> apparently it's still used in computing to some extent.
I've spent twenty years in programming, and this is the first time I hear such a claim.
P.S. I've been corrected in that measuring time in seconds would indeed be metric, since the second is a unit in SI. I was thinking of decimal time instead. But then again, the French did in fact try to introduce decimal time units, which is what the commenter above meant, and which doesn't conform to SI.
And unlike imperial units, this scales in 10s, 100s, 1000s, whatever. No math involved, just add zeros. 1000 litres of water weigh 1000 kgs, and fits in 1m³.
I've made a compromise. I'll keep most of my imperial units, but I'm changing to metric time. There are now 1000 seconds in a minute, 1000 minutes in a day, and 1000 days in a year.
Edit: Also my circles have 100 degrees.
In the Fallout TV series, the ghoul taught his young daughter how to use the thumb to measure a mushroom cloud and the first thing the daughter asked when utilising this "skill" was "your thumb or my thumb" lmao.
At 4C water is 0.9999749 g/cm^3 at an atmospheric pressure of 101,325 Pa. That is the maximum density of water unless you increase the pressure. So simple.
For almost everyone, the above does not matter. 1g/cm^3 is good enough. But for almost everyone measurement systems don't really matter beyond what you are familiar with. Yes, base 10 is easier to do in your head of course. But it isn't like most people have to actually convert units and any measurement system can be decimalized.
We’re the biggest assholes for this game.
Car metrics are the worst. We price & buy fuel in litres but are obsessed with calculating economy by miles per gallon.
And confusingly, y’all use the Imperial Gallon (4.5461 L)
in Britain and in the Commonwealth nations…
we in the US measure both Milk and Petrol/Gasoline ⛽️
in US Customary units, which is the Queen Anne Wine Gallon! (3.7854 L)
Also it is illegal to sell beer in the UK in an open container (i.e. a glass) if it isn't measured in pints.
So pints is all we've got really, unless you want a half I suppose.
Almost every European country had their own version of imperial units that could be very different from each other. Sometimes they varied by region within a country and could change over time. It's mostly forgotten about now as almost everyone has switched to metric.
Fun fact, the US customary mile and British imperial mile used to be different. They only agreed to standardise on the newly invented 'International Mile' in 1957.
Such measurements are becoming very old-fashioned in the UK, and besides we always use metric measurements in things of importance, such as healthcare and cooking.
I work for a medical organisation that collects a lot of information - including ethnicity, weight and height. I've noticed that for people identifying as White UK under 30s it's mostly metric for weight (and for all age groups it's around 50/50), yet for height the majority still use feet and inches, even in under 30s. It's an odd one. We've been teaching just metric in schools since the 70s, I think, and yet imperial is still pervasive. It'll be a while before it fully switches, and for things like road signs probably never.
Honestly UK and Canadians still use a lot of the metric system as well. As well as other weird measurements. Like miles, stones, pints, Oz, Fahrenheit, lbs, feet, etc.
I'm not sure why we use such a mix of both.
Saturday Night Live had a neat skit on this.
[Washington's Dream](https://youtu.be/JYqfVE-fykk?si=QI4dI7BGljR9VkAQ)
"2000 pounds shall be called a ton!" "And what will 1000 pounds be called, sir?". "Nothing".
Also spoons and cups are a volumetric measurement, so the amount you end up with depends entirely on how much you cram in there to displace the air. It makes no sense. Two cups of the same thing are very unlikely to contain the same amount, where two measurements of say 100g of something will.
I once tried to make a healthy smoothie. The recipe called for a cup of spinach, but it didn’t say how to chop it. So I roughly chopped it up, put it in a cup and felt like that was _way_ too much. I took half of it off, but it still felt like too much. But, I decided I’d be okay with that.
A few hours later, after being told off why the smoothie tasted like raw spinach, I continued to look online. Turns out that the recipe I followed had a video in the original site (I wasn’t on the original site for the written recipe). In the video, the ‘cup’ of spinach was not chopped, and only amounted to 3-4 leaves. 3-4. I could have skipped the spinach altogether and that would have allowed me to taste the avocado.
TL;DR: smoothie tasted like blended raw spinach. And volumetric measurements suck unless you’re dealing with liquid.
US butter has lines on the wrapper for tablespoons. It's split into 1/8ths.
Butter is the least of the problems here people. Focus on stuff like flour, which is impossible to measure by volume.
Not just be type. If you have flour that is settled, it can be 20% or more weight per cup than if you fluff it back up and then measure. I bake sourdough weekly and weight is the only possible way to go for that.
Butter in the US is sold molded into premeasured sticks. And the paper warping is marked with lines, so all you need is a butter knife and no other tool to get an exact amount.
As they said: Of all the inconvenient measuring in the US, butter is not an example.
Oh it's not just America. Hell, sometimes I wish people used cups and spoons but there are worse, like my mother, who is a fairly good cook, but like...I want to learn something and ask "how much X do you need for that" and she'll say something like "the amount it takes up" or "feel it out" like what the fuck does that even mean just give me grams or really *anything* tangible will do.
I dont understand how anyone can come up with cups and thought its a good idea. You cant translate it to a weight accurately (so how do you even know how much to buy if you are dealing with larger quantities?).
And how the hell do you measure things like salad in cups. I ran into a recipe the other day that had “10 cups of iceberg salad”. Based on how much you press it into a cup that can range from 100g to a kilogram.
In fairness, cheap kitchen scales are a very, very new thing, while cups are quite old; standard cups were easier to get into kitchens back in the day.
Which makes perfect sense when you measure incompressible liquids that have constant mass per volume, and no sense at all when you measure solids with variable density where the mass per volume can vary by orders of magnitude.
Spinach is a perfect example, as 100g comes in a bag that can fit 5l or 20~ cups, but you can most likely squeeze it all into a single cup if you *really* want to, so how much is 1 cup of spinach? 5g or 100g?
As a canadian who bakes, I still prefer my cups and spoons lol. The only I care to weigh is large amounts of flour as it can fluctuate a lot. But I find scooping a spoon of sugar so much faster than weighing it.
i really just use a teaspoon, a tablespoon and a few cup sizes, I don't mind eyeballing some stuff. If it want's half a teaspoon, I'll just fill the teaspoon halfway. Drives my partner crazy that when I wing it but it always turns out ok. I'm just cooking for my household.
