the new guy, arguing that metric is dumb because how do they measure length?
“They can only approximate,” he said. “Like, if you’re measuring a door, it’s two meters tall, but what if it’s a little bit taller? If it were in inches, you’d just say it was six foot two-and-a-half inches or something . . . maybe you could say it was one meter fifteen centimeters four millimeters tall, and there isn’t an easier way.”
This was about when I walked in. I suggested that it might be easier to refer to the door as being 74 1/2 inches tall, which was a lot quicker way of saying it, and that in metric, someone might say it was 2.154 meters tall.
The new guy wandered off (and I don’t blame him) and the manager and I had a brief, non-productive discussion about the advantages of a wholly decimal system over our mixed, non-intuitive system.
After it was over, it occurred to me that if fractional was really all that great, they wouldn’t have gone to decimal with units under 1/32 (or 1/64 for drill bits). After all, if you want precision, measuring by 1/1024 is more precise than by thousandths. Saying a spark plug gap should be .045” isn’t as precise as saying it should be 43/1024, right? (And if that’s too much, you can go finer; it could be 85/2048, or 169/4096. . . )
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Incidentally, the new guy and I had some fun with that in the afternoon; instead of telling him socket sizes in mm (which is how it’s usually done), I did cm and mm. He wanted a socket bigger than a 28mm, I told him that I had a three centimeter two millimeter socket he could try, and then later on I told him a bolt was one centimeter five millimeters. . . .
Anyway, that brings me to the quiz portion of the blog post! I’m not a native metric-speaker, so I need y’all to tell me how you give measurements when they need to be sorta precise, and where they’d cross multiple measurements (like a door a specific height more than two meters, for example).
My guess is that you use whatever units are the closest to what you’re measuring, just like we would for anything (i.e., if I was measuring something small I’d use feet and inches; if I was measuring something big I’d use miles) and that you typically use decimal with those units. Like it’s three and a half centimeters (or 35mm), it’s 1.125 meters, etc.
But maybe you don’t! Maybe it’s something more clever than what I’m thinking of.
*(Semi-grimdark follow-up to Rocketpone’s attempted landing)
For something like a door or wall I tend to do a mix. X inches and so many millimeters. However I have to be that preside because of the cluster fuck of an old house I live in. Another house is prob just say x and a quarter etc…
Tend to use lbs for everything weight wise and just go out 2 parts past the . if I need to be presice.
The French have a metal bar that officially defines a meter. It's made of an alloy with a very low coefficient of thermal expansion and is kept at a precise temperature.
Mistaking units was also a factor in a somewhat famous plane crash, the [Gimli Glider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider).
Meh. We had a tow dolly come in today with one tire that was getting ready to lose its tread, and another which had been replaced on the road by roadside assistance when that one blew out. Presumably the other one had gotten damaged in the same blowout, and was just a ticking time bomb on the rest of the run up from Mississippi.
Anyways, our shop-repair questionnaire has a question, 'are all the tires the same brand' (presumably they mean 'model', because that's not as helpful as you'd think), and this was the first time I've ever had to answer 'yes', because roadside assistance had put a ST205 75R14 on the passenger side instead of the ST205 75D14 that the dolly's records say it should have. I don't know if they're going to replace the other, dying ST205 75D14 with a 75R14 or not, but I guess they think it's not worth the cost of the tire to put radials on tow dollies, normally?
Which is a roundabout way of saying, as far as I can tell (and good god almighty, I'm not a car person), the D/R thing indicates whether or not it's radial? Also, I only noticed this when I looked it up, but they were ST205s, not P205s. The leading letters indicate whether they're for passenger cars, or something else. In this case, 'special trailer'.
With metric you choose for the level of precision you need. In your door example you would say it was 2154 mm. Most building plans are in millimeters. For people you would use centimetres, eg 180 cm tall.
You missed the one unit set that imperial is far better than metric for ordinary life (note not scientific use where of course science is always metric). This is Temperature. When it is cold out, it is say 8 degrees. That is -13.5 C. I actually like the precision of Fahrenheit, and when doing C I have to use half degrees. Essentially Fahrenheit is good at real world temperatures and Celcius is good for science.
