• @assassin_aragorn
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    21 year ago

    I find imperial vs metric to be a question of practicality vs ideality, and as an engineer I tend towards the former. Either way it doesn’t really matter, because unit conversions are easy math, and a good engineer can work in any unit system.

    In defense of imperial, to balance things out here:

    • I almost never need to go from inches to feet to yards to miles. Conversions like that play almost no role in my daily life. Easily going from mm to cm to m to km is a solution in need of a problem.

    • Because imperial isn’t bound by a constant conversion factor, you can use several points of reference. An inch is about the size of one knuckle. A foot is roughly the size of… A foot. Most of the time, I don’t need anything more than this. Although to be fair, I rarely need this even. Smaller than an inch is all metric though, easily.

    • Imperial is sometimes more convenient. Twelve seems like an usual number for inches to feet, but twelve is also easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. I can instantly convert from fractional feet to inches for the most common fractions.

    • I’m going to say it, both temperature scales make sense. Celsius being based on water makes a lot of sense, it’s the most ubiquitous substance. Fahrenheit makes sense too in terms of climate and the weather that people experience – it’s harder to go more simple than 0 = very cold and 100 = very hot.

    • Conversions actually aren’t universally good for metric. Joules are great for abstract concepts, but not so much more realistic matters. The energy required to raise 1 g of water by 1 deg C is 4.184 Joules – or more simply, 1 calorie. Calorie is actually neither imperial nor metric. Metric here loses the intuitiveness of water, while SI takes a big W. Another example, mass and weight. In metric, 1 kg is 9.8 Newtons. Most places don’t bother with Newtons and stick to kg. In imperial, 1 pound mass is 1 pound weight. They have been set equal to each other by definition. Mass to weight calculations will always be much easier in imperial, and that’s rather nice for looking at chemistry and flowrates and equipment requirements.

    • Imperial is better for K-12 education, another unpopular opinion. It requires children to learn going from inches to feet to yards, which uses math far more regularly than metric does. For lengths, it’s great for teaching fractions. Unit conversions between systems are taught often, which gives students a basis when you’re converting other units, like moles and kilograms in chemistry.

    • It teaches you to always label your fucking units. It’s incredibly bad engineering practice to do this, even if you work solely in one unit system, because you almost certainly aren’t using just one unit. Hell when it comes to pressure, with kPa, psi, atmospheres, and bar, it really doesn’t matter what unit system you’re using.

    • Metric defines some units in a way that’s good for science but bad for everyday life. A pascal is 1 newton of force per square meter. Our atmosphere is 101,125 Pascals. You see kPa used constantly because the defined unit is absurdly small. The same goes for a Joule, it’s the work done to move a 1 newton object 1 meter. Chemical reaction energy is measured on the basis of kJ per mole (or kg). The defined unit is really small.

    TLDR: Convenience + Practicality vs Ideality + Logic

    • @atx_aquarian
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      21 year ago

      The amount of downvotes for a thoroughly explained opinion tells me this is Reddit now.

      • @assassin_aragorn
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        11 year ago

        Yeah it’s disappointing. Several weeks ago, it would’ve been upvoted not because people agreed with it, but because it contributed to a thoughtful discussion. I’m an engineer. I’ve probably had to explicitly consider and think about units more in a year than most people here have in their lifetimes.

        I just can’t wrap my head around this thread. You’d think Americans were math geniuses by age 12 with how hard they’re making this out to be.

          • @assassin_aragorn
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            01 year ago

            Either way it doesn’t really matter, because unit conversions are easy math, and a good engineer can work in any unit system.

            In defense of imperial, to balance things out here:

            It’s baffling that someone would spend so long on a critique while completely missing the point. My argument has never been that imperial is better than metric. I regularly use both, and there are advantages and disadvantages to both. The advantages of metric here have been covered ad nauseum, so there was no need for me to mention them again. And since engineering is a field that intimately deals with both unit systems, I thought it would be good to offer that perspective

            I was clearly right to offer that perspective, because the majority of your argument focuses on ideality and exactness. Engineering doesn’t deal with ideality or absolute precision. A scientist uses just the right amount of tape to patch a hole. An engineer eyeballs it, adds more tape as needed, and calls it good enough. I don’t need my feet to exactly be 1 imperial foot or for my knuckle to be exactly 1 imperial inch. As long as it’s within 75-125% of it, I’ve got the right ballpark. And if it’s closer to 50% or 150%? I can do simple math to scale it.

            Thank you for illustrating my point on how this thread is an emulation of Reddit, complete with arrogant arguments which miss the OP’s point and also fundamentally misunderstanding their perspective. Plus, not even understanding parts of their argument apparently – I didn’t label 0 or 100 when talking about temperature because I was talking about the abstract number itself. That should have been obvious from me talking about the simplicity of using 0 for very cold and 100 for very hot.

              • @assassin_aragorn
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                01 year ago

                You have a good one as well.

                It also just occurred to me that I was thinking only of American engineers. You’re completely right that in other countries, for most applications, engineers wouldn’t need to know the imperial system. Constantly working between the two would mostly be unique to American counterparts.

                This certainly explains the difference in opinion and experiences.