But "the" metric system, so called, functions entirely on the happy coincidence of macroscopic distance being divisible at human discretion, while the similar and simultaneous effort at decimalizing time foundered on the rocks of how long it actually takes Earth to revolve upon its axis and to circle the sun. Both efforts originate in the same silly hamartiac human desire to prescribe a shape to which reality must conform, and thus may come in for about equal gentle contumely on that score. Especially since, in another example of its designers' foolishly misplaced priorities, metric offers no units at the human scale. They may have prefigured the brutalists in this way.
Oh, and my "inch" is almost exactly 3 centimeters.
30cm is a "metric foot" (it's actually even closer to 1 light nanosecond which is kinda cool for thinking about distances at computer speeds)
250ml is a "metric cup"
It turns out that UK/US sizes are based on the length of a barley corn.
Quite why it isn’t just in centimetres is baffling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe_size
Inches vs. centimeters? Baby stuff. Get on my level. :D
In everyday life, the metric system offers no big benefit, except for consistency for international standards and trade. But if you're doing anything engineering-related, your life is simpler if you don't need conversion factors to move between liters, meters, joules, watts, amperes, volts, ohms, and so on.
And FWIW, even to the extent that US engineers sometimes use inches and Fahrenheit, almost everything else they do is anchored to SI.
Inches are defined relative to the SI as well.
I do think it's funny all these folks insisting metric is so humanist seem never to have noticed which of their finger joints is an inch long. For me that's the second of the little finger, but I have large squarish peasant hands. As for the rest, treating a centimeter as 10/25 of an inch and vice versa seems to work well enough for measurements not requiring particular precision, or in other words anything I'd be comfortable doing without a caliper. Where's the trouble, really?
Should we go back to fathoms, furlongs, chains, drams and bushels?
This was settled a long time ago for the vast majority of the word.
Someone hasn't been to an apple orchard recently.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojana
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_measurement_syste...
That's not entirely true. An American driving across the Canadian border on an interstate can automatically go from 55 to 100. That's almost twice as much.
What do you mean exactly? Any distance is divisible arbitrarily, it’s a continuous scale regardless of the unit system. We could define the metre as a foot (or rather, as the distance of some physical phenomenon close enough to a foot) and build a decimal system out of it, and it would have the same advantages as the metric system.
> while the similar and simultaneous effort at decimalizing time foundered on the rocks of how long it actually takes Earth to revolve upon its axis and to circle the sun
The fact that there are 60 seconds in an hour and 24 hours per day has absolutely nothing to do with how quickly the earth revolves. Your argument works (kinda) for the number of days in a year, that’s all.
> Both efforts originate in the same silly hamartiac human desire to prescribe a shape to which reality must conform
No, this is completely backwards. This effort originates from the idea that we should observe and understand nature, and build a rational society based on this understanding. The original metre was a fraction of the length of a meridian for a reason. They did not change the size of the Earth to conform to an arbitrary unit. Instead they came up with a unit that made sense to them, for both philosophical and practical reasons. They did the opposite of what you say.
> Especially since, in another example of its designers' foolishly misplaced priorities, metric offers no units at the human scale
The metre is about 2 thirds of an average human height (give or take, the average also changed with time). How is that not a human scale? If you want to go lower, to the scale of something you can hold, you have centimetres. If you want to go larger, to the scale of a distance you can walk, you have kilometres. And all conversions and comparisons spanning the 5 orders of magnitude relevant to our daily lives are seamless and make sense. What is your problem with this system?
> They may have prefigured the brutalists in this way
That is actually hilarious. The enlightenment philosophers and humanists who came up with the metric system are polar opposites of the brutalists. They rationalised our understanding of the world around us. They did not rebuild it square.
This is a distinction without a difference. Read James C. Scott, for pity's sake.
The long version is Seeing Like a State.
It just explains that many of these things got traction despite the resistance against them only because the state needed them.
In the case of measurement units, one was that the natural units varied in size and could be gamed, which is a big problem for fair tax collection.
How do you apply this to the imperial system?
I’ve heard this criticism before, but limited to temperature, with people saying they want more increments. I’m not sure why half a degree centigrade is so hateful.
It is all subjective. You like what you grew up with because it is familiar, not because it is better. You know by rote memorisation how much 100 feet is and what 75F feels like, the same way I know by rote memorisation how much 50 meters is and what 25C feels like.
In the meantime your grasp of nuance or lack thereof is no pressing concern of mine. And my entire thesis has been flagrantly subjective throughout, save where the minor matter of relevant history is involved. To attempt to answer this with the charge of subjectivity, as though this accomplished other than to recapitulate what has been obvious all day, seems not only pointless but risible.