I’m a big advocate of metric (so I’d love to have a chat with your boss lol). I also don’t have an intuitive feel for it in everyday use, but it’s what I use at work so I’m getting a really weird feel for it. Like I don’t know what 70 km/hr is like, but I know what 2 cm/s is like.
Also, fractional sucks. I’d shoot myself if I had to work with that. I routinely go from km to mm and that’d be a nightmare to do with fractions. Also, please not that ene be if I used imperial, there’s no way I’d even think of using fractions. It’s tenths of inches, not 16ths. Thou exists for a reason.
Oh my god, I actually forgot that was ever a thing! :O
Up here in metricland, we measure distance in minutes. "Thirty minutes to the store", "45 minutes to the airport", etc. Even here, though we tend to use imperial for doors, walls, etc. (Unless you're working with government plans.) But if need more precise than an eighth (maybe a sixteenth), then we'll add or subtract what I'll politely call a "coont har". For real precision, specify colour.
Well I guess if an unit is not precise enoigh you just go down a smaller unit?
Born and raised in Metric, plus that I am kinda into science stuff since kindergarten, it's really the only standard way of measurement to me. But of course, we use nautical miles in aviation for some historical reasons, and that I watched enough American shows and The Grand Tour (plus other series from Clarkson, May and Hammond) to have an approximate idea about how far it is when someone says XX miles, or just times 1.6 if I don't feel certain. Back in 2017 the homestay father once talked about the Imperial to Metric transition in Australia while we waited for takeaway, and the inconsistent weight units that are not decimal... I could only shaked my head slightly in confusion as I was listening. Like why the hell does 1 quarter = 2 stones, and yet = 28 pounds?
Oh and I play airsoft (gelsoft actually since conventional BBs are pratically banned in China), so I need to have an idea about how long a 9 inch AR15 handguard is in comparison to 8 inch or whatever. So it's a smaller unit that I can look at my blaster and say “uhh about that much”. And for cars I can tell “yeah R15 is rather default for smaller sedans and R18 is larger for tuned sports cars.”
A while back I saw a new StarTalk episode from Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about Metric units that are used in USA for a while (will see if I can find the YouTube link later), which was entertaining. Nowadays Imperial units are actually based on Metric in order to be accurate... I personally think this point is enough to close much of the debates.
I've lived through this. You know I have.
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Not anymore. Nowadays, the meter is defined in terms of the speed of light, and the second is itself defined in terms of the frequency of light emitted by the hyperfine transition of cesium-133.
Metric never made sense to me. Main it was around all of those stupid prefixes. I could never keep them straight and they always felt arbitrary.
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They are arbitrary. That's rather the point, it's all an elaborate and systemic attempt to detach measurement from history and contingent, tangible, specific referents such as said infamous king's ulna. And why they've shifted over the years the definitions of their various measures as they look for, and find, more abstract and less 'centric ways to define their terms and measures.
Hate it or love it, it's all about detachment and distancing. Which is why, probably, pre-metric usages lurk everywhere in the folkways and day-to-day practice of language. That bit about 'minutes' as a term of distance in Canada strongly suggests that as time goes on, new folkways will evolve novel, non-traditional measurements to short-cut, avoid, and route around the studied detachment of imperious, alienated metric.
Look, I'm just saying that marking the speedometer in Furlongs per Fortnight is an up and coming thing....
You can kinda measure what cars we had by the contents of my toolbox. All SAE through college (69 Ford Falcon) until we got a first Subaru (76 4WD wagon) and then a Mazda RX4 (dumped shortly after) and a second Subaru wagon (80 wagon) at which point it was almost all metric. Then with the second kid, we got a Chevy minivan and it evened out to 50/50, eventually going almost 100% when I got a Chevy Celibrity. We fed Chevy a long string of repair bills before wising up and we're now a Honda CRV, Nissan Versa Note, and a Toyota Camry family. Far cheaper and easier to drive. My SAE tools are in a bag. Maybe I'll show them to the grandkids someday and watch their puzzled faces.
When I was a kid I learned the mnemonic
A pint's a pound the world around.
The world around a pint's a pound.
The avoirdupois ounce wasn't finally standardized until 1959. (16 to the pound.) For precious metals you use the Troy system, which is smaller.
