Comment by lioeters
18 hours ago
> Note: all units are in inches.
Not so universal as I'd hoped, but I love the concept and the organization behind it, Free Art and Technology Lab.
18 hours ago
> Note: all units are in inches.
Not so universal as I'd hoped, but I love the concept and the organization behind it, Free Art and Technology Lab.
Is this complaint just for the sake of complaining? You print out the pieces, they connect various toys together. The units could be light-years for all it matters.
There's something about the internet that makes people want to moan in public about nothing.
Whenever I see someone in a current British television show use "inches" or "feet," I'm reminded of the HN metric mafia that insists that the United States is the only place in the world that uses imperial units.
Even Wikipedia will tell you that's false.
Every post/comment is selecting across 100,000+ people worldwide for the individuals most likely to complain about it.
There’s no other place on earth I can invite 100,000 people to disagree with me. Exception is maybe a public office. (Which the vast majority of people shy away from, for just this reason)
There's this universal constant 2.54 you can use it to divide any value in inches and badabing you get the value in centimeters
up until very recently, the only units that made it even remotely "universal" was US customary units. Or, as Arduino Vs Everyone on youtube says: "units that have gone to the moon."
Now, i speak larger measurements in metric if i think the person i am talking to understands or doesn't care; but short measurements i still use "quarter inch" or "teenth" or "thou" pronounced like "wow", from the beginning of "thousandth".
I know km, liters - i drink at least 3 liters of liquid a day, if not 4, but i drink it 1 quart beverage receptacle at a time, odd how that fits!
is it really so hard to have a ruler with both measurements? I have a ruler that lets you convert from font point to two other measurement units to inches, for page layout.
I'm american, from the '80s, and we never used metric day-to-day.
the US will be US customary units basically forever. because we're an absolutely massive geography, and there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of mile markers, speed limit signs, "distance to" signs, speed warning signs, gas stations, etc.
So 2026 is the year where i finally say: Please, please, shut up about this. No one cares.
> is it really so hard to have a ruler with both measurements? I have a ruler that lets you convert from font point to two other measurement units to inches, for page layout.
The problem with the imperial unit system rather is that it does not form something "to build more complicated units out of".
For example: if you want inch (in) as a unit, why not have "in^2" as a corresponding small area unit and "in^3" as corresponding volume unit?
Additionally, there should be constant/regular conversion factors between the various subunits of a measure, i.e.
vs
we don't use leagues or furlongs. I know what a chain is because i have one, but that's specifically to measure land against a plat map. Every location in this country is based off common reference locations (there's a literal marker on the ground), with only chains and angles to delimit things (generally).
Read that last part again, because they use GPS to determine if the marker has moved, and that takes X minutes to quiesce. you can't take X*Y minutes to check each chain mark and angle.. not all land is rectilinear. we have a bit less than ten million km^2 of land in this country.
I'd reckon that maybe 1% of Americans know what a league is, as in the definition. Less for "furlong", less for "chain".
This is how these conversations go, usually. It's completely pointless, most of the people here will never interface with something where this matters. I'm a few decades old - 2.25 score years old, to be accurate. My wife knows what a score is, and how many feet in a mile, which i can never remember; by the by, it's about 5300 feet.
like Celsius, the metric measurements don't "mean" anything directly to a human. a meter is how fast light travels in 1/speedoflightinmeterspersecond. water boils at 100 and freezes at 0. compare to ~100F "roughly median body temperature", "roughly the length of an adult foot", and "roughly the length of the middle bone in your thumb".
yes, for "science" using units that convert is great, one of my favorite things to read is the Frink language unit file for that reason. Metric is cute and ostensibly "well-defined". great, use it.
you're not getting ~400,000,000 people to switch, potentially ever. The sheer cost is astronomical. a speed limit sign, just the sign is ~$22. The total cost of install could be from $500 to $3000. Per speed limit sign. There's at least 10,000 speed limit signs on interstates alone. [nearly] Every single mile of every single highway and interstate in the US has a reflective sign stating what mile it is - except for mile 420, i'm not sure why, that'll be missing but there will be a 419.7 mile marker. weird.
> In 2002, a contractor installed just over 50 miles’ worth of markers on I-78 and Routes 22 and 33 at a cost of $230,000, or about $4,500 per mile. Today, [...] $6,500 per mile, said PennDOT spokesman Ron Young.
and
> As of 2022, [...] the Interstate Highway System, which has a total length of 48,890 miles (78,680 km)
and that's just interstates. We have expressways, freeways, spurs, feeders, highways, state roads that use mile markers. Speed limit signs vary in distance, but figure 2 miles per (raelly 1 per mile since they're on both directions of travel, and usually there's 2 per direction, one on either shoulder) on nearly every commute surface. we have ~2,600,000 miles of paved roads, and a bit over 4,000,000 miles of roads, total, in the US - that's 6.437376e+6 kilometers, or 21 lightseconds in a vacuum, or 32 lightseconds in fiber optic cable. 32000ms ping, awesome.
Every house in the US is built with 16" on-center framing for the walls. we're not going to switch to "406.4mm on center", because our sheetrock, plywood, etc are all 48"x96".
every other country that switched did it 70+ years ago, has less people, or is drastically smaller.
like i said, rudely, but now politely, give it up, we're staying with our US customary units.
2 replies →
I can't take seriously anyone who measures butter by volume
I've been cooking for something like a quarter century, for multiple people, and i have never once, in my life, used a kitchen scale. I have one for doing METRIC measurements of ratios of liquids for other uses, but not once for cooking.
A stick of butter is a quarter pound. it doesn't matter though, because the butter is marked in "recipe increments". if you melt it, you can use "tablespoons" to measure it, literally.
eta: i haven't even used measuring cups or spoons for anything in like a decade, unless i am making bread or bread-like things.