For 12 years of the revolutionary era, France did use decimal time. And the calendar and clocks were organized around a 10 day week and a 10 hour day. But those changes, coupled with the loss of Sunday worship, had other effects on the population.
Here’s an assessment of what was really meant and then lost by the elimination of Sunday:
“‘The elderly ladies took advantage of the long journey (to church) to exchange old stories with other old gossips … they met friends and relatives on the way, or when they reached the county town, whom they enjoyed seeing … there then followed a meal or perhaps a reciprocal invitation, which led to one relative or another….’ But if that was the way it was for the old ladies, what did Sunday mean to ‘young girls, whose blood throbbed with the sweetest desire of nature!’ We can well understand their impatience, ‘they waited for each other at the start of the road they shared,’ they danced.
“Now, however, when the Tenth Day came around, ‘the men were left to the devices they always had:’ the old men went to the tavern, and they bargained. The young men drank and, deprived of their ‘lovely village girls’, they quarrelled. As for the women, they had nothing left to do in village. The mothers were miserable in their little hamlets, the daughters too, and out of this came their need to gather together in crowds. If the need for recreation is necessary because of moral forces… there is absolutely no doubt that village girls find it very hard to bear privations which are likely to prolong their unmarried state: ‘in all regions the pleasure of love is the greatest pleasure.'”
– from The Revolution Against the Church, From Reason to the Supreme Being, by Michel Vovelle, pp 158-159.
However, all I ever read about this part of the revolution seems to indicate that people just didn't comply and went to church anyway on Sundays, and also didn't work that day. On that account, I feel likr your quote is kind of partisan. People wouldn't have been left lost and aimlessly drinking on their tenth day because of a lack of God, because they never quit going to church!
For example, the new state transformed Notre Dame and other Catholic churches into Temples of Reason, from which the new state religion, the Cult of Reason, would be celebrated. It didn't last long. Hard to create a new religion quickly. Maybe some echoes of recent history there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_France_d...
Also, the months were given names by a Poet, and the days had minerals, vertues or plants instead of Saints. The calendar itself was pretty cool.
Honestly, if they had 5 weeks of 6 days each instead of the 3 weeks of 10 days, I'd even call it the perfect calendar.
It's 100,000 s/day as opposed to our current 86,400 s/day which is not far off.
Hours, however, were twice as long.
They had time pieces that displayed both together.
Or more to the point: since they had no use for milliseconds at that time, their milliseconds would have been 86.4% of standard milliseconds.
It made sense to keep some things like angle measurement and time as disruption was too great for very little practical benefit.
It's still used in some industries, where convenient.
Honestly a brilliant marketing move by the French revolutionaries, just a few hundred years too early.
[edit: corrected spelling of Quartidi]
That last one is what I have the biggest problem with. When you are doing anything with derived units, 'kilo' suddenly disappears.
Having decimal numbers, it’s the best solution. Otherwise you’re bound to make mistakes scaling things up or down.
> a liter is not a cubic meter
Well, it’s a dm^3, close enough ;) Conversion is trivial, 1 m^3 is 1000 l. A cubic metre is a bit large for everyday use, but it makes sense e.g. when measuring water consumption or larger volumes. The litre also had the advantage of being close to 2 pints, so it already made sense as a unit when it was introduced. Contrary to hours with 100s.
> 'kilogram' is the base unit, not 'gram'
Yeah, this one is perplexing. It’s an annoying inconsistency on an otherwise beautifully regular system.
Anyway, the point is the inconsistency in the system due to the kilogram being the base unit. So derived units are defined in terms of kilogram rather than gram. Say, the unit of force, Newton (N), is defined as kgm/s^2 and not gm/s^2). Or pressure, Pascal (Pa) which is N/m^2 which inherits N being defined in terms of the kilogram). And so on. Anyway, an annoying inconsistency maybe but doesn't really affect usage of the system once you get used to it.
Considering today we set the kilogram by fixing the Planck constant and deriving it from there, we can just divide each side of the definition by 1000 and use that as a base unit. Using kg as the base unit is completely arbitrary, as we can derive each unit of weight directly from the meter and the second, not from the base unit.
This one isn't metric's fault to be fair. That's just what you get for inventing numbers before inventing math.
Makes me wonder what would have happened if 'French numbers' in base 12, 36 or 60 were introduced at the same time.
People got used to working in octal.or hexadecimal in the past for computers, doesn't seem like it would have been as big of a change as you think.
Irrelevant with a decimal system.