If it helps 2 seedless raisins are about 1 gram.
For the door example, I'd usually convert to whatever units came out as a whole number. So, 215cm instead of 2.15 meters. This is less true with fluids, I think, 'cause I see 1.25 Litres on soft drink bottles all the time. But the smaller ones say 600mL instead of 0.6L. And yes, that's millilitres (1/1,000th), not centilitres (1/100th). Those don't seem to get used much, even though centimetres do.
And I don't think I've ever seen deci-anything (1/10th) used at all!
One area I prefer English units is in measurements for cooking. Sure, you do have to remember how many teaspoons in a tablespoon, how many tablespoons equal a quarter cup, how many cups in a pint, etc. But if you want to make half of a recipe, it's really easy how to calculate half of a teaspoon, when there's a 1/2 teaspoon measuring spoon sitting there.
But there is one area where the English measurement system will never die, and that's in song lyrics. No one's going to sing about walking 800 kilometers.
Metric is for machinery (and drugs). English is for people.
If you look up the specifications for bearing clearances, they are in 100,000 of an in. or .00X, X being the thousandths decimal place. As for socket size, 36 years of doing this stuff has taught me: 8mm is 5/16", 10mm is almost 3/8", 11mm is 7/16", 13mm is 1/2", 14mm is 9/16, 16mm is 5/8",17mm is 11/16, 19mm is 3/4", 21mm is 13/16", 22mm is 7/8, and 24mm is 15/16".
I find imperial is great day to day I can eye ball most measurements. I.e. cooking. Metric is great when I'm doing software based shit as it doesn't need a bunch of conversions and the math is much cleaner. Everything is in fractions of 10s. I still couldn't tell you what a millimeter, meter, or more than 2 liters looks like irl.
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That’s a light second. A meter is the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 seconds.
For blueprints and such it would be in mm, for a hight on a door where the average joe measuers itd be in meters like 1.54 meters (just a tad over one and half meters) its kinda dependant on circumstance. No sane person would use mm or inches to measure the distance across the usa
The reason blueprints is in mm is cause when you write it out you can easily tell wich number is meter and wich is cm respectivly(2054 mm is 2 meters 0 decimeter 5 cm and 4 mm)
10/16, which reduces to 5/8. (If both the top and bottom can be divided by the same number, in this case 2, you can reduce the numbers and have the same value.)
Lots of people have trouble with fractions, but I always just got them.
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Fahrenheit was originally calibrated against the freezing point of brine approximating human bodily fluid, and the average human body temperature. It's meant to be scaled according to what's tolerable for a person.
Coincidentally, and oddly enough, I'm designing some sets right now, and the carpenters insist on getting the measurements in decimal inches. i.e. something that's 3' 3¼" wide needs to be specified as 39.25".
No idea why.
EDIT: CNC laser router runs off spreadsheets in digital inches.
Interestingly, centimeters actually diverge from the usual increments for prefixes. Almost every other prefix increments in 103. Centimeters are x10-2 meters. I don't think any of the other metric units even use the centi- prefix.
In science, prefixes are not often used for calculation. Most formulae convert input prefixes into a standard notation multiplier of the base unit before begining calculation. Prefixes are mostly just used to shortcut communication, except in certain odd cases, like the volume of a mole of gas at room temperature and pressure being 24 decimeter cubed for some reason.
17mm lol. Coincidentally, 11/16 is my second-least-favorite fractional inch size wrench / socket because it's like 17mm, but it's not. My first-least-favorite is 11/32. Because now that is a dumb size. It's literally just a c
nt hair smaller than 3/8. Why not just use 3/8?!
Yeah, it's called 10 thousandths (.010), but you'll sometimes hear it called a hundredth. Actually, there's a good reason why machinists still use thousandths of inches as the gold standard... one thousandth (.001) is pretty much the smallest unit that makes a difference when talking about precision machining stuff. Any smaller and you're talking about laboratory precision. Apparently a thousandth is .0254mm. Not a very handy number. You could round down to .025mm, but that's still an oddball number. You could round up to .03mm, but then you do lose some precision over a thousandth, and who wants to do mental math in threes? You could round down to .01mm, but then that's like a third of a thousandth (0.0004), now that's down to laboratory precision, in other words, it's too small. I've been around my machinist friends while they work, and even though they might be working on something entirely metric, you'll still hear them say 'yeah take another thousandth off it.' It's just a handy unit. And of course the industry is already standardized to it.