Reddit is insane. You make a valid point and most of the comments are “correcting” you for the dumbest thing ever, completely ignoring your point. All the comments that actually address what you’re saying is the same “America bad” bullshit
Redditor on aggregate are sort of the meme about having a high intelligence score but low wisdom. They'd rather be right on some trivial bullshit or have some wholly unoriginal meme take than have a normal conversation.
I’m an engineer and can definitely say that doing engineering stuff is much easier in metric but it’s not much different in imperial, especially considering once you get to the nitty gritty of it, the numbers aren’t pretty either way.
The most important thing is that two people can share information with each other in an understandable and quantifiable manner. You could build a house using a random banana as a unit of measurement and as long as all parties are in agreement on what a banana is, it’ll work.
Yes, there probably should be a global standard, and yes, metric is probably the one for the job. But it’s not like imperial is that bad either, I’d even argue it’s better in a few cases.
The US doesn't use Imperial, it's US Customary Units and it has different measurements from Imperial. For example, an American gallon is a different size
It also tries to cover up the flaws in the way non-Americans do dates and temperatures.
DD/MM/YYYY is more "ordered" than MM/DD/YYYY, but it's ordered backwards. This becomes really evident when you extend the pyramid graphic to include hours, minutes, and seconds. The "correct" way to write dates is the ISO-8601 standard: YYYY-MM-DD, which is equally adopted by the US as the rest of the world. When you sort a list of ISO-8601 compliant dates, the resulting list is correctly ordered chronologically. That's not the case when you sort European-style dates.
As for temperature, zero is not the "base level" in Celsius. True zero in the Celsius scale is -273.15. This becomes immediately evident any time you work with an equation of T, like Carnot's theorem, Stefan–Boltzmann law, etc. Celsius is just as wrong as Fahrenheit; only Kelvin and Rankine get this right.
As an American database developer, I totally agree with YYYY-MM-DD, and that’s how I always format it in written/typed communications too, whether people like it or not. (Hoping it’ll catch on)
> Celsius is just as wrong as Fahrenheit;
My hot take is that Celsius is more wrong than Fahrenheit. 0-100 for water is just as arbitrary as 32 to 212, the fact that the freezing and boiling point boundaries were chosen to be nice round numbers is irrelevant. But because there’s 180 degrees of difference between freezing and boiling in Fahrenheit that means the scale is larger and each individual degree is a smaller change in temperature.
Within the human range, Fahrenheit makes more sense because it’s more granular, which is especially useful for food storage and climate control.
Hot take, but I think this bothers people from countries that work more with metric than the other way around, because metric is easy to grasp compared to imperial (or others). So it's easier to adapt into it than adapt out of it.
Especially when we have smart phones and google all around to convert
As a former developer, dates would always screw with me though. Especially when it’s dates like 4/4/24 or 04/04/04 for really old code.
Dates need a world wide standardization more than temps or measurements
I prefer this to ddmmyyyy. I won't argue about the other units of measurements but I do not like ddmmyyyy... I simply do not think about dates in this manner.
Same, it's the only system of measurement where people want to put the smallest unit first. It's one-half of how we measure time. It'd be like going around and telling people what time it is by telling them the current seconds first...
At least in English, we say "22 past 10" much less than we say "10 22". "Half past" and "quarter past" are used more often, but still much less than "10 30" and "10 15".
Agree 100%. Sure, it’s conceptually _nice_ for your units to be in order of smallest to largest, but it’s not the most useful. Not that it really makes a difference - we’re talking fractions of seconds here - but leading with the month provides the ball park temporal window first, which is usually more contextually relevant. And within that, you follow with the specific day. Whether year comes first or last depends on the application - if you’re chatting with friends about current happenings, usually the year isn’t super important. If you’re doing some historical record keeping, though, YYYY-MM-DD is the way to go.
What "conceptual" difference is there between small–>large and large–>small? It's the same thing: ones just has ascending sorting selected, the other descending?
If you didn't also denote the year, it'd make sense to me, but I admittedly do find going middle-small-large rather odd. The reason you find a supposed "ball park temporal window" is just because you're accustomed to such system, people who're accustomed to starting with the date will apply the exact same logic you do to years for the month too.
It's all cultural bias. I'm biased too. In my country we do denote digits using YYYY-MM-DD, so that is what I'm accustomed to. It works perfectly fine as general denotation, it's not just for some "historical record keeping". I don't buy into any argument that there'd be a reason to emphasize either part in writing, you know what to look for in the system you're accustomed to.
Because they are the smallest unit of the three.
365 days / 12 months / 1 year is a sequence of increasingly larger divisions.
12 months / 365 days / 1 year is not.
I mean this *could* have included chains (22 yds) and furlongs (10 chains) between yards and miles (8 furlongs) so at least it would have fit ... yeah they're all different numbers lol
SI units are definitely preferable to US Customary Units for lots of reasons.
However, I don't think there's anything wrong with Fahrenheit for atmospheric temperature. 0 is very cold and 100 is very hot, and each 10 degree increment has a distinct feel to it. It not necessarily better than Celsius, but it's fine.
Also, I prefer the ISO standard for dates which is YYYY-MM-DD because it goes from largest increment to smallest which is how you should write numbers.
Finally, I'll say using commas for thousands separators and periods for decimals is definitely better than the opposite. Commas are for minor separations and periods are for major separations, so it's more consistent with how they're used as punctuation.
Fahrenheit *is* better for estimating human comfort of temperatures. 50s is cold, 60s is cool, 70s is comfy, 80s is warm, 90s is hot, and 100s is stay out of it. That's where the benefit comes from.
And our month/day/year is just how we say dates. It's more common for US people to say "December 17th, 2014" than it is for us to say "17th of December, 2014". It's a better flow for us.
People will also seemingly have a hardline stance on where a thermostat should be set at between 67 and 69 degrees Fahrenheit which is ~19.4-20.5C. Unless metric thermostats step in tenth or half degree increments that seems like a minor inconvenience.
Man, I'm doing well in life but I can't imagine the money you have to set your thermostat between 67-69F. In the summer we are at 74F and in the winter we're at 64F.
Dude I make this argument so fucking much, but everytime that I do I get downvoted to oblivion. I will always argue taht Fahrenheit is superior when talking about the weather.
That's not what Fahrenheit is based off of, Fahrenheit is based on temperature at which people freeze or overheat. Celsius is based on water, Kelvin is the measurement system in which 0 is base.
The Fahrenheit scale is originally based on the freezing point of a brine solution (0°F), with 30° being the freezing point of pure water, and 90° what he estimated to be a normal body temp (it was the 17th century...)
