@epic @cjd

It's a rather bizarre mix of units here - the transportation systems interchangeably uses kilometers and miles, some shop owners by principle refuse to use kilograms and insist on "pounds" (without realising a "pound" is defined in law using grams and that there was like a dozen of "pounds"), fuel efficiency is measures in miles per gallon, but it's a different gallon from the one used in the US. In general, the whole units situation is nothing but a confusing dick contest.,,

@kravietz

You just blew what I knew about English measurement out of the water. I know people there fought the change to metric, but had no idea they still were.

It sounds as though it is an the illusion only the USA and Myanmar accept the 'backwards' measurements Caleb is talking about, the reality is people are still people. Thank goodness they are. Individuality is better for countries as well as people.

I prefer feet and inches like I think Caleb does (as well as the right answer from his Apple), but I prefer pounds, shillings, and pence to that insipid EU metric system. At least when a mechanic is asking for a toolset here in America (like sockets/wrenches), the question is still, "English or metric?" The same as there's no American language, there's no American measurement system. We're doing fine without either, England and America are inexorably linked, even if England tends to wander off the trail a bit.

@cjd

@epic @cjd

I don't have any religious or emotional attachment to any of these unit systems. F

rom purely practical point of view I find scalars such as "30 feet 7¼ inches" impractical for calculations as you need yet another layer of conversion to decode these fractions.

I have just tested, and even wolframalpha.com is unable to decode this as a valid distance. It can convert 30' 7" but gets lost at that fractional part.

@kravietz

There’s no decoding.

Tell a carpenter to cut a board adding numbers with fractional parts of 0.1875” and 0.6875” and he’ll either put down his saw and grab a calculator or the calculation will break his train of thought. He stops thinking about what laps over what and how it fastens to the wall.

Tell a carpenter to cut a board adding lengths with fractional parts 3/16” and 11/16” and 3 + 11 is 14 so half = 7 so 7/8”. That takes a heartbeat and he never stops thinking about what he’s doing.

As far as Wolfram, I don’t know the program you’re talking about but their Mathematica was written in Lisp. Lisp has rational numbers as part of the base language, add a rounding function and you won’t see 17/125 as an answer. It’s hard to believe their new version can’t do fractions or doesn’t let you add functions.

My calculators for doing plan takeoffs and such are all from Calculated Industries which has been making fractional calculators since the ‘80s. Just set it for accuracy 1” down to 1/64” and Bob’s your uncle. Lots of other people make them.

@cjd

@epic @cjd

For that reason, the imperial units can probably still function in daily usage in isolated environments - for example among car mechanics or plumbers. There you don't *design* a ½" pipe, you just go and buy it, so the dimension really functions as a label and you could just as easily got and acquire the right pipe using a hypothetical "P12" symbol or whatever else.

@kravietz

America being an isolated environment has helped it avoid invasion for a long time because oceans. I’ve never heard of it referred to as an isolated environment though. Most people are upset we just won’t shut the f up. Imperial units is functioning for daily usage over here just fine.

Piping, which someone did design as 1/2”, is the worst of examples. Is the diameter the ID or OD”? What’s it made for? How thick is the wall? How much pressure can it take? What’s it made out of? How does it connect? The “P12” symbol serves a good purpose.

I think I got lost in that example.

@cjd

@epic @cjd

As soon as various engineering and scientific disciplines started to get interconnected, it became critical to develop a common frame of reference. SI units are such frame, as they are defined based on specific physical constants rather and this would explain why the scientific world uniformly converted to SI.

You probably *could* build an atomic clock based on the notion that Cs-133 wavelength is 1" and 268/1000" but that's not very practical nor portable.

@kravietz

It doesn’t matter if you do your calculations in feet or meters, you know perfectly well no one’s suggesting to always use fractions, abandoning base 10 or decimal point numbers.

When solving a single math equation, people mix decimals, rational numbers, and symbolic placeholders for numbers however it tickles their fancy. No standards committee should force them to do otherwise, you should use the system that makes the problem solvable or easiest.

@cjd

@epic @cjd

At the same time, from reference point of view, imperial units have two major issues:

1) they are completely arbitrary, defined out of nowhere

2) they are defined differently at different times and places - there's a whole lot of "miles", "ounces" etc

The latter was a terrible mess even in the UK alone where each industry was using a different standard of ounce and there were like 20 of them, and that status quo was maintained primarily in order to screw confused customers 😂

@kravietz @epic
This business of different ounces dates back to feudalism when local lords controlled the size of the bushel baskets and flour sacks to screw the surfs who worked the land.

Napoleon established the metric system to take power away from the local lords and place it in the central government, this came along with standard language and giving the surfs official last names.

Sometimes the power structures unseated by colonization are worse than the power structures established. 🤷‍♂️

@epic @cjd

So at the end of the day, while some people in the UK do use imperial units just as some of them use separate taps for cold and hot water, and come with various more or less consistent excuses for that, they rarely realize the "traditional" units is also a result of one king's decision to scrap all previously used "traditional" units and declare a single "standard" one..

@kravietz

My little post got divided into five responses from you. I’m not sure if that’s just your preference to keep your comments short or they automatically got split (I don’t know how long-format and short-format servers communicate yet).

My reader only indents or draws outlines one level to indicate threads. It’s obvious they are a sequence but I can’t be completely sure of the order because when I clicked on them to see if they follow each other they all seemed to be attached to my post, not each other. Times didn’t help.

I’m only sniveling because I hope I read them right. Plus, if one becomes five, five responses would become 25, 25 responses would be, like, more than 75 pretty much I think.

@cjd

@epic @cjd

It's only because Mastodon doesn't allow me to post more than 500 characters.

> isolated environment though

I didn't mean the US, I meant specific sectors of economy such as plumbing or car mechanics...

> Tell a carpenter

...or carpentry.

I don't do wood work, but I do 3D cases or PCB occasionally and can't imagine doing that in fractional inches.

> 3/16” and 11/16”

Then maybe it's optimised for human memory operations.

@kravietz @cjd

Thanks for letting me know aobut the 500 characters, kravietz.

If messages are too long for Mastadon's prototcol, do you know if they get truncated or if they just don't show up?

@epic @cjd

You just can't type more than 500 characters in Mastodon... I'm looking at all these posts from Diaspora with envy :)

@kravietz

You might be like me in that you don't want more than one account you have to go check. I should always stay under 500 characters or something will happen. From what you just told me that something is probably that my posts or responses will just disappear from other services.

I just started using Fediverse and haven't found the manual yet. 😀

Thanks!

@cjd

@epic @cjd

No, quite the opposite - I see very long posts from some people here on Mastodon and apparently they come over from Diaspora or Pleroma. So it seems like Mastodon just doesn't let you *post* long comments, but happily imports them from federation. Eh...

@epic @kravietz
I find mm and cm quite pleasant to work with. g and KG likewise.

When filling a tire, I find PSI (or KG-cm2) more intuitive than Bar or Pascal. Likewise, foot-pounds are a human-scale measurement of torque, a newton-meter is a very light force on a very long wrench.

But people should use what works for them, and I find the metric-police to be dripping with colonialism. Europeans still don't get that people in other lands do things differently and that doesn't make them dumb.