Granted, it doesn't lend itself to precision in the way your manager suggests. And that level of precision is for machinists, not mechanics.
Maybe he's just dumb and can't differentiate between 100,000th of an inch (.000001) and 100 thousandths of an inch (.100). I will say this, modern engines are pretty precise for fuel economy reasons. And the new fangled coatings they do on the parts like cylinder walls probably add a layer of surface leveling that might approach that level of accuracy. Apparently the coatings are for anti-friction and anti-wear. And they're really great! Except that when they're exposed to antifreeze they get destroyed.
The worst part is that they were redefined in the 30s or so by some random Swede. The guy who made the calibration measures. He legit just rounded up on inch-to-mm conversion. And because he made the most accurate shit, his measures just became the de facto standard around the world. So the imperial system actually has been corrupted. Shame. I actually have an example of that. I was working on a 1920s Victrola, trying to retap some screw threads, and came to find out that the taps I have are too large. Very small diameter screws, like #2 or so. Yeah, so I'm guessing that's some of the changes there.
Let me make some defense for the imperial system, though. Firstly, it's still used. Worldwide. I'm pretty sure tire rim sizes are in inches in most countries (despite the aforementioned metric parts of it). Electronics like circuit boards and components are measured in decimal inches. Since circuit boards are in everything, that's kind of a big deal. Then you have plumbing. Well, the Brits gave plumbing to the other side of the world, and guess what? If you flush a toilet in any country in the world, that toilet tank is refilled through a 1/2" pipe. Yep. Plumbing around the world is still in Imperial measurements (albeit British Pipe Standard, as opposed to our National Pipe Thread, used in this hemisphere). Secondly, fractional inch is the absolute best for carpentry, hands down. It is fractional by design, the people who invented the imperial system knew what they were doing. Look. You can take an inch, and divide it (in your head, without a calculator) more ways than you can a centimeter. Divide it by 2, 4, or 8 easily. A centimeter? 2 or 5. Take a foot. Can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 6, or 12. Ten centimeters (decimeter)? 2 or 5, again (ok, 10, too, I guess). Fractional inch makes woodworking or building-house-carpentry very easy.
Also, I like how you can sometimes get a Brit telling you how dumb Imperial is - despite the fact that they invented it - but if you ask them how much they weigh, they'll answer in stone.
Speaking of the Brits, they had their Whitworth threads, which, you know, cool, old boy Whitworth paved the way for the industrial revolution. But during WW2 they realized how dumb they were to be hanging on to that, when the US was the one selling them tanks and equipment, and they couldn't fix anything we gave them. So immediately after the war, they converted their screw thread standard to the American one. Then promptly switched over to metric like not even 20 years later.
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Since light takes about eight minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth, then by that definition the Sun is a mere 480 meters away. Practically next door!
As for the quiz part, dear Admiral... 'round here we indeed use whichever metric measurement is the closest. A door would, for example, be 2.15 meters (or 2 meters and 15 centimeters; metrics always go in 10s which is VERY convenient imho.) Then, if measuring the gap you must leave underneath the door to make sure that there's enough space for the threshold, we'd most likely use millimeters.
Born and raised in Metric:
lengths are in mm, cm, metres, kilometres, omg that's really far away
weight is grams and kilograms and tonnes and omg that's a large house it must weight tons
liquids are in ml (millilitres) and litres and oh, that's the ocean
sayings are in imperical (I gave them an inch and they took a mile)
The benefits of the metrics system to me is going up and down the scale (mm <-> cm, cm <-> m, m <-> km) is just a case of moving the decimal point.
I don't use tools much so for me the socket set is a case of 'grab a socket that looks about right, try it, and if it's too small find one bigger, no, wait, that's too big, find one in the middle there somewhere that has a snug fit'.
edit: follow up to *(Semi-grimdark follow-up to Rocketpone’s attempted landing)
That's alright, we have the technology, we can rebuild Rocketpone to be faster, stronger, and maybe more gimbals this time.