You're making an argument from familiarity. Yes, a 12-base system using fractions works very neatly in a small human-sized domain, but it disintegrates into complete uselessness outside that domain. That's why you get ridiculousness as things being 13/64th of an inch, or that there's 63360 inches in a mile. It's unworkable for very large distances and very small distances. With a metre and standard prefixes, you don't need any conversion factors, and you can represent any distance at any scale with a single unit.
Quick, what's 11/64" + 3/8"?
Quick, which weight is bigger: 0.6lbs or 10oz?
Highly relevant if you are using T-squares, compasses, and dividing calipers.
So instead of buying 100cm planks, buy 120cm planks?
The _other_ reason to use a measurement system is for doing _science_, and for that, having everything in base ten makes things _immensely_ easier, especially if you're working the math out by hand
Again, this is just familiarity. You think it's super neat that you can divide a cup of whatever by 2 or 3 or 4, but if I tell you to divide it by 5, you're gonna deflect and ask me "who does that?!?"
Imperial works neatly for a small domain of problems, and is useless outside that domain.
Metric is less neat in that small domain, but works equally well everywhere.
Firstly, we can divide a cup by 2, 3, and 4 in the kitchen because those are common measuring-cup sizes. Nobody is prevented from using a fractional size: if I divide a cup by 5 then I have 1/5th of a cup, nothing more and nothing less.
While 1/4th of a cup is 2 oz, and 1/3rd of a cup is 16 teaspoons, 1/5th of a cup doesn't divide evenly into a smaller unit and that's why "we don't do it", but there is nothing to stop the chef from using 9 teaspoons. [Or he can instinctively go up to 45mL on his graduated measuring cup, which almost always has both systems on it!] Teaspoons, tablespoons, ounces, cups, quarts and gallons are all inter-related multiples, and once you internalize it, you can convert like a boss.
While I'm sure it's lovely that metric measures divide by 2 and 5, that's all they divide by, so in terms of divisors, you've lost 3, 4, 6, 8...
So if it really is about dividing things usefully without resorting to fractions, then using a system that is nothing but multiples of 10 is a handicap, when we've had systems with lovely 12s and 16s with many different options for dividing them up.
But the metric people can simply chop up the measures even more finely and claim victory. For example, currency: it was in multiples of 16 or 8 which allowed for limited permutations. Decimalization chopped it into pennies, and we find 100 gradations in every pound sterling. All that did is make base-10 math easier for bean counters, and confuse people on the streets with a mystifying array of coinage. [Mental math indicates that it must increase the volume of coins per average transaction, as well.]
If a basic customary unit of length is an inch, many people can put two fingers together and estimate that on the human scale. But who can estimate or eyeball a millimeter?
Oh, and, have you ever found a nice British recipe in metric, shopped at your American grocery store, and prepared that in your American kitchen with your Fahrenheit range? You will eventually want to tip it all in the rubbish bin. Adam Ragusea suggests as much: https://youtu.be/TE8xg3d8dBg?si=SD8wLxD6ib6InLX4
"It's super easy if you're familiar with it!"
Yes, that is exactly the problem that you are unable to see.
If you'd grown with a metric system you could eyeball a centimeter with ease. Also comparing orders of magnitude different measures for estimation isn't fair, how precise would be your guess of a barleycorn?
EDIT: Yes, yes, SI defines the kg and then the g by reference to kg, but so what, notionally it's still the gram that's the base unit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-349-...
I am angry that IKEA's localization does not allow Americans to view dimensions in metric site-wide. You can still see dimensions in metric but those only appear on the pictures of some items. The webpage still converts all textual measurements to Imperial. You can't sort and search using metric values. IKEA designs everything in metric, using nice, even, whole numbers. Please let me see those. Seeing them converted to the nearest 32nd of an inch feels like vandalism.
I’m not American and laughed at this.
Welcome to the other side. Also, here in New Zealand people seem to do everything in metric, except their height and the weight of their baby. Why?
People stop asking me to convert to Imperial pretty quick.
It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that there are four quarts in a gallon...
I have no such trouble with any SI unit. So with that, I will leave you with this!
"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'The French were right again!'"
They were drilled into my brain when I was in primary school: 10, 100 and 1000.
5 us gallons is about 4 imperial gallons.
In practice the volume units are a much bigger problem. I have not hit anyone with the "cubic hand" yet...
[0] well, really, it uses metric with a redefined version of the old US customary system layered over it to prevent people from noticing, but...
Change to the IKEA site of a different country (via what comes immediately after `ikea.com/`).
I guess they thought the mere sight of metric would offend the Americans. :)
Maybe the product ranges between the countries is close enough that the Canadian site is an alternative?
