People like to shit on the imperial measurements for its inconsistensies, but why is it we have a similarly dogshit one for measuring time?
People like to shit on the imperial measurements for its inconsistensies, but why is it we have a similarly dogshit one for measuring time?
For example,
60 seconds = 1 minute
60 minutes = 1 hour
24 hours = 1 day
7 day = 1 week
29-31 days = Month (approx.)
365/366 days = year
It's like for the imperial measurement of distance, where 1 mile = 5280 feet...
Edit: just to clarify, I'm more or less keen towards any consistent, decimal-based measurement systems like base-10 or base-12.
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Hot take: imperial units are fine for normie stuff (as in, not engineering or math or whatever)
They come in useful sizes! Feet are handier than meters and gallons are better than liters. And unit conversion between feet and miles, pounds and tons, etc. isn't something that ever happens in day-to-day life. It sounds silly to say that a mile is 5280 feet but I'm pretty sure that ratio was decided retroactively for the sake of making the system consistent. As in, no one knows or cares about converting between the two because we already know how long a foot is and how long a mile is. Also no one uses the obscure units like gills and barleycorns.
Feet are handier than meters and gallons are better than liters.
Wrong, youre just used to them. I roughly know what a liter of something weights, usually around a kg. A gallon tho? wtf i would know? I can easily compare meters of length to my arms or height, but i need more complex divisions for feet
A foot is as long as my forearm and a little longer than a literal foot, unless you've got big feet. An inch is as wide as my thumb which I have used to measure things cuz it's pretty exact. You're right that I don't know how much a gallon is in pounds though. It's like... more than a bag of apples but less than a box of soda
Brazilian here. You're just used to it because objects around you are imperial sizes. I live in a metric country so objects around me are metric sized. So I can easily eyeball metric units.
- 0.5 cm is the width of a pencil
- 2 cm is the size of a small coin (the American penny is roughly 2cm wide, BTW)
- 1 meter is roughly a long step
- 1 km is the distance you walk in roughly 20 minutes
- 1 liter is easy because in any metric country it's the volume of a standard soda bottle
- 1 kg is the weight of a small bean, rice or sugar bag, or the weight of a soda bottle, or the weight of a good sized cabbage.
Haha yeah in case it wasn't clear from my other comments, I don't actually think imperial is a better system. I just don't think it's as bad as everyone says it is. Like you said, you understand the size of these units relative to things irl and can just intuit them.
Converting between units doesn't come up often because like, when are you gonna need to know distances in coins? I mean it's cool that you can easily do that in metric but I couldn't care less that I can't switch between feet and miles.
P.S. do beans weigh as much as cabbages in Brazil? :0
Hahahhahaj, you were victim of my bad English. I meant a bag of beans! Hahahaha.
I was just giving an example of how you could have an intuitive idea of metric units by the using objects around you if you eventually need it.
Haha no problem, your English is waaay better than my Portuguese! I understood what you meant and that's the point I was trying to make too. I don't need to do any conversions to figure out what a mile, gallon, etc. is because I already know, just like you already know what a kilometer and liter are.