Trouble is with measurement accuracy, is cos light speed is so variable, a meter at the point on the Earths surface closest to the core, is different than a meter at the point on the surface furthest away? Due to Oblate Sphereoid etc, I have no ide where those point are. Poor GOCHE
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I'd hazard it's because the actual distances involved have become trivialized by automobiles and people think in terms of "how much will this take out of my day" rather than "how far is it to the next town?"
Also, ignoring variables such as the occasional highway jam, construction work, or rest stops, it's easier to look at the clock when you leave and when you arrive and learn how long the drive typically takes than it is to measure the exact distance along a winding little line on an atlas... a task that long predates the advent of GPS or smartphone navigation apps that give you the exact value.
How far you can drive in an hour can vary wildly, but no matter how far you drove in that hour, it was still one hour.
In the case of large objects like doors, windows, anything in construction and things, we typically just quote the dimensions in centimetres. We don't need any more precision than that in everyday construction. So a 1.5m door would be 150cm. There's no loss of accuracy in converting either, because all you do is move the decimal left or right.
That also brings up something I wanted to mention earlier whilst reading:
The big advantages of metric really starts to shine when you're working exclusively in metric. Unlike imperial, where you have to memorise all these odd fractions and ratios, everything in metric is separated by a factor of 10. Even more so, the exact ratio is encoded directly into the name using greek and latin terminology!
Take length for example, the base unit is the meter.
There are 100 centimeters in a meter (ratio of 1/100). Centi is short for the latin word "centum", meaning "hundred".
There are 1000 milliimeters in a meter (ratio of 1/1000). Milli is short for the latin word "mille", meaning "thousand",
And etc.
Wikipedia has a page listing all of them.
Maybe next time you talk to him, try bringing up decimeters (1/10th of a meter) or yoctometers (1/1000000000000000000000000th of a meter)
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And before that it was a certain number of wavelengths of a certain frequency of light. An indestructible standard.
The more I work on farm equipment these days, the more I like metric better. What's really fun is equipment that has some parts in imperial, some parts in metric.
What was really fun was a couple weeks ago when I put calipers on a hexagonal shaft and went, 'Yep, that's about 7/8.' Because they're marked in tenths of an inch, not fractional. Which starts looking a lot like metric... but I really didn't feel like pulling out my smart phone and trying to figure out what fractional measurement results in that decimal number.
I could be spending time working on math, or I could be making the corn planter work with rain coming.
I rarely deal with weight measurements smaller than pounds (which are about 2.2 pounds per kilogram). I have a hard time picturing 'grains' of weight. A ton is easy-ish to picture-- a pallet of so many 50-pound bags.
I ought to be able to envision an acre, but... never really had to. I'd just go out and till/plant/harvest whatever fields I had to.
I can easily picture a thousandth of an inch after working on electronics for a decade-- most components I dealt with were 0402 (4 thousandths by 2 thousandths of an inch). The 'simplicity' breaks down as things get smaller and smaller. There's stuff that's 01005 now, and down the road will be 0050025.
Liters are easy enough. So are gallons-- I often have a gallon jug of water with me (then after a couple refills, put said jug to use for 50/50 antifreeze mix, hydraulic fluid, engine oil, or def). I also have a mental box of '5-gallon bucket.' It is Not A Good Day when I'm using one of those to add hydraulic fluid to a tractor... maybe now that planting is finally done I can fix some seals, get a damaged hydraulic cylinder worked on or replaced.
Now if I can just avoid doing things like taking two hours to find a fuse is bad... Not going to decide on a plan of action without having climbed into the driver's seat and observed directly what does and does not happen when the key is turned. I also need to get people to stop using brake cleaner on fuses... not as bad as over-use of ether, but not good for the things long term.
Just remembered.
Keroscene is another name for Parrafin, and you get medical parafins to drink?
