Not listing alternate units second, not converted on screen, not called “freedom units” and not hiding behind the excuse of “most our audience is in the US”
Mostly thinking YT channels like Wendover, Bluejay, sometimes Practical Engineering and even some European ones like TLDR News
The difference between a meter and yard is less than that of a measured vs “eyeballed” yard and everybody knows what 0 C and 100 C are so the learning curve is also massively (by at least 50 kg) exaggerated
Most americans have exposure to the metric system but they don’t have the inherent understanding of being able to mentally visualize or feel the difference the way they do with imperial units, it legitimately took me finding a video by a Youtube Latin teacher to get a sense for how to mentally gauge temperature in centigrade.
So until Americans have been fully integrated into the metric system, “our audience is mostly american” is an entirely valid excuse for content creators who want their audience to be able to have a mental picture or scale or feeling of the dimension they’re giving information by.
So until Americans have been fully integrated into the metric system
How is this supposed to happen if you keep giving them the crutch of the existing system? At some point you need people to do as you did and actually learn the intuition.
Aus just did the switch by law, didn’t seem to be all that much of a grinding process for them, especially with people not making it a whole fucking thing where they constantly get ridiculed for using different units and turn it into a shitstorm where self appointed patriots get to turn it into a matter of national pride on the line over all those foreigners looking down their noses at them over it.
It’s not funny, it’s not helping, it’s just annoying, shut up.
Disagree, I am from a non-us country and live in the US. Most people here genuinely do not have any idea what a centigrade or meter are, because they do not use them. For a content creator, you want your audience to be as broad as possible, so you can attract more views, and alienating so many people for a petty reason like ‘my arbitrary system is better’ (even if it is!) is a bad choice.
As a non-American I don’t really care as long as they include metric.
My pet hate is news outlets using US geography to make size comparisons like “that’s an area as big as the size of downtown Miami”.
I assume every country has those: In Germany, Saarland (a small federal state), soccer fields, VW Golf and public pools are regularly used as size comparisons, assuming that everyone knows how large they are.
In New Zealand we have a joke that everything is in blocks of cheese (1kg is the standard cheese size).
When it’s international news I would like them to at least state the square km instead of only talking about some random landmark though.
The only standards converter that matters… El Reg If you know, you know. If you don’t you can always learn :)
To add to this, most Americans have some exposure to the metric system. It’s used in science classes, as well as in the military.
Unfortunately the most popular content creators are the ones that cater to the lowest common denominator, so making your videos as broad as possible is best.
If you look at the top videos around they’re often not popular because they’re good, often just that they’re so stupid anyone can understand them like the whole focus on prank videos.
Can’t say I’ve noticed this turn in any of the channels listed but I’ll take the opportunity to add Oversimplified
Honestly this seems like a great use case for “AI” in YT videos. Give creators a tool to automatically pop up a conversion on the screen (also give users the ability to turn it off)
TLDR News qould be an exception since they’re British, and the American system’s based on the British system, which is still in use in the UK.
Still partially in use the UK. We’ve got a really messed up system where metric is used for some things and imperial for others.
We tend to cook in metric but weigh ourselves in imperial (but stone and pounds not just stone)
Distance is metric for DIY and metric for driving.
Liquids are metric for most things and imperial for milk and beer.
I agree.
I agree with the exception of temperature. Fahrenheit is superior for non-scientific purposes. It’s more specific.
I can count on zero hands the times i have needed daily temperature to a greater precision than 1C.
I think it’s more that Fahrenheit captures the range of temperatures that humans experience from “very cold” to “very hot” in a rough 0-100 scale, whereas Celsius’s 0-100 is instead based on the phase changes of water, which doesn’t actually overlap with weather temperatures very well, being “decently cold” to “you are basically a burning corpse”.
Unpopular opinion: metric is great for people who only measure distilled water at standard pressures and temperatures. Anyone working with any other substance is going to have to do the same kinds of conversions that Americans regularly use.
The ability to divide by 3 without recursion is a useful characteristic.
We would be much better off if metric had been developed with a duodecimal number system.
I’m not sure I understand your first paragraph. The annoying thing about imperial units is the non-standard conversion factors between different unit sizes, e.g. miles to yards. In metric they are much easier to learn and work with, and they don’t rely on “distilled water at standard pressures and temperatures”. Could you try to explain?
Converting between mass and volume measures only gives 1:1 ratios when you’re working with distilled water at standard temperatures. 1 cubic centimeter of distilled water is one gram.
Doesn’t work for jet fuel or milk or depleted uranium or any other substance you might be working with.
For the miles/yards thing: the circumstances where you need the length of a mile, you rarely need the accuracy of a yard, and vice versa. You just use the unit whose accuracy you need. For example, a builder wouldn’t measure 3 yards 1 foot 2 inches. They’d just use 122 inches.
I think some of this might be right but I expect much more people to calculate/estimate more regularly than they are measuring. And if you are working fully in numbers metric seems much more reasonable. You can easily calculate without converting and even if you have mixed units you can just throw in 10^-+N very simply.
You are talking about inter-unit conversions. This is not what people complain about with imperial - they complain about intra-unit conversions. And rightfully so: why use a unit system that adds extra complexity on top of the existing complexity? Why use a system that adds unnecessary complexity on top of necessary complexity?
For the miles/yards thing: the circumstances where you need the length of a mile, you rarely need the accuracy of a yard, and vice versa. You just use the unit whose accuracy you need. For example, a builder wouldn’t measure 3 yards 1 foot 2 inches. They’d just use 122 inches.
But why use a system that is harder for rare cases, than one that’s not harder for any cases?
funny thing, most construction measurements in metric countries are subdivisions of 120cm, not 100cm, for this reason (120x240cm is also conveniently close to the US standard of 4’ x 8’ width for panel material)
First, What?
Second, why does the method of division matter?
Because if I’m measuring a board to cut, imperial divisions give me many more whole numbers that are way easier to deal with in most practical applications.
12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6, while 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5. That means that all of the most common divisions are straightforward to calculate, instead of me trying to guess how far between 3 and 4 on my ruler 3.3333333333 centimeters is if I want my 1/3 cuts to line up correctly.
That’s why the base of the system matters, and it’s why imperial is objectively 20% more based than metric.
In a duodecimal number system, metric would be absolutely gorgeous. We’d even have a metric unit circle: Each position on a standard clock would be represented by a single digit, and those positions line up with the most important angles in geometry.
Base-10 is the ugliest part of metric. 10 sucks.
Metric construction doesn’t start with 10cm or 100cm as a basic size. It uses a 600mm “module”. Dimensional lumber pretty much aligns with US sizes, not powers of 10 in mm.
And, are you telling me you can find an exact 1/3” on your ruler?
