Wow, I had never heard any claims of superiority for the English measurement system.
I think that with respect to temperature, 1C clearly comes closer to the minimum perceptible temperature difference than 1F does. 1cm is clearly better for “something small” than 1 inch, though 1 caliber is possibly better for “something really tiny” than 1mm but aren’t used much. Meters are better than feet for large things. Liters than pints for practical fluid volume, grams are a bit small, kilograms a bit large, and Newtons “just right” but not widely used.
A friend of mine claims Fahrenheit is more convenient because of “-ties”. “Today it will be in the fifties/sixties/thirties/high seventies.” Celsius doesn’t have conveniently-spoken ranges that give users a general idea of the weather. I countered with high and low teens, low twenties, but I don’t think his point is completely invalid.
You say centimeters are better for small things and meters better for large things, but neither are very useful for things that might constitute an arm-load. I’m not sure that sentence is very clear, so I’ll try examples. My laptop is 36 centimeters wide, which is an inconveniently large number of units for it to be, but it’s only a little more than a foot. This textbook: about a foot square. That hard-drive is half a foot (I’ll admit that “six inches” was easier to the tongue, but in reality it’s closer to seven, which I wouldn’t say). What I’m trying to say is that the unit “foot” is very convenient for things that we might be handling in everyday situations, unless those things are hand-sized.
Your friend is on the right track. The Fahrenheit system has a smaller unit degree than Celsius/Kelvin (1 degree C = 1.8 degrees F), which gives it more precision when discussing temperatures in casual conversation. It also helps that the range 0 to 100 F corresponds roughly to the usual range of temperatures that humans tend to experience. It’s a nice, round range, and it’s easy to identify “below zero” or “above 100″ as relatively extreme.
As a physicist, I do almost all calculations using the SI/metric system, but I have little intuition for those units in everyday life. Much of that is, I’m sure, having been raised to use imperial units, but they do tend to be better adapted to usual human scales.
More generally, the words for the non-metric units are often much more convenient than the words for the metric ones. I think this effect is much stronger than any difference in convenience of the actual sizes of the units.
I think it’s the main reason why many of the the non-metric units are still more popular for everyday use than the metric ones in the UK, even though we’ve all learned metric at school for the last forty years or so.
In a scientific context I have definitely heard some metric units being given one-syllable pronunciations, for example “mg/ml” as “migs per mil” and mg/kg as “migs per kig”.
Well...I’ve never seen one, but...It has to be bigger than a loaf of bread, right? Otherwise, the bread wouldn’t fit inside. And it can’t be big enough to hide a body in, or it would definitely be named for that property. So mid size-ish.
If that’s all you know, why the hell are you using it as your basis of comparison?
The house I lived in in college had a breadbox in which you could hide a body. At least, it seems that way to me now. I admit I never tested that property at the time. There was, you see, all this bread in it.
It’s a box you keep loaves of home-baked bread in to keep them from going stale. I’ve only seen a couple in person, but they’re about the size of a toaster oven or half the size of a tower-format computer: maybe fourteen inches wide by eight deep and six high, or 35x20x15 cm.
I remember someone telling me that Fahrenheit was designed so that the ordinary temperatures people would experience would all fit between 0 and 100 on the scale.
Indeed, having read the actual justification, the above seems like a just-so story based on a happy coincidence. Powers of 2 clearly explain everything better.
I was raised with the metric system and I have to agree with your sentiment. Metric lacks convenient human-sized units. Decimeters are maybe acceptable for lengths, but few people use them. I myself often use feet and inches to describe human-sized objects just because they are more convenient. But as soon as I have to do any kind of work with a quantity beyond pure description, I will swap to metric.
I was raised with the metric system, but I think inches and feet would be better than centimetres (too small) and metres (too large) for lots of everyday situations (plus, they have intuitive anthropocentric approximations, namely the breadth of a thumb and the length of a shoe). The litre is similarly too large IMO. I have no strong opinion about kilos vs pounds. On the other hand, I prefer Celsius to Fahrenheit—having the melting point of ice at such a memorable value is useful. (But I also like Fahrenheit’s 100 meaning something close to human body temperature. I might like a hypothetical scale with freezing at 0 and human body temperature at 100 even more.)
I was raised on the English system and I have essentially the same intuitions about feet and inches vs. cm and meters and about Celsius vs. Fahrenheit, so there may be something to them.
