'Pokémon Go' Is Forcing Americans to Learn the Metric System
288 replies, posted
[QUOTE=wystan;50711308]Fair point, but at least we don't use stones as a measurement of weight. Fucking barbarians.[/QUOTE]
I disagree with you on many, many things, but holy shit stone is such a fucking retarded unit.
[QUOTE=VinLAURiA;50709344]Heh. I always find it funny when someone posts that image because sure, metric wins on the top part but we still write dates better.
[t]http://i.imgur.com/TG5XMDJ.png[/t][/QUOTE]
No you don't. Numbers should generally be set up in logical systems where clear succession is evident. The international standard fullfills this. The chain is clear. Days to Months To years. The american system on the other hand does Months to Days...let's go up a level...to years.
The ISO standard exists because it makes lists easier and more natural. 19921201_filename will always be listed before 20160523_filename. But humans generally don't colloquilly think in years first, months after and days last.
Our thought patterns tend to follow what day is it? Of what month? Of what year?
[QUOTE=ramirez!;50711266]I feel like we should just make a new system. Feet and inches for measuring height of people, Fahrenheit for bodily temperatures, and then the metric system for everything else. It's [I]obviously[/I] the best way.[/QUOTE]
How is I'm 5 feet and 6/12fts (or 6 inches or half a feet) easier than I'm 167.
[QUOTE=space1;50710844]You're unable to think so let me spell it out for you: The European system is not perfect, particularly with temperature, time of day, and how you write dates.[/QUOTE]
Your visualization issues stem from how used you are to imperial. I need to make an internal conversion of 1 inch = 2.54 cm before I can conceptualise it. Likewise it's simple to gauge the distance of one meter or one decimeter. The benefit is that if I can gauge even one single of these distances (let's say a meter). I can generally semi gauge the others based on a mere glance. Oh hey I know this is a meter, let's visually look at a tenth - that's a decimeter, hmm let me make a tenth of that - that's a centimeter. It works from larger to smaller and from smaller to larger.
Likewise imagine going cubic in imperial.
One Linear foot is 12 inches. One square foot is 144 square inches and one cubic foot is 1728 inches. Compare that to meter to decimeter. 1:10 | 1:100 | 1:1000. Hell it gets even worse if you work in fluids. There are 7.48 gallons in a cubic foot. Compared to exactly 1000 liters in a cubic liter. (Hint 1 liter = 1dm^3).
In terms of temperatures - comes down to the scale you're used to. But Celsius is generally more relevant in more fields than Fahrenheit.
Last but not least - time of day? Most people don't actually say it is 21 hours. There's no need, it's obvious from context that it is 9 in the evening. But the 24hour system generally shines in writing. Imagine a list of times. The first event begins at 9:00 AM the Second even begins at 11:20 PM. It would be very easy for someone to accidentally misread such a list. Versus - The first event begins at 9:00. the second event begins at 23:20.
And that's before you consider automatic data sorting. You can either rely on pure numbers or have to have a switch in the system to recognise AM and PM mean something. There's a reason why the US military uses the 24hour clock.
[QUOTE=space1;50710678]Why are you all so oblivious to the fact that imperial is easier to visually understand? Is it so you can feel superior to these "dumb americans" who "won't get with the times"?
[/quote]
Imperial is only easier to visualize if you are familiar with system. Someone who grew up with the metric system would say.
[quote]Why are you all so oblivious to the fact that metric is easier to visually understand? Is it so you can feel superior to the rest of the world?[/quote]
[QUOTE=space1;50710678]
If you were so concerned with efficiency over being smug, you'd use kelvin instead of Celsius.[/quote]
Kelvin=Celsius-273.15C
Besides which, you're forgetting that kelvin has the exact same thing, in which case.
[quote]If you were so concerned with efficiency over being smug, you'd use Rankine instead of Fahrenheit.[/quote]
Rankine and Kelvin are heavily used in scientific applications. The idea of doing many of the thermodynamic calculations in Celsius or Fahrenheit is not a pleasant thought to me.
[QUOTE=space1;50710678]
We're taught metric in school, but imperial is used by pretty much everything else. There's a reason why non scientific things are like this, it's because it's just helluva lot easier to visualize. I just can't picture someone telling me they're 60 cm tall, it doesn't compute. If you tell me you're 5 feet and 9 inches tall, I can instantly understand you. There's no real point to metric unless you're doing math with it.[/QUOTE]
Again, all you are saying is what you are used to is superior. That's like me saying English is better than French because it is easier to understand. I am just more familiar with English, that is all.