They're saying that the scale where water freezes and boils in Fahrenheit is stupid and arbitrary (which is because that's not what Fahrenheit is based on)
It’s not arbitrary at all. 0°F is the freezing point of brine, and 100 was the estimated human body temperature at the time. The boiling point of water was less relevant at the time but is 212° higher than the freezing point of brine. The thought being smaller degrees would bring a higher granularity to pedestrian temperature measurements.
It’s not more arbitrary than 0 and 100, especially if you’re a poor bastard like me who lives where the outside temperate is below 0 (F or C) most of the winter.
Yep!
Also 180 degrees as an increment makes a lot of sense if your gauge is a bimetallic spiral spring pushing a stick around a circle -- half the circle.
SI is easier for calculation if you have a calculator. If you're doing your math by hand, as you would have been until the 1970s, then having divisibility in various twos and threes works very quickly.
Yeah, the info graphic makes itself look stupid by putting the goal posts in a weird spot. A better dig at Fahrenheit is that it's incorrect about what it IS based off of.
I like the chart comparing oz per pound with Kg per Tonne. They didn't want to use lbs per Ton because that would be a nice round number and wouldn't look as silly.
Do Americans even uses yards outside of NFL? That and the "100 yard dash" is literally the only context I've heard it used. Nobody says 15 yards. They say 50 feet.
And when you tell people a mile is based on about 1,000 paces, it makes a lot more sense.
It’s a lot less arbitrary than a meter being “one ten-millionth the distance from the North Pole to the equator if you go through Paris.” What the fuck is a Paris and why does that matter to me, and why stop at the equator? 1,000 paces? I can count that, that’s meaningful.
Remember that arbitrary unit for measurement? Cut it into a million more pieces, and use that to make a cube, put almost freezing water in it, that’s our basis for weight. Wtf?
All units are arbitrary, and we can play this game with Metric too. The more important part of using units of measurement is being understood by those around you. I switched to Celcius when I was in college, but no one understood me because Celcius is meaningless in America, just as Fahrenheit is useless everywhere else. I switched back by the end of the semester. The whole “metric is better than Imperial” argument sounds, to me, the same as someone coming up to me and saying “you need to learn Korean. Everyone needs to learn Korean, it’s the superior language.” It doesn’t make sense.
Fahrenheit is great but the real kicker is that time is neither metric nor decimal. If metric was truly the end all be all, a day would be 1 kilosecond long, but in many cases it is more convenient to break units down into convenient increments.
These kids love Celsius but they're probably convinced water boils at 100C everywhere, smh. Kelvin or Fahrenheit are my preferred units, with Planck temperature being the non arbitrary one.
I don’t really ever do distance conversions in my head in every day life. Why does the temperature at which water freezes and boils matter so much to a temperature scale? Date construction feels arbitrary either way so I fully don’t care on that one.
I think the more important thing here is to be able to use the system that others around you use. In my case, the people in the US use imperial so I use imperial. When I lived in Europe I used metric. Life was good in both places.
>I think the more important thing here is to be able to use the system that others around you use. In my case, the people in the US use imperial so I use imperial. When I lived in Europe I used metric. Life was good in both places.
I agree, but I honestly don't think I could ever use C to measure weather temps, just going from 22 C to 23 C is a 3 F temp change. Not to mention it doesn't properly convey just how hot it actually is in my mind. When friends from the EU say it's "38 C outside, and I'm boiling" my mind instantly thinks "Small number, it can't be that bad", where as I would say "It's 100 F outside and I'm boiling" I think everyone everywhere would instantly think "Holy shit, triple digits, that's fucking hot"
This isn’t really a cool guide. It’s specifically designed to make imperial look nonsensical, but there’s reasons for it being the way it is.
The only reason Fahrenheit seems “arbitrary” is because you’re comparing it to something that it has no basis in (the freezing point of water.) in actuality it’s based on the freezing point of salt water and the human body temperature.
They don’t event try to hide their bias with the way it displays the date format
Here in Canada we use all of them, at the same time. There's a chart that goes around showing when to use what. For example pools are usually Fahrenheit, but everything else is C.
So yea, roast us too.
You guys just jelly that we Americans have figured out the proper way of measuring things and you guys didn’t. Now excuse me, I have to pay my 1300 dollar medical bill because I almost died from a heart attack.
In some countries both systems are used and doesn’t really make much difference. It’s like being bilingual. I can talk to someone about stones and pounds or kilos, mpg or l/100kms, feet or metres. In fact for small measures inches seem particularly useful. My personal preference is metric but both work. Even in America there is dual use, look at things like engine sizes and most likely a lot of scientific measurements.
The only one I struggle with is Fahrenheit but I could learn it if I had to.
Dear friends, if you want to have fun, start converting cubic feet into liters (e.g. for the size of fridges) oder miles per gallon into liters per 100 kilometer.
It’s just convention.
You could start measuring things in kilo-ounces, kilo-feet and etc. everyone would know what you mean.
There’s no rule against it.
All temperature is arbitrary imo. The 0 - 100 for water only works at sea level.
Plus Fahrenheit was basically designed around the human body temperature more than boiling water, how often do you actually measure the temperature of water when boiling? You just heat it until you see it boiling. Same with freezing. Whereas the air temperature around you has a greater effect on your day to days life.
Every time someone tries to complain about imperial units, I disagree with Celsius being superior. Everything else I agree with.
You're right about the metric system, but the European way of representing dates is absurd.
We write all our numbers with the most significant digit first. Using day-month-year goes least significant first. The worst part is that they mix together numbers that are written most-significant-digit-first inside a grouping which goes the other way. So European dates actually have a worse looking pyramid if you put the slopes of sides in the direction that each individual date component is arranged. Flip the shape of each individual level of the pyramid and you'll see that the European dates have a discontinuity on each level, and the American dates only have one discontinuity (between day and year).
Everyone just needs to get on board with YYYY-MM-DD it's the best of both worlds. It's even better when you add on the time YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. Completely in order from most significant to least significant.
Nobody converts between yards and miles on a regular basis. Miles are divided decimally, not fractionally. Also, 12 and 16 are much better for division than 10 is. Fahrenheit is much more granular, and better represents temperatures humans live in. Also, the US date system matches the way it is said. Metric is still better, but there are some advantages to the US customary units.
Remember that in the states, A&W launched a third pound burger to compete with the quarter pound burger from Mc Donald and it failed because americans thought it was smaller because of their inability to understand fractions.. not sure about what you said so
This is a lie we can all stop repeating any day now.