I love the fact that in China we use metrics almost exclusively. The only instance where people use imperial units that I can think of is when they're talking about the size of a screen, which is always described by the length of its diagonal in inches. Sure, we have our own set of traditional units of measurement, but their use is quite limited and in fact they're essentially an alternate form of metric units. The most commonly used one among them, jin (斤), is exactly 500 grams or 0.5 kilogram, and anyone with half a brain could alternate between these units without any difficulty. People growing up using exclusively one system of measurement will automatically be familiar with it and find the other system incomprehensible. Like, when it comes to the height of a person I'll just say they're 175cm (or 1.75m, depending on the mood) tall while 5'9 means absolutely nothing to me. A lot of the confusion comes from the conversion process so not having to do that regularly is quite a blessing.
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Here in Celsius land I can assure you we also don't use decimal points when we're talking about weather. Today's just 20-30 degrees to me, no need to be that precise in everyday life.
Well, we went metric around 1970. A pound of butter is still a pound of butter, 'cept it says 454g on the package. Helps keep easy switching between metric and Imperial alive in the reptile brain. That and 1kg = 2.2 lbs, or 22 pounds is 10 kilograms. One meter is just over 39" (I have a yardstick, a real one, made of wood, except it's 1m long and also shows inches). At work, weights are mostly switching to metric, except where I'm double checking for policy drift in my head. Like, one bear: 2lbs dog chow in the summer, 3lbs dog chow in the winter (then management plays silly buggers pushing that value willy nilly for reasons, but I remember the gold standard). One zebra: 1 lbs feed, 1 flake timothy hay, twice a day. Simple numbers. Feed is delivered in 25kg bags. That's about 55 lbs and 115 millipounds, plus roughly 560 micropounds.
What was the question again? Oh yeah, how do I communicate a measurement at work. Well, if it's animal care (food, body weight, med/supplement dose), it's all metric as that what's the policy makers have written down on paper. Then I confuse people by dosing the hay by number of flakes and apparent appetite. As for construction requests, I switch to inches and feet. Two by fours are still 2" x 4", that broom I need replaced is still 24" wide, and measuring tape is still both imperial and metric.
In the future, when GMM stands for Genetically Modified Motors, catbusses are the low emission norm for rapid transport and Ford Mustang muscle cars are powered by actual horse muscle, high ATP metabolite fuels will be measured in liters at the pump.
Canadian here. Just spent a weekend wrangling with inches and fractions thereof while trying to install backsplash in my kitchen. Why does Canada use imperail units?!?!? This is supposed to be a sensible country!
In an attempt to better understand the system, I have the outside thermometer display in my truck set to Celsius. It has a button that toggles between the two systems.
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Yikes, how tired WAS I when I wrote that? I can't believe I made a dumb mistake like that. Thanks. 
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In engineering we use millimeters period. Casually you go up to the largest whole.
That first picture is more "do not care-o-sene"
you think measurements are weird for you?
cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/417125608880078848/619041110391652352/7aba4ad.jpg
Or the Gimli Glider.
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simple, let's go through the important and interesting temps
0 is the freezing point of water
20 is "room temperature"
100 is boiling water.
100f is about 40c
40f is 4c
-40 is the same in both (which is always fun when I bitch about extreme cold at work)
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I already know all of that intellectually. I'm trying to get it to come naturally, though.
I don't understand the question exactly, but I would use metric for anything other than English-machined parts.
Both systems are a valid means of measurement, so are cubits, spans, hands, staffs and rods. All of them have their place, both for usage and which century it ceased to be used.
Additionally, General Motors needs to make up their mind which system they are going to use, and then proceed to stay with it.
But, that's not what I'm here for... where do I get one of those mugs?
Oh hey, I remember those. I remember the base itself had these tiny little holes in it, too. I recall as a kid looking at those and trying to figure out why the soda pop didn't just spill out. Wish I could remember when they started getting away from those.
I tend to like measuring human-scale things (people, doors, tables) in feet and inches, rounded to the nearest quarter-inch. Weight for me is pounds (or tons, when things get ridiculously heavy) to the tenths or hundredths place, but I'll use ounces if I'm below a pound. Occasionally I'll use grams, if a recipe is in metric or I'm trying to measure something really small. Yards are purely for Football. Overland distances are in miles, to the nearest tenth or hundredth. Temperature (unless I'm doing cooking or some other chemistry) is in Fahrenheit for me.