[QUOTE=space1;50710968]There is literally no argument in defending celsius whatsoever, it is basically a much worse farenheit. None of this really matters anyway, because we're not scientists and we don't need to be exact.[/QUOTE]
"Much worse farenheit". Again, what evidence is there to support this other than personal preference.
ITT: People used to metric saying imperial is dumb and people used to imperial saying metric is dumb
This is really all a matter of what you're used to using. I just can't picture someone telling me they're 5 feet and 9 inches tall. If you tell me you're 175 cm (I guess that's about right, right?), I can instanly understand you. There's no real point to imperial unless, well, there's just no real point.
Learning two systems (metric for math, imperial for normal life) is incredibly more inefficient than just learning metric and using it everywhere. Trust me, us Europeans aren't just blindly guessing how much someone is tall because we can't visualize in metric.
One thing I can somewhat understand is the whole month/day/year thing because it's easier to say June fifteenth than fifteenth of June. I very much prefer DD.MM.YYYY though, because, surprise, that's the system I grew up with.
I'm a little surprised that this sparked 5 pages of arguments but it's just the same thing being said over and over.
As someone who has worked in the building trades switching to metric would be a pain in the ass for a lot of the older guys. :v:
i still havent found a pikachu
[QUOTE=wystan;50711168]I like the Imperial system just because of how mad it makes Europeans. Additionally anything with the word Imperial before it is automatically cooler.[/QUOTE]Oh holy shit I agree wholeheartedly, this thread is five pages of Europeans acting like their shit doesn't stink and literally saying "hurr pokemon is making americans not be retarded lmao!!!"
No, if you didn't know how to use the metric system before Pokemon Go came out then [B]you were always an idiot, a video game is not going to change that.[/B] Nobody in the United States shouldn't know how to use both, we've been learning to use and convert easily between the two since I believe 1983 so there isn't an excuse for anyone in 2016.
[editline]14th July 2016[/editline]
Given the nature of the thread I do probably need to state firmly that I think metric distance, weight, and volume measurements are excellent.
[QUOTE=space1;50710678]Why are you all so oblivious to the fact that imperial is easier to visually understand?[/QUOTE]
I've asked for it once and I'll ask for it again: Do you have sources to back up the claim that imperial is just easier to understand for everyone?
Metric's for nerds
Lots of discussions here, it is pretty much fact that the metric system is objectively better and that conversion is easier.
The important part is that both systems work in your everyday life. You will find the other system weird if you never used it, that is normal.
Now knowing that it is not hard to see how the metric system is better since it works as well as imperial in your everyday life (if you grew up with it) and it is better in scientific usage.
About the date format discussion, it is easy, stick to the ISO standard or reverse it to keep the logical order. English might be used a lot in the world but in German for example we say "14 Juli 2016", so 14/06/2016 makes sense without breaking the logical order of the standard but I guess I'm biased on this one.
[QUOTE=Erfly;50708044]I'm still disappointed that the metric system uses tonnes rather than Megagrams[/QUOTE]
Actually megagrams is perfectly useable, the word exists and is recognised. And due to the logic baked into the metric system everyone that dont know it but know the metric system will understand what you mean.
I prefer M/D/Y because literally everyone I know and have ever spoken to use "Month, Day" in speech like "July 15th," save for rare occasions like "4th of July" where it's to denote an important event. My eyes read it that way because people speak it that way.
Of course, Y/M/D is probably the best system for writing dates since you don't fall into this trap to begin with, and it even still puts days after months for people like me.
In healthcare we've been converting everything over to metric that hasn't been already. For a long time Yale used to put people's weight in the charts as pounds, and now it's kilograms, but a lot of nurses still fuck it up by putting pounds in the kilogram field because all of the balances are set to display pounds still. Things like medications, volume of liquid and solids have used metric for a while.
Imperial is subjectively better in some circumstances. Yes, Celsius measures the freezing and boiling point of water, but when it comes to the weather, you don't really need to know that. Fahrenheit is good because it's a range of what temperatures are generally tolerable for humans. Below 0 is dangerous and above 100 is dangerous, versus -17 to 37 in Celsius. With Fahrenheit we have no need to use decimals either because of our larger range of numbers to use. With cooking, temperature in either Fahrenheit or Celsius is kind of arbitrary. If you want to freeze water, you shove it in the freezer, not meticulously measure the temperature of the water until it's 0 degrees C. If you want to boil water, you turn on the stove, rather than make sure the temperature is 100 degrees C. Putting the oven on 375 degrees Fahrenheit makes just about much sense as doing it for 190 in Celsius, in other words not much.