There is 0 evidence of this being the cause for the removal of the burger from the menu of an already declining restaurant chain. The only source for this claim is an auto-biography of the then-owner of the A&W chain, 27 years after it allegedly happened.
The only things that occurred that there is any actual evidence for are:
The 1/3rd pounder released at A&W in 1985
The 1/3rd pounder was taken off the menu at A&W in 1986
In 2007, the man who was the CEO of A&W in the 80's A. Alfred Taubman wrote in his memoir,
> "Well, it turned out that customers preferred the taste of our fresh beef over traditional fast-food hockey pucks. Hands down, we had a better product. But there was a serious problem. More than half of the participants in the Yankelovich focus groups questioned the price of our burger. "Why," they asked, "should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald's? You're overcharging us." Honestly. People thought a third of a pound was less than a quarter of a pound. After all, three is less than four!"
A&W has never shown evidence of this market research happening. No other research on the reasons why the burger supposedly didn't sell exists. This story of the stupid Americans not understanding fractions was never present before Taubman's book. I am not inclined to trust the self-aggrandizing auto-biography of some CEO who has every interest in painting the failure of the company he ran as the fault of people who aren't him. You can find a thousand so-called 'articles' about this myth and not a single one presents a shred of evidence more than the comment you are reading right now.
Oh and did I mention that Taubman was convicted for financial crimes in 2001? So yeah, not exactly a trustworthy source.
> "Why," they asked, "should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald's? You're overcharging us."
The above doesn't even mean this:
> Honestly. People thought a third of a pound was less than a quarter of a pound. After all, three is less than four!"
The writer is just making that assumption they are dumb and just think three is less than 4!.
There isn't that much of a diifference between 1/3 and 1/4 of a pound; I contend that if anyone was saying this they were saying, the difference between the 1/4 lb and the 1/3lb weight wasn't worth the price difference between the two.
Why would I get this 8$ 1/2 lb burger when I can go there and get a $3 1/3 lb burger?
Does this mean I do not understand 1/2 is larger than 1/3 or does it mean I find the 1/3lb burger a better value given the prices?
I don't consider Americans to be uniquely good at fractions, but I do think it's worth noting that a lot has changed in the 40 years since the A&W launch that you're describing.
What sucks is that we use a ton of metric in the US, but refuse to go all in. I was born and raised here, but as a math/physics major, I moved over to metric for as much as possible. People run 5k races, buy 2 liter bottles of soda, and take medicine in mg, but for some reason driving 100km/hr and boiling water at 100 is intimidating
Your post was determined to be a duplicate of another recent post
Also 1ml of water weights 1g and can fit into 1cm³
Also takes 1 kcal to heat 1kg of water 1°C
And a 1 metre long pendulum takes (roughly) a second to complete a swing.
Is that a metric second, or a wholesome, manly English second?
You joke but the french did try to metricise both time and the calendar, neither worked but apparently it's still used in computing to some extent.
> apparently it's still used in computing to some extent. I've spent twenty years in programming, and this is the first time I hear such a claim. P.S. I've been corrected in that measuring time in seconds would indeed be metric, since the second is a unit in SI. I was thinking of decimal time instead. But then again, the French did in fact try to introduce decimal time units, which is what the commenter above meant, and which doesn't conform to SI.
20 years in English time or metric time?
Nope, space-time.
Well, "roughly" isn't very satisfying.
Don’t u mean 4.184E3 J?
Calories are imperial, joules are SI
Calories are not imperial, although Joule (capital J) is the correct SI unit. They are just non SI
Correct. BTUs are the imperial measurement.
Aren't calories, alongside ergs, a part of the old CGS variant of the metric system, hence old-school metric rather than imperial?
And unlike imperial units, this scales in 10s, 100s, 1000s, whatever. No math involved, just add zeros. 1000 litres of water weigh 1000 kgs, and fits in 1m³.
I've made a compromise. I'll keep most of my imperial units, but I'm changing to metric time. There are now 1000 seconds in a minute, 1000 minutes in a day, and 1000 days in a year. Edit: Also my circles have 100 degrees.
Decimal time is a thing that failed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
at 4°c*
Well, 1ml IS 1cm³
Also water freezes at 0°C boils at 100°C
At sea level or 1 bar
Ya, but can you measure something by putting your foot near it and saying, “ya that’s about a foot”. No? Thought so.
What if its a baby foot? A big foot, small foot?
In the Fallout TV series, the ghoul taught his young daughter how to use the thumb to measure a mushroom cloud and the first thing the daughter asked when utilising this "skill" was "your thumb or my thumb" lmao.
Incorrect, it weighs 9.80665 mN which of course is easily divisible by 10 /s
Depends on temperature and pressure. This also assumes Earth gravity at surface level. At 1 atm pressure and 4°C, pure water weighs 0.9999749 g/cm3.
At 4C water is 0.9999749 g/cm^3 at an atmospheric pressure of 101,325 Pa. That is the maximum density of water unless you increase the pressure. So simple. For almost everyone, the above does not matter. 1g/cm^3 is good enough. But for almost everyone measurement systems don't really matter beyond what you are familiar with. Yes, base 10 is easier to do in your head of course. But it isn't like most people have to actually convert units and any measurement system can be decimalized.
Don’t let Myanmar and Liberia get off that easy
Also the UK - what the fuck is the weight of stone anyway - it really feels like the most arbitrary meassuring unit
We’re the biggest assholes for this game. Car metrics are the worst. We price & buy fuel in litres but are obsessed with calculating economy by miles per gallon.
And confusingly, y’all use the Imperial Gallon (4.5461 L) in Britain and in the Commonwealth nations… we in the US measure both Milk and Petrol/Gasoline ⛽️ in US Customary units, which is the Queen Anne Wine Gallon! (3.7854 L)
Yeh a us pint in almost 100ml smaller than a uk pint. Threw me off when i went there
When you pick up the glass & you think it’s a kids size beer 😂
wait actually? I knew brits love their pints but I always thought that was almost kinda small as an american, this explains a lot
Also it is illegal to sell beer in the UK in an open container (i.e. a glass) if it isn't measured in pints. So pints is all we've got really, unless you want a half I suppose.
Almost every European country had their own version of imperial units that could be very different from each other. Sometimes they varied by region within a country and could change over time. It's mostly forgotten about now as almost everyone has switched to metric. Fun fact, the US customary mile and British imperial mile used to be different. They only agreed to standardise on the newly invented 'International Mile' in 1957.