You've made an artificially hard example (Ikea doesn't separate units, it is just inches).
What's harder, a 24" object on a 160" wall, or a 59cm object on a 4m 3cm wall?
Or to compare like for like (rounding & unified units), a 24" object on a 160" wall vs a 60cm object on a 400cm wall? Seems the same.
Malicious compliance.
As a non-American: I love it. ;)
He died when I was 4 so it's not a first hand account, I'm not sure how much of it is true or what he really thought, but somehow it feels right.
The metric system is incredibly useful and practical (of course) but there's something rigid and unpleasant about it.
*Yes, it should be craftspeople, but that doesn't exactly sound like the same thing, and anyway all of them happen to be men.
For example, 1/4 being 0.3 in base 12 can make certain computations easier (just as a 1/3 being 0.4_12 would), but again, what's wrong with 1/4 and 1/3 respectively.
Of course, things like duodecimal and base-6 are interesting to use, but at this point the convention is base-10 and it probably won't change for a while. It's kinda like the \pi Vs \tau debate, where even with all the elegance and easier pedagogy brought by the use of \tau as the fundamental circle constant, the existing convention does matter, and probably matters a lot more in general than the better alternative.
Of course, this also applied to the SI units. It literally took a major historical revolution for these units to be a) defined and b) getting used over the old units.
skrebbel•5h ago
That's actually impressively good accuracy for the time! Hats off to the astronomers.
hilbert42•4h ago
I'd go further, I think their work was a remarkable feat for the late 1790s. That they achieved that accuracy given the primitive equipment of the day says much for their abilities and understanding.
Also at the time France was in turmoil, numbers of its scientists were victims of the French Revolution—Antoine Lavoisier, probably the greatest chemist of his time—was beheaded by guillotine in 1794, so the political environment was anything but stable.
Look back 225+ years ago: there was no electricity, no material science to speak of to make precision instrumentation—journal bearings on lathes, etc. couldn't be made with the accuracy of today, backlash would have been a constant worry. All instrumentation would have been crafted by hand.
And the old French pre-metric system of units was an imperial system similar to the British (France even had an inch that was similar in length to British Imperial unit). All instrumentation up to that point would have relied on the less precise standards of that old system.
Traveling was by horse and sailing ship, and so on. Surveying would have been difficult. There wasn't even the electric telegraph, only the crude optical Chappe telegraph, and even then it was only invented in the 1790s and wasn't fully implemented during the survey.
They did a truly excellent job without any of today's high tech infrastructure but they made up for all these limitations by being brilliant.
In today's modern world we often underestimate how inventive our forefathers were.
selkin•3h ago
[0] about a modern pound, depending where you were. Toulouse’s livre was almost 1.3 modern pounds, for example.
[1] about 13853/27000 meter.
hilbert42•38m ago
The issue came up in a round about way on HN several weeks ago and I should have been more careful here because I wasn't precise enough in my comment then. As I inferred in that post 'imperial' nomenclature is used rather loosely to refer to measurement and coinage/currency as they're often closely linked (in the sense that the 'Crown' once regulated both).
Pre-revolution French coinage used the same 1/12/20 number divisions as did the old English LSD and currencies in other parts of Europe, and that system is often referred to as 'imperial' coinage which likely goes back to Roman Imperial Coinage — but to confuse matters it was decimal.
One can't cover the long historical lineage here except to mention the sign for the Roman [decimal] denarius is 'd' which is also used for the LSD penny, 12 of which make the shilling (£=240d).
So for various reasons both 'old' physical measurement and 'old' coinage are often referred to as (I)imperial. To add to the confusion, modern currencies when converting from LSD/1/12/20 to metric and '1/12… measurement' are often done around the same time. Nomenclature overlaps.
For example, I'm in Australia and the 1966 conversion from LSD to metrified coinage occurred shortly before the metrication of measurement. It was all lumped together as Imperial (note u/c) to Metric (that's how the public perceived it). The Government staged both changeovers close enough so that the reeducation of the citizenry wasn't forgotten by the time the measurement program started.
For the record here's part of length in the old French measurement system:
"Pied du Roi (foot) ≈ 32.48 cm (Slightly longer than an English foot, which is about 30.48 cm.)
Pouce (inch) = 1/12 of a pied ≈ 2.707 cm
Ligne = 1/12 of a pouce ≈ 2.256 mm
Toise ≈ 1.949 metres (A toise is 6 pieds.) <...>"
The other units can be found on the same site: https://interessia.com/medieval-french-measurements/
ahazred8ta•2h ago