Other units in imperial make sense too. A foot is the length of a human foot. Miles come from the Latin word for thousand and basically means 1000 paces. A cup is a cup. An inch is a thumb length. These associations help with visualizing distance, because you will always have a foot and thumb to use as a measuring tool to reference. Of course in metric once you have the distance of a meter or centimeter committed to memory you can do the same, but you don't have an easy point of reference for things in the distance. Cups and pounds relate much better to real portion sizes in a traditional home kitchen. Almost all recipe’s call for a pound of meat as it’s a usual portion amount of meat to cook with. The same with cups of liquid. It’s way more natural to use a cup of liquid as the base of a recipe than deciliters.
Everyone says the US is not metric. Sure, in law we're not forced to use metric, but any field requiring any semblance of accuracy or international usage measures in metric. Scientists, engineers, big business and designers already metric. Why? Because it makes sense for them in their trades. Almost all grocery’s also have metric units listed on the packaging. But in the everyday life of most people accuracy isn't really needed and being able to quickly deduce measurements by "rule of thumb" is useful.
This [URL="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/SI-metrication-world.png/800px-SI-metrication-world.png"]"metrification map"[/URL]shows that pretty much every country other than the US is metric. But what it doesn’t tell you is what people still use Imperial or other forms of measurement in daily use. England is listed as being metric, even though pounds, stones, miles and feet are common in everyday life there. A lot of South American countries still use pounds and inches too. Obviously there are lots of countries that are metric, such as Denmark, Germany and France, but even some of those countries still use Imperial measurements in cooking, for instance tablespoons.
Really there's no point in being elitist over measurements. The fields that require accuracy like in biology, chemistry, physics are going to use metric. Cooks, news agencies, and the average Joe are going to use Imperial. Whatever measurement is more convenient depends on who is measuring what.
We all know the metric system. Its just that it isn't used in every day life. Its not hard to switch to it for Americans.
How is this making Americans learn the metric system?
All we have to do is memorize 3 conversions. 1.25mi, 3mi, and 6.25mi.
That's it. There are only 3 measurements in this game in metric and it's the 3 kinds of eggs. Literally nothing else.
It's not like Ingress where distance to portals was in meters/kilometers, or portal link range was in km, or attack range in meters, etc. etc.
how do people still try to use the argument "yeah but I say January 4th"? congratulations, I say both January the 4th and 4th of January. written language ≠ spoken language, use ISO 8601 when writing dates and shut up about it.
Although I'm absolutely on team metric, I realized just now that there's a bit of truth in the [I]"metric is harder to visualize"[/I] argument, in my opinion. Because Imperial is based on lengths that can be shown in a relatable way in front of you, people actually learn to visualize both feet, inches, yards and to a lesser extent, miles. Of course, it would be very easy to show someone, and to visualize and memorize, [I]"10 centimeters"[/I], but in my personal experience, it seems like we just don't? I can roughly estimate it, but I don't feel like I've got that visualization imprinted in my brain like I do with 1 centimeter and 1 meter. It seems to me, somehow, that the simple act of giving them names incentivizes visualizing and remembering them?
If we actually used decimeters as a common unit, or gave [I]"30 centimeters"[/I] a unit name and used that commonly, it seems to me that we'd have the same effect that Imperial seems to have where it has a couple of very relatable scales that you can see in front of you. Actually, it would be pretty nice to have a third of a meter be a commonly used unit, but that feels like a limitation of the decimal system. Should have used dozenal.
The imperial system is one of the things that will disappear when old people that can't be arsed to change, eventually die.
[QUOTE=wystan;50711168]I like the Imperial system just because of how mad it makes Europeans. Additionally anything with the word Imperial before it is automatically cooler.[/QUOTE]
i like the metric system because it almost always spawns an american who whines that he finds it impossible to visualise metric weights, while using a system developed with measures of mercury and barrels of almonds in mind
use whatever you want to use, but anything regarding technical systems should be done in metric and ISO date format
which is the inevitable outcome of time anyway
[QUOTE=Petrussen;50714262]The imperial system is one of the things that will disappear when old people that can't be arsed to change, eventually die.[/QUOTE]
Yup, that's pretty much how I see it, as a non-American.