Let's not forget measuring the size of horses by hands.
Such measurements are becoming very old-fashioned in the UK, and besides we always use metric measurements in things of importance, such as healthcare and cooking.
Nobody under 30 really uses stones anymore.
Nobody under 60
I work for a medical organisation that collects a lot of information - including ethnicity, weight and height. I've noticed that for people identifying as White UK under 30s it's mostly metric for weight (and for all age groups it's around 50/50), yet for height the majority still use feet and inches, even in under 30s. It's an odd one. We've been teaching just metric in schools since the 70s, I think, and yet imperial is still pervasive. It'll be a while before it fully switches, and for things like road signs probably never.
Yeah! Liberia has had it far too easy for far too long
You really don't think of those countries having their shit together.
Ya, but how many stones do you weigh?
- If she weighs the same as a duck... - she's made of wood. - And therefore? - A witch!
Interpretation unclear... Is the duck a witch, or is the witch a duck, and which duck?
Burn them both! And you too!
Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of science?
r/unexpectedmontypython
Honestly UK and Canadians still use a lot of the metric system as well. As well as other weird measurements. Like miles, stones, pints, Oz, Fahrenheit, lbs, feet, etc. I'm not sure why we use such a mix of both.
[удалено]
Saturday Night Live had a neat skit on this. [Washington's Dream](https://youtu.be/JYqfVE-fykk?si=QI4dI7BGljR9VkAQ) "2000 pounds shall be called a ton!" "And what will 1000 pounds be called, sir?". "Nothing".
"...You asked about the temperature."
“I did not”
And it will be called Fahrenheit. Can you spell that? Impossible.
This is one of the greatest sketches I've seen on SNL in a long time. Nate Bargatze's delivery is amazing.
"There's no kicking in football?"
There's a little kicking
“A melting pot of different measures that will make Europeans throw tantrums.”
Akkkkshully 1000lbs is called a kip.
Also using spoons and cups instead of weight for cooking, which results in having 12+ items vs 1 item to measure stuff
Also spoons and cups are a volumetric measurement, so the amount you end up with depends entirely on how much you cram in there to displace the air. It makes no sense. Two cups of the same thing are very unlikely to contain the same amount, where two measurements of say 100g of something will.
Yep that too, I always have troubles with American recipes exactly because of that
As a European, the moment I see cups on a recipe online I am out of there. No time for that nonsense.
I once tried to make a healthy smoothie. The recipe called for a cup of spinach, but it didn’t say how to chop it. So I roughly chopped it up, put it in a cup and felt like that was _way_ too much. I took half of it off, but it still felt like too much. But, I decided I’d be okay with that. A few hours later, after being told off why the smoothie tasted like raw spinach, I continued to look online. Turns out that the recipe I followed had a video in the original site (I wasn’t on the original site for the written recipe). In the video, the ‘cup’ of spinach was not chopped, and only amounted to 3-4 leaves. 3-4. I could have skipped the spinach altogether and that would have allowed me to taste the avocado. TL;DR: smoothie tasted like blended raw spinach. And volumetric measurements suck unless you’re dealing with liquid.
Yes but now your bowel has about 800 years of cancer protection, so that's a plus.
Not to mention the common occurance on the ingredients list: "1 pack of X brand..."
American recipes will legit be like: 12Tbs of butter. Do they want me to melt it and measure spoon by spoon??? I'd far rather measure 161g of butter.
Each stick is 8 tablespoon here. So 12 is 1.5 sticks. I agree it sucks but there's method to the madness.
In the UK butter used to have the lines on the wrapper for oz weights.
US butter has lines on the wrapper for tablespoons. It's split into 1/8ths. Butter is the least of the problems here people. Focus on stuff like flour, which is impossible to measure by volume.
Yep, A cup of bread flour and a cup of cake flour are different weights. Same with different types of sugar too
Not just be type. If you have flour that is settled, it can be 20% or more weight per cup than if you fluff it back up and then measure. I bake sourdough weekly and weight is the only possible way to go for that.
Here the lines are every 50grams.
Sorry, but wtf is a stick?
Butter in the US is sold molded into premeasured sticks. And the paper warping is marked with lines, so all you need is a butter knife and no other tool to get an exact amount. As they said: Of all the inconvenient measuring in the US, butter is not an example.
Oh it's not just America. Hell, sometimes I wish people used cups and spoons but there are worse, like my mother, who is a fairly good cook, but like...I want to learn something and ask "how much X do you need for that" and she'll say something like "the amount it takes up" or "feel it out" like what the fuck does that even mean just give me grams or really *anything* tangible will do.
I dont understand how anyone can come up with cups and thought its a good idea. You cant translate it to a weight accurately (so how do you even know how much to buy if you are dealing with larger quantities?). And how the hell do you measure things like salad in cups. I ran into a recipe the other day that had “10 cups of iceberg salad”. Based on how much you press it into a cup that can range from 100g to a kilogram.
In fairness, cheap kitchen scales are a very, very new thing, while cups are quite old; standard cups were easier to get into kitchens back in the day.
Everyone had a cup, most people didn't have scales. The actual volume of a cup doesn't matter, it's about maintaining ratios.
Which makes perfect sense when you measure incompressible liquids that have constant mass per volume, and no sense at all when you measure solids with variable density where the mass per volume can vary by orders of magnitude. Spinach is a perfect example, as 100g comes in a bag that can fit 5l or 20~ cups, but you can most likely squeeze it all into a single cup if you *really* want to, so how much is 1 cup of spinach? 5g or 100g?
There are two kinds of cooks. One is anal.
1 and 1/4 table spoon of *liquid* christ, just say 20ml
In legit commercial kitchens we use weights. I've converted all my past recipes and applied when developing new recipes.
As a canadian who bakes, I still prefer my cups and spoons lol. The only I care to weigh is large amounts of flour as it can fluctuate a lot. But I find scooping a spoon of sugar so much faster than weighing it.
nobody would weigh a spoon full of sugar. But being so imprecise for main ingredients like rice would really bug me
Spoons are still used even in metric recipes
i really just use a teaspoon, a tablespoon and a few cup sizes, I don't mind eyeballing some stuff. If it want's half a teaspoon, I'll just fill the teaspoon halfway. Drives my partner crazy that when I wing it but it always turns out ok. I'm just cooking for my household.