My understanding (please correct me if I’m wrong) is that British and Canadians are essentially raised on both systems, so perhaps they could comment on which is more naturally intuitive.
One, where have you seen a foot-long shoe? That would be, what, 48 or 49 European size? This naming was always curious for me, feet are just… noticeably longer than feet. Two, metric system has the main advantage of easy scalability. Switching from liter to deciliter to centiliter to millimeter is far easier than jumping between gallons, pints and whatever even is there. That’s the main point, not any constant to multiply it on (i.e. a system with inch, dekainch, and so on would be about as good). Three, I really see no problem in saying things like “36 centimeters” to describe an object’s length. I know that my hand is ~17 centimeters, and I use it as a measurement tool in emergencies, but I always convert back to do any kind of reasonable thinking, I never actually count in “two hands and a phalanx”.
Funnily enough, I was raised with the English system, and use it mainly in every day life, the only exception being liquid volume, which years of backpacking taught be to think of in terms of 1 Liter water bottles.
Nitpick: “caliber” has several different meanings, all of which (confusingly) relate to a gun’s barrel dimensions. The one you’re using is a measure of internal barrel diameter, essentially a shorthand for inches (i.e. .22 caliber); the decimal point often gets dropped in that context, though. It’s equally correct to speak of caliber in terms of some other unit, like millimeters. When you’re talking about large weapons, though, the word means the length of the weapon’s barrel as a multiple of its internal diameter; a tank gun might be 120 mm 55 caliber, making it 6.6 meters long.
The American customary system doesn’t as far as I know have a general-use length unit in the millimeter range. There are a couple of typographical) units) defined in terms of the customary system, but they haven’t really escaped into the wild.
Wow, I had never heard any claims of superiority for the English measurement system. I think that with respect to temperature, 1C clearly comes closer to the minimum perceptible temperature difference than 1F does. 1cm is clearly better for “something small” than 1 inch, though 1 caliber is possibly better for “something really tiny” than 1mm but aren’t used much. Meters are better than feet for large things. Liters than pints for practical fluid volume, grams are a bit small, kilograms a bit large, and Newtons “just right” but not widely used.
A friend of mine claims Fahrenheit is more convenient because of “-ties”. “Today it will be in the fifties/sixties/thirties/high seventies.” Celsius doesn’t have conveniently-spoken ranges that give users a general idea of the weather. I countered with high and low teens, low twenties, but I don’t think his point is completely invalid.
You say centimeters are better for small things and meters better for large things, but neither are very useful for things that might constitute an arm-load. I’m not sure that sentence is very clear, so I’ll try examples. My laptop is 36 centimeters wide, which is an inconveniently large number of units for it to be, but it’s only a little more than a foot. This textbook: about a foot square. That hard-drive is half a foot (I’ll admit that “six inches” was easier to the tongue, but in reality it’s closer to seven, which I wouldn’t say). What I’m trying to say is that the unit “foot” is very convenient for things that we might be handling in everyday situations, unless those things are hand-sized.
Your friend is on the right track. The Fahrenheit system has a smaller unit degree than Celsius/Kelvin (1 degree C = 1.8 degrees F), which gives it more precision when discussing temperatures in casual conversation. It also helps that the range 0 to 100 F corresponds roughly to the usual range of temperatures that humans tend to experience. It’s a nice, round range, and it’s easy to identify “below zero” or “above 100″ as relatively extreme.
As a physicist, I do almost all calculations using the SI/metric system, but I have little intuition for those units in everyday life. Much of that is, I’m sure, having been raised to use imperial units, but they do tend to be better adapted to usual human scales.
More generally, the words for the non-metric units are often much more convenient than the words for the metric ones. I think this effect is much stronger than any difference in convenience of the actual sizes of the units.
I think it’s the main reason why many of the the non-metric units are still more popular for everyday use than the metric ones in the UK, even though we’ve all learned metric at school for the last forty years or so.
In a scientific context I have definitely heard some metric units being given one-syllable pronunciations, for example “mg/ml” as “migs per mil” and mg/kg as “migs per kig”.
This too. Centimetre and kilometre are four syllables each, inch and mile one.
Mile is 1.5 syllables, so to speak, at least as most people I know pronounce it.
...is your preferred unit bigger than a breadbox?
What’s a breadbox? How big is that?
Well...I’ve never seen one, but...It has to be bigger than a loaf of bread, right? Otherwise, the bread wouldn’t fit inside. And it can’t be big enough to hide a body in, or it would definitely be named for that property. So mid size-ish.