Another good step would be for most Americans to read speeds in Km/h, instead of Mph.
[editline]15th July 2016[/editline]
I had to memorize that 185 Mph is 300 km/h, and 200 Mph is 320 Km/h, when I watch races. That's the only way for me to get an idea of how fast they're going.
I don't see why people are saying Fahrenheit is objectively better and makes more sense. To me, it makes no sense compared to Celsius.
[QUOTE=Pretiacruento;50714306]Yup, that's pretty much how I see it, as a non-American.
Another good step would be for most Americans to read speeds in Km/h, instead of Mph.
[editline]15th July 2016[/editline]
I had to memorize that 185 Mph is 300 km/h, and 200 Mph is 320 Km/h, when I watch races. That's the only way for me to get an idea of how fast they're going.[/QUOTE]
Double digit numbers are fast in both systems, triple digit numbers are crazy fast in both systems. Come on, that part's never been hard.
The people complaining about dates need to have their head checked.
ITS FUCKING DATES.
[editline]15th July 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=Speedhax;50714578]I don't see why people are saying Fahrenheit is objectively better and makes more sense. To me, it makes no sense compared to Celsius.[/QUOTE]
Its easier to guess if you need a coat or not. Its also better to use involving sea water
Everyone claims the system they're used to is better, claiming your own is better isn't going to convince anyone on the other side it's better. The closest you can get is showing how inconsistent and nonsensical imperial conversions are.
Can't we all just agree to disagree?
[QUOTE=Petrussen;50714262]The imperial system is one of the things that will disappear when old people that can't be arsed to change, eventually die.[/QUOTE]
That's what they've been saying for the last 3 generations and it still isn't gone.
[QUOTE=Ignhelper;50708724]
Like for fuck sake baking is pure science. You need an exact amount[/QUOTE]
lmao
something ive learned from my mother about cooking is winging it.
my food has taken less time to make, and has always come out better when I started winging it with approximations rather than trying to get the exact amount needed. its far more about finding a nice balance rather than an exact.
[QUOTE=bdd458;50716312]lmao
something ive learned from my mother about cooking is winging it.
my food has taken less time to make, and has always come out better when I started winging it with approximations rather than trying to get the exact amount needed. its far more about finding a nice balance rather than an exact.[/QUOTE]
cooking =/= baking
I learned basically the inverse when it comes to baking from my mother, and from my girlfriend(who is a trained pastry chef) that baking is about measurement and being pretty exact with things. There's some fudging room but it's largely a delicate matter. The other thing I learned is that going by the texture and appearance of the mixed ingredients would really help you find the balance you're talking about there if your measurements were off in the first place.
[QUOTE=Aetna;50707971]Yes please. As a home diy-er/mechanic, I'd much prefer if standard would fuck off already. Talk about the most convoluted system of measurement.[/QUOTE]
What are you talking about btu/hr-ft-F is a beautiful unit!
Plus it doesn't matter if you teach every American student metric, the moment they step out into the job world everything here is stamdard
[QUOTE=HumanAbyss;50716396]cooking =/= baking
I learned basically the inverse when it comes to baking from my mother, and from my girlfriend(who is a trained pastry chef) that baking is about measurement and being pretty exact with things. There's some fudging room but it's largely a delicate matter. The other thing I learned is that going by the texture and appearance of the mixed ingredients would really help you find the balance you're talking about there if your measurements were off in the first place.[/QUOTE]
read it as cooking by mistake but in my experience with baking its still the same.
as long as you're not wildly off and the humidity isn't bad your shit should turn out fine.
dont get me wrong, if you're baking or cooking in a professional capacity its best to have consistency, and the only way to make sure of that is with measurement
[QUOTE=redBadger;50708049]Sorry but month/day/year is infinitely superior.
Everything else is a different story[/QUOTE]
I will tell you guys a personal story about this month/day/year thing when I got in trouble with the law here in 'murica.
I got a ticket once and the officer wrote down 2/16. Thanks to the special system of measurement in 'murica I winded up writing a letter to the court that 2/16 can be interpreted as both February 2016 BUT ALSO as February 16th. The court [B]accepted[/B] my argument that the date was vague and threw out the ticket.
TLDR: The system of measurement here is so bad it got me out of a ticket.
Oh and I was guilty as fuck.
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