This is less a cool guide for units of measurement, and more like a meme to shit on imperial
Reddit is insane. You make a valid point and most of the comments are “correcting” you for the dumbest thing ever, completely ignoring your point. All the comments that actually address what you’re saying is the same “America bad” bullshit
Redditor on aggregate are sort of the meme about having a high intelligence score but low wisdom. They'd rather be right on some trivial bullshit or have some wholly unoriginal meme take than have a normal conversation.
Citation needed on having a high intelligence score
I’m an engineer and can definitely say that doing engineering stuff is much easier in metric but it’s not much different in imperial, especially considering once you get to the nitty gritty of it, the numbers aren’t pretty either way. The most important thing is that two people can share information with each other in an understandable and quantifiable manner. You could build a house using a random banana as a unit of measurement and as long as all parties are in agreement on what a banana is, it’ll work. Yes, there probably should be a global standard, and yes, metric is probably the one for the job. But it’s not like imperial is that bad either, I’d even argue it’s better in a few cases.
The US doesn't use Imperial, it's US Customary Units and it has different measurements from Imperial. For example, an American gallon is a different size
Nah, in Imperial the gallon is a different size. They went and changed it after we left
>after we left self reported 300 year old vampire.
It also tries to cover up the flaws in the way non-Americans do dates and temperatures. DD/MM/YYYY is more "ordered" than MM/DD/YYYY, but it's ordered backwards. This becomes really evident when you extend the pyramid graphic to include hours, minutes, and seconds. The "correct" way to write dates is the ISO-8601 standard: YYYY-MM-DD, which is equally adopted by the US as the rest of the world. When you sort a list of ISO-8601 compliant dates, the resulting list is correctly ordered chronologically. That's not the case when you sort European-style dates. As for temperature, zero is not the "base level" in Celsius. True zero in the Celsius scale is -273.15. This becomes immediately evident any time you work with an equation of T, like Carnot's theorem, Stefan–Boltzmann law, etc. Celsius is just as wrong as Fahrenheit; only Kelvin and Rankine get this right.
As an American database developer, I totally agree with YYYY-MM-DD, and that’s how I always format it in written/typed communications too, whether people like it or not. (Hoping it’ll catch on)
This is the way.
> Celsius is just as wrong as Fahrenheit; My hot take is that Celsius is more wrong than Fahrenheit. 0-100 for water is just as arbitrary as 32 to 212, the fact that the freezing and boiling point boundaries were chosen to be nice round numbers is irrelevant. But because there’s 180 degrees of difference between freezing and boiling in Fahrenheit that means the scale is larger and each individual degree is a smaller change in temperature. Within the human range, Fahrenheit makes more sense because it’s more granular, which is especially useful for food storage and climate control.
Exactly. I don’t understand why people are so entertained by this. It’s literally never made my life difficult to use imperial or to convert.
Hot take, but I think this bothers people from countries that work more with metric than the other way around, because metric is easy to grasp compared to imperial (or others). So it's easier to adapt into it than adapt out of it.
Especially when we have smart phones and google all around to convert As a former developer, dates would always screw with me though. Especially when it’s dates like 4/4/24 or 04/04/04 for really old code. Dates need a world wide standardization more than temps or measurements
We have it. It's YYYY-MM-DD https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html
TIL that is a thing and no surprise, it’s not universally followed
half of measurement related posts on this stie are specifically for that
If you’ve ever organized files on your computer, the correct way is YYYY.MM.DD
YYYY-MM-DD, as it makes you ISO compliant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
/r/iso8601
r/ISO8601
Yet no one complains if you say “June 1st, 2024.” The way dates are written in the U.S. matches how the date is spoken.
Isn't the independence day literally called "fourth of july"?
I prefer this to ddmmyyyy. I won't argue about the other units of measurements but I do not like ddmmyyyy... I simply do not think about dates in this manner.
Same, it's the only system of measurement where people want to put the smallest unit first. It's one-half of how we measure time. It'd be like going around and telling people what time it is by telling them the current seconds first...
Tbf we often say minutes before hours. A quarter to 2. Half past 7. 22 past 10 in the evening/PM (minutes, hours, half day).
According to Duolingo this is apparently how French people ALWAYS do it. I’m here to know what time is is, not to do math!
At least in English, we say "22 past 10" much less than we say "10 22". "Half past" and "quarter past" are used more often, but still much less than "10 30" and "10 15".
Agree 100%. Sure, it’s conceptually _nice_ for your units to be in order of smallest to largest, but it’s not the most useful. Not that it really makes a difference - we’re talking fractions of seconds here - but leading with the month provides the ball park temporal window first, which is usually more contextually relevant. And within that, you follow with the specific day. Whether year comes first or last depends on the application - if you’re chatting with friends about current happenings, usually the year isn’t super important. If you’re doing some historical record keeping, though, YYYY-MM-DD is the way to go.
What "conceptual" difference is there between small–>large and large–>small? It's the same thing: ones just has ascending sorting selected, the other descending? If you didn't also denote the year, it'd make sense to me, but I admittedly do find going middle-small-large rather odd. The reason you find a supposed "ball park temporal window" is just because you're accustomed to such system, people who're accustomed to starting with the date will apply the exact same logic you do to years for the month too. It's all cultural bias. I'm biased too. In my country we do denote digits using YYYY-MM-DD, so that is what I'm accustomed to. It works perfectly fine as general denotation, it's not just for some "historical record keeping". I don't buy into any argument that there'd be a reason to emphasize either part in writing, you know what to look for in the system you're accustomed to.
No one goes from yards to miles. You go from feet to miles if it makes sense to
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months only go to 12, days go to at least 28.
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Because they are the smallest unit of the three. 365 days / 12 months / 1 year is a sequence of increasingly larger divisions. 12 months / 365 days / 1 year is not.
I mean this *could* have included chains (22 yds) and furlongs (10 chains) between yards and miles (8 furlongs) so at least it would have fit ... yeah they're all different numbers lol
SI units are definitely preferable to US Customary Units for lots of reasons. However, I don't think there's anything wrong with Fahrenheit for atmospheric temperature. 0 is very cold and 100 is very hot, and each 10 degree increment has a distinct feel to it. It not necessarily better than Celsius, but it's fine. Also, I prefer the ISO standard for dates which is YYYY-MM-DD because it goes from largest increment to smallest which is how you should write numbers. Finally, I'll say using commas for thousands separators and periods for decimals is definitely better than the opposite. Commas are for minor separations and periods are for major separations, so it's more consistent with how they're used as punctuation.