If that’s all you know, why the hell are you using it as your basis of comparison?
It’s just so convenient and fun to say!
The house I lived in in college had a breadbox in which you could hide a body.
At least, it seems that way to me now. I admit I never tested that property at the time.
There was, you see, all this bread in it.
Probably not serious, but...
It’s a box you keep loaves of home-baked bread in to keep them from going stale. I’ve only seen a couple in person, but they’re about the size of a toaster oven or half the size of a tower-format computer: maybe fourteen inches wide by eight deep and six high, or 35x20x15 cm.
A breadbox used to be a fairly standard kitchen fixture. These days, “Is it bigger than a toaster oven?” might be comparable.
I remember someone telling me that Fahrenheit was designed so that the ordinary temperatures people would experience would all fit between 0 and 100 on the scale.
Alas, Wikipedia does not comment.
Indeed, having read the actual justification, the above seems like a just-so story based on a happy coincidence. Powers of 2 clearly explain everything better.
I have similar intuitions but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t if I had been raised on the metric system.
The obvious answer is to figure out what people raised with the metric system are thinking.
I was raised with the metric system and I have to agree with your sentiment. Metric lacks convenient human-sized units. Decimeters are maybe acceptable for lengths, but few people use them. I myself often use feet and inches to describe human-sized objects just because they are more convenient. But as soon as I have to do any kind of work with a quantity beyond pure description, I will swap to metric.
I was raised with the metric system, but I think inches and feet would be better than centimetres (too small) and metres (too large) for lots of everyday situations (plus, they have intuitive anthropocentric approximations, namely the breadth of a thumb and the length of a shoe). The litre is similarly too large IMO. I have no strong opinion about kilos vs pounds. On the other hand, I prefer Celsius to Fahrenheit—having the melting point of ice at such a memorable value is useful. (But I also like Fahrenheit’s 100 meaning something close to human body temperature. I might like a hypothetical scale with freezing at 0 and human body temperature at 100 even more.)
I was raised on the English system and I have essentially the same intuitions about feet and inches vs. cm and meters and about Celsius vs. Fahrenheit, so there may be something to them.
My understanding (please correct me if I’m wrong) is that British and Canadians are essentially raised on both systems, so perhaps they could comment on which is more naturally intuitive.
One, where have you seen a foot-long shoe? That would be, what, 48 or 49 European size? This naming was always curious for me, feet are just… noticeably longer than feet.
Two, metric system has the main advantage of easy scalability. Switching from liter to deciliter to centiliter to millimeter is far easier than jumping between gallons, pints and whatever even is there. That’s the main point, not any constant to multiply it on (i.e. a system with inch, dekainch, and so on would be about as good).
Three, I really see no problem in saying things like “36 centimeters” to describe an object’s length. I know that my hand is ~17 centimeters, and I use it as a measurement tool in emergencies, but I always convert back to do any kind of reasonable thinking, I never actually count in “two hands and a phalanx”.
Funnily enough, I was raised with the English system, and use it mainly in every day life, the only exception being liquid volume, which years of backpacking taught be to think of in terms of 1 Liter water bottles.
Nitpick: “caliber” has several different meanings, all of which (confusingly) relate to a gun’s barrel dimensions. The one you’re using is a measure of internal barrel diameter, essentially a shorthand for inches (i.e. .22 caliber); the decimal point often gets dropped in that context, though. It’s equally correct to speak of caliber in terms of some other unit, like millimeters. When you’re talking about large weapons, though, the word means the length of the weapon’s barrel as a multiple of its internal diameter; a tank gun might be 120 mm 55 caliber, making it 6.6 meters long.
The American customary system doesn’t as far as I know have a general-use length unit in the millimeter range. There are a couple of typographical) units) defined in terms of the customary system, but they haven’t really escaped into the wild.
Please don’t use URL shorteners. I want to upvote this for informativeness but aagh...
I wouldn’t have, but the markup here interacts badly with URLs containing close parentheses. If you know of a workaround, I’d be happy to hear it.
EDIT: …or I could just look at the extended markup help. There, fixed.
Simply put a backslash before the closing parenthesis. I.E. to link to “http://example.com/foo(bar)″ type ”link\)”
“[link](http://example.com/foo(bar\\))″, rather.
Nope, the equivalent unit is x/2^n inches.
For example, metric wrenches might be 4mm or12mm, while “standard” (imperial) might be 5⁄32″ or 1⁄2″.