I could argue against Metric all goddamned day.
I could point out that decimal-based units aren't as easily subdivided into fractions as Imperial Units.
I could say that it's silly that countries have spent untold millions (or even billions!) of dollars to metricate for no tangible benefit, or note how many school districts in Canada have abandoned teaching Metric entirely, or are teaching it in conjunction with the supposedly-defunct Canadian (Imperial) Units, because once kids get out of school and into the real world, they find that outside of a few specialized fields, Metric is rarely used, almost half a century since it was introduced.
I could note that for as much as Metric's fanboys like to indicate how 'consistent' it is compared to Imperial, it has its own inconsistencies. For instance, the base unit for every type of measurement is the one without any additional modifiers (meter rather than centimeter, liter rather than kiloliter, etc.), except for one: the kilogram, not the gram, is inexplicably the base unit for mass.
And while we're on inconsistencies related to mass: the tonne being the unit for 1,000 kilograms, not the megagram. Presumably this is just to sow confusion and dissent among non-Metric users who then have to qualify their speech with phrases like, 'Metric tonne,' or, 'Imperial ton,' which look redundant when transcribed since they're spelled different but pronounced the same.
Or how about we talk about temperature? Centigrade and Fahrenheit are both stupidly arbitrary. Picking the freezing and boiling points of pure water at a specific air pressure and ambient temperature is no less arbitrary than using the freezing point of brine, the change in volume of linseed oil, or, gosh darnit, doing the whole thing backwards. The only non-arbitrary temperature scales are those that use absolute zero as a 0-point, such as Kelvin and Rankine, which are admittedly both impractical for daily use.
I could argue all these things till the cows come home to the sound of the fat lady singing, but I won't, because there's only one argument I need to make for why Imperial Units are better: the humble foot. The foot is, by far, the most useful unit of distance measurement ever devised. It's short enough that you can use it for short distances, but long enough that one doesn't need to resort to scientific notation to express longer distances in common use. Being dozenal, it can be easily subdivided into twelfths, sixths, quarters (or 'fourths' as apparently the Metric lot call them), thirds, and halves without resorting to fractions: far more than the tenths, fifths, and halves decimal units can be.
There is no Metric foot. The centimeter is shorter still than an inch, and the meter longer than the yard. Sure, there's the decimeter (and don't get me started on the confusion caused by the hard/soft-'C' pronunciations of 'deci-' and 'deca-'), but even it's too short to be useful: which is probably why no one uses it. Ever wondered why, despite metrication, rulers are so commonly found in thirty-centimeter lengths? If everything was truly better in tenths, why not a decimeter ruler? Because no one has any use for a ruler a third of a foot long, that's why. The foot is just… perfect.
The foot is perfect, and if you don't use it, you should feel bad.
So, now that I've sufficiently poisoned the well, let's have a nice, civil poll on units of measurement.
A note on Question 4: During the crafting of this poll, I got into a debate with an American over whether pounds measure weight (force) or mass. Though the pound is a unit of both force and mass, he proposed that the common usage of the word 'pounds' was that of weight: that is, the force of gravity acting upon a person. Now, growing up in Canada, it was drilled into our heads during schooling that speaking of how much a person 'weighs' is a misnomer, because we're actually speaking of mass: which is why a person's 'weight' is measured in kilograms, not newtons (the Metric unit for force). My American friend speculated that, 'If it's different in Canada, I can only blame the cold getting to your heads.' To cover my bases in case this is accurate, I've included Metric options for both kilograms and newtons, and encourage comment on whether you believe common usage of the word 'pound' refers to mass or weight.
im in ur base, metricating ur imperialism
Started By
*Anastasia
, Nov 18 2014 05:56 PM
42 replies to this topic
#1
Posted 18 November 2014 - 05:56 PM