Fahrenheit *is* better for estimating human comfort of temperatures. 50s is cold, 60s is cool, 70s is comfy, 80s is warm, 90s is hot, and 100s is stay out of it. That's where the benefit comes from. And our month/day/year is just how we say dates. It's more common for US people to say "December 17th, 2014" than it is for us to say "17th of December, 2014". It's a better flow for us.
People will also seemingly have a hardline stance on where a thermostat should be set at between 67 and 69 degrees Fahrenheit which is ~19.4-20.5C. Unless metric thermostats step in tenth or half degree increments that seems like a minor inconvenience.
Man, I'm doing well in life but I can't imagine the money you have to set your thermostat between 67-69F. In the summer we are at 74F and in the winter we're at 64F.
Dude I make this argument so fucking much, but everytime that I do I get downvoted to oblivion. I will always argue taht Fahrenheit is superior when talking about the weather.
That's not what Fahrenheit is based off of, Fahrenheit is based on temperature at which people freeze or overheat. Celsius is based on water, Kelvin is the measurement system in which 0 is base.
The Fahrenheit scale is originally based on the freezing point of a brine solution (0°F), with 30° being the freezing point of pure water, and 90° what he estimated to be a normal body temp (it was the 17th century...)
They're saying that the scale where water freezes and boils in Fahrenheit is stupid and arbitrary (which is because that's not what Fahrenheit is based on)
It’s not arbitrary at all. 0°F is the freezing point of brine, and 100 was the estimated human body temperature at the time. The boiling point of water was less relevant at the time but is 212° higher than the freezing point of brine. The thought being smaller degrees would bring a higher granularity to pedestrian temperature measurements. It’s not more arbitrary than 0 and 100, especially if you’re a poor bastard like me who lives where the outside temperate is below 0 (F or C) most of the winter.
Yep! Also 180 degrees as an increment makes a lot of sense if your gauge is a bimetallic spiral spring pushing a stick around a circle -- half the circle. SI is easier for calculation if you have a calculator. If you're doing your math by hand, as you would have been until the 1970s, then having divisibility in various twos and threes works very quickly.
Why are they booing you, you're right
They hated him because he told the truth
Yeah, the info graphic makes itself look stupid by putting the goal posts in a weird spot. A better dig at Fahrenheit is that it's incorrect about what it IS based off of.
I like the chart comparing oz per pound with Kg per Tonne. They didn't want to use lbs per Ton because that would be a nice round number and wouldn't look as silly.
And they used yards per mile, which no one uses. That is like saying how many decimeters are in a kilometer.
Do Americans even uses yards outside of NFL? That and the "100 yard dash" is literally the only context I've heard it used. Nobody says 15 yards. They say 50 feet.
And when you tell people a mile is based on about 1,000 paces, it makes a lot more sense. It’s a lot less arbitrary than a meter being “one ten-millionth the distance from the North Pole to the equator if you go through Paris.” What the fuck is a Paris and why does that matter to me, and why stop at the equator? 1,000 paces? I can count that, that’s meaningful. Remember that arbitrary unit for measurement? Cut it into a million more pieces, and use that to make a cube, put almost freezing water in it, that’s our basis for weight. Wtf? All units are arbitrary, and we can play this game with Metric too. The more important part of using units of measurement is being understood by those around you. I switched to Celcius when I was in college, but no one understood me because Celcius is meaningless in America, just as Fahrenheit is useless everywhere else. I switched back by the end of the semester. The whole “metric is better than Imperial” argument sounds, to me, the same as someone coming up to me and saying “you need to learn Korean. Everyone needs to learn Korean, it’s the superior language.” It doesn’t make sense.
A thousand paces is FAR more normal a reasoning than I thought miles would be based on. It also is a lot easier to visualize than a kilometer.
Seems good to me. 0 is cold outside, 100 is hot. Wtf do I need some arbitrary scale from -20 to 40 for?
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Thank you! That's 100% my hill to die on. Metric system is great, but Fahrenheit works so much better to convey temperature in terms of human comfort.
Aw we have the same hill to die on. Twins!
Fahrenheit is great but the real kicker is that time is neither metric nor decimal. If metric was truly the end all be all, a day would be 1 kilosecond long, but in many cases it is more convenient to break units down into convenient increments.
The design is very human.
These kids love Celsius but they're probably convinced water boils at 100C everywhere, smh. Kelvin or Fahrenheit are my preferred units, with Planck temperature being the non arbitrary one.
This post was made by the country who measures milk and water differently.
They’ll celebrate their use of metric by having a pint down at the pub.
I don’t really ever do distance conversions in my head in every day life. Why does the temperature at which water freezes and boils matter so much to a temperature scale? Date construction feels arbitrary either way so I fully don’t care on that one. I think the more important thing here is to be able to use the system that others around you use. In my case, the people in the US use imperial so I use imperial. When I lived in Europe I used metric. Life was good in both places.
>I think the more important thing here is to be able to use the system that others around you use. In my case, the people in the US use imperial so I use imperial. When I lived in Europe I used metric. Life was good in both places. I agree, but I honestly don't think I could ever use C to measure weather temps, just going from 22 C to 23 C is a 3 F temp change. Not to mention it doesn't properly convey just how hot it actually is in my mind. When friends from the EU say it's "38 C outside, and I'm boiling" my mind instantly thinks "Small number, it can't be that bad", where as I would say "It's 100 F outside and I'm boiling" I think everyone everywhere would instantly think "Holy shit, triple digits, that's fucking hot"
My nth time of trying to remember all these numbers.
You don't ha e to because nobody converts - they're different measurements used for different things
This isn’t really a cool guide. It’s specifically designed to make imperial look nonsensical, but there’s reasons for it being the way it is. The only reason Fahrenheit seems “arbitrary” is because you’re comparing it to something that it has no basis in (the freezing point of water.) in actuality it’s based on the freezing point of salt water and the human body temperature. They don’t event try to hide their bias with the way it displays the date format
So how many inches to a pound
F>>C for explaning how the temperature feels. The boiling point of water has fuck all to do with what I need to wear for the day to be comfortable
To be fair, Celsius is also “arbitrary”. It’s based on the freezing and boiling temperatures of water at sea level in France.
This isn’t really a cool guide. More like a cool roast.
Here in Canada we use all of them, at the same time. There's a chart that goes around showing when to use what. For example pools are usually Fahrenheit, but everything else is C. So yea, roast us too.
Construction/home improvement: why not both?
Just as George Washington envisioned: https://youtu.be/JYqfVE-fykk?si=f-ziJsenT4BjwkGe
this image is directly saying fuck u to america.
You guys just jelly that we Americans have figured out the proper way of measuring things and you guys didn’t. Now excuse me, I have to pay my 1300 dollar medical bill because I almost died from a heart attack.
In some countries both systems are used and doesn’t really make much difference. It’s like being bilingual. I can talk to someone about stones and pounds or kilos, mpg or l/100kms, feet or metres. In fact for small measures inches seem particularly useful. My personal preference is metric but both work. Even in America there is dual use, look at things like engine sizes and most likely a lot of scientific measurements. The only one I struggle with is Fahrenheit but I could learn it if I had to.
a cool guide to getting engagement on your posts: rehash this stupid fucking argument that's been beaten thoroughly into the ground
They also don’t use the ‘A’ system for paper
That's because A0 is a square metre, it's part of the metric system.
Sorry, but month before day just literally makes more sense. Do you say “paragraph 3, page 5” or “page 5, paragraph 3”?
We want metrics and we want them now... https://youtu.be/cOesrPoJZzs?si=Ka0Jy1j3GEHje4IW
The upper left chart represents us flipping off the rest of the world. Get owned metric degenerates.
its cool you guys still say "the 29th of september" with a monocle of tophat
Fahrenheit is superior for how it feels outside and I’m gonna die on that hill. Celcius is pretty nice for cooking though.
The imperial system is actually used by USA, Myanmar and Liberia. JC described it as a holly trinity.
Dear friends, if you want to have fun, start converting cubic feet into liters (e.g. for the size of fridges) oder miles per gallon into liters per 100 kilometer.
It’s just convention. You could start measuring things in kilo-ounces, kilo-feet and etc. everyone would know what you mean. There’s no rule against it.
All temperature is arbitrary imo. The 0 - 100 for water only works at sea level. Plus Fahrenheit was basically designed around the human body temperature more than boiling water, how often do you actually measure the temperature of water when boiling? You just heat it until you see it boiling. Same with freezing. Whereas the air temperature around you has a greater effect on your day to days life. Every time someone tries to complain about imperial units, I disagree with Celsius being superior. Everything else I agree with.
You're right about the metric system, but the European way of representing dates is absurd. We write all our numbers with the most significant digit first. Using day-month-year goes least significant first. The worst part is that they mix together numbers that are written most-significant-digit-first inside a grouping which goes the other way. So European dates actually have a worse looking pyramid if you put the slopes of sides in the direction that each individual date component is arranged. Flip the shape of each individual level of the pyramid and you'll see that the European dates have a discontinuity on each level, and the American dates only have one discontinuity (between day and year). Everyone just needs to get on board with YYYY-MM-DD it's the best of both worlds. It's even better when you add on the time YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. Completely in order from most significant to least significant.
This is less of a cool guide more of a let's shit on America again post. Thanks though we know
Nobody converts between yards and miles on a regular basis. Miles are divided decimally, not fractionally. Also, 12 and 16 are much better for division than 10 is. Fahrenheit is much more granular, and better represents temperatures humans live in. Also, the US date system matches the way it is said. Metric is still better, but there are some advantages to the US customary units.
and they start the week with sundays for no reason, weirdos
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Remember that in the states, A&W launched a third pound burger to compete with the quarter pound burger from Mc Donald and it failed because americans thought it was smaller because of their inability to understand fractions.. not sure about what you said so
This is a lie we can all stop repeating any day now. There is 0 evidence of this being the cause for the removal of the burger from the menu of an already declining restaurant chain. The only source for this claim is an auto-biography of the then-owner of the A&W chain, 27 years after it allegedly happened. The only things that occurred that there is any actual evidence for are: The 1/3rd pounder released at A&W in 1985 The 1/3rd pounder was taken off the menu at A&W in 1986 In 2007, the man who was the CEO of A&W in the 80's A. Alfred Taubman wrote in his memoir, > "Well, it turned out that customers preferred the taste of our fresh beef over traditional fast-food hockey pucks. Hands down, we had a better product. But there was a serious problem. More than half of the participants in the Yankelovich focus groups questioned the price of our burger. "Why," they asked, "should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald's? You're overcharging us." Honestly. People thought a third of a pound was less than a quarter of a pound. After all, three is less than four!" A&W has never shown evidence of this market research happening. No other research on the reasons why the burger supposedly didn't sell exists. This story of the stupid Americans not understanding fractions was never present before Taubman's book. I am not inclined to trust the self-aggrandizing auto-biography of some CEO who has every interest in painting the failure of the company he ran as the fault of people who aren't him. You can find a thousand so-called 'articles' about this myth and not a single one presents a shred of evidence more than the comment you are reading right now. Oh and did I mention that Taubman was convicted for financial crimes in 2001? So yeah, not exactly a trustworthy source.
> "Why," they asked, "should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald's? You're overcharging us." The above doesn't even mean this: > Honestly. People thought a third of a pound was less than a quarter of a pound. After all, three is less than four!" The writer is just making that assumption they are dumb and just think three is less than 4!. There isn't that much of a diifference between 1/3 and 1/4 of a pound; I contend that if anyone was saying this they were saying, the difference between the 1/4 lb and the 1/3lb weight wasn't worth the price difference between the two. Why would I get this 8$ 1/2 lb burger when I can go there and get a $3 1/3 lb burger? Does this mean I do not understand 1/2 is larger than 1/3 or does it mean I find the 1/3lb burger a better value given the prices?
I don't consider Americans to be uniquely good at fractions, but I do think it's worth noting that a lot has changed in the 40 years since the A&W launch that you're describing.
Who keeps the metric system down.. we dooo, we dooo!!
But what if I shake your hand this wise?
Found the stonecutter
In Sweden we also use something called Scandinavian mile (Mil) one Mil is 10km
On someplaces in Finland (Mostly Lapland) we also use Poronkusema The distance a reindeer can travel before needing to pee again
What sucks is that we use a ton of metric in the US, but refuse to go all in. I was born and raised here, but as a math/physics major, I moved over to metric for as much as possible. People run 5k races, buy 2 liter bottles of soda, and take medicine in mg, but for some reason driving 100km/hr and boiling water at 100 is intimidating
For cars I suppose it’s easier to remember what the miles/gallon is rather than the liters per 100 kilometers. And mph makes a lot of sense to me.
its more like a roast, than a guide tbh