One of the more hilarious parts about American news is that you’re bound to find a unit of measurement that’s a bit, we’ll say, improvised. Why give exact dimensions when you can use very rough estimates? Here’s a good example of this in current news: earlier today, I wrote about how Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 lost one of its door plugs. Many news sources called the opening left behind “about the size of a refrigerator.” Great, now I’m picturing a Frigidaire parked in a window seat of a Boeing 737.
Some of these estimates also don’t make any sense. Refrigerators come in different sizes! Was the plug about the size of a fridge found in an apartment? Or like, the huge one you’d find in Jeff Bezo’s mansion? My favorite of these comes from KSHB 41 News from Kansas City. In 2019, the station fired off this meme-worthy Tweet:
[Ed note: who can forget the giraffe-sized asteroid scare we endured back in 2022 (below)? At least we got a sweet arcade game out of it.]
Anyway, StillNotATony has a silly joke about Thomas’ article about the Galaxy E8. And we aren’t talking about a Samsung here:
‘in a pube-width under six seconds”
Man, we Americans really will use anything other than metric…
And it still looks better than most Lexuseseses.
Jack Beckman figured out why Jason cannot find the reverse lights of a Peugeot 404:
The clue to the mystery is right in the name: 404 (not found).
Finally, we have Rust Buckets, who noticed something amusing about David’s new stash of Jeep Grand Cherokee ZJ design history:
I think it’s hilarious that some of the front end studies were “hey what would this look like with a Ford explorer front end” and “hey what would this look like with a fullsize Chevy front end”
If it makes anyone feel better there is a company from over the pond called Sortimo, that has Been using their Sortimeter for measurement for decades. I want to say it is like 3 mm for every one sortimeter, but I digress. Point is all sort of weirdness abides all over the world.
Imagine how boring this site would be if it just reported facts and figures in cold, metric terms. Artistic license is a thing for a reason.
Besides which, at least in the refrigerator case, every single person who read that knew intuitively how large the hole was. That’s excellent writing. I’m not so sure about the half-a-giraffe unit though – I mean, which half are we talking about? A giraffe neck is a significantly different size from a giraffe body.
Everyone knows you split giraffes into left and right sides down the backbone.
Isn’t a giraffe-sized asteroid a giraffeteroid? And a smaller one a half-giraffeteroid?
About that pic of the washing machine sized hole in the northbound lanes in KC MO, in the Southbound lanes it would have been in Leawood Kansas! Those Missouri guys just don’t keep their roads up!
Funny that one of the “American” examples you gave is from the Daily Mail, a British newspaper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail
Yes, but Daily Mail is also a tabloid, so it wouldn’t be out of character for them to use the headline simply as a troll to the US.
Yeah, news agencies do this everywhere, I don’t know why people pretend it’s just America.
This one is pretty dumb, but the general idea is when you are talking hundreds of feet (or dozens of meters), something like a football field is easier to visualize
I saw the title of this post and now I have to rant a bit. Maybe I am in the minority, but I hate the metric system. The imperial system is a lot more useful and applicable in daily life. My foot is almost exactly one foot in length. My thumb is precisely 1 inch in width. I can effortlessly and accurately measure feet and inches without a ruler; how is that not a good thing? With temperature, 0 degrees is freaking cold and 100 degrees is ridiculously hot. I don’t really care what the temperature is relative to the freezing and boiling points of water, or whatever technical thing celsius is based on. I want to use numbers that I can relate to based on my lived experiences. Units in the imperial system are great for that. The metric system is great for science where converting units matters, but it kind of sucks for daily life.
I will use the metric system when you can pry the yard stick out of my cold, dead hands.
I can eye ball 0.05″. I can’t imagine trying to machine stuff in millimeters.
So you are saying you like what you’re familiar with. But can you divide an inch into five equal pieces (and no, your ruler doesn’t have 0.2 on it)?
Having lived in both systems, I can tell you that the metric system is superior in nearly every way, except for when dividing by three or twelve. Watching young (American-born and educated) people try to use feet and inches in our NYC architecture office tells me everything I need to know; they cannot do the simplest things. If I ask them to find the mid-point of a 9′ 3-1/2″ wall they have to use the internet. If I ask what half of 2833mm is they will probably have to use a calculator, but at least using a calculator is a possibility. How many inches in half a yard? How many feet in a mile? How many barleycorns in a shaftment (real units!)?
I can’t divide an inch into 5 equal pieces, but I can honestly say I have never needed to do that in my personal or professional life. I have, on the other hand, frequently needed to measure in whole or half inch units.
I don’t see why I should switch to an unintuitive measuring system to make life easier for some professions. It is easy enough to use the metric system when it is advantageous and use the imperial system for daily life (I use the metric system for certain measurements at work, so while I hate the metric system I am not opposed to using it when it makes sense).
But it’s only intuitive to you because you are familiar with it. What about someone whose foot is 8-3/8″ long? I assure you that people in the rest of the world also use their appendages for roughly measuring things (I know exactly where 10cm is on my hand and so on). You cannot even type 3′ 3-3/32″ into a calculator without doing four separate operations.
Using two separate systems simultaneously is probably the worst option IMHO.
And the best, at least in engineering and related disciplines… wait wait, hear me out!
In the US you *know* your gonna have to use and be comfortable with both systems in engineering related disciplines. I work in metric whenever possible because it is better from all technical standpoints. But lots of stuff was historically designed in imperial units and many standard parts are still made in imperial sizes, so you have to choose when to work in imperial and when to convert, and always be wary of what units you are dealing with. I feel knowing and using both systems on the regular makes for a better engineer. It can be maddening at times, but it’s worth it. No matter what part of the world you live in, as an engineer (or related) I am confident you will have to deal with some imperial units and some point in your career, so best to be comfortable with them too. (Note, I realize engineers in the UK are likely in a very similar situation. Not saying the US is a special flower here).
I also agree that you’re gonna favor whatever units you ‘grew up’ with. Trying to say either system is superior for common everyday tasks is garbage, it’s just what you are used too. I use metric whenever I can professionally, but I grew up with imperial units, so if I need to estimate something it will be in imperial units.
Well, we don’t really have a choice – I make drawings for facade repairs at old buildings; not knowing the imperial system is not an option. That doesn’t mean having to be familiar with two systems is a good thing, though!
My favorite part is that volume and weight relate directly: 1000g of water is 1000ml which is a 10cm cube.
Sorry, looks like I accidentally replied to the wrong post.
Point of order:
Most young people can’t do the simplest of things these days.
Although whenever I think that, I meet a youngster who is much more responsible and driven and capable than I have ever been.
Is this related to the frequency of bustles in my hedgerow?
That is a pointless argument. Not everyone’s foot is 1 foot nor are there thumbs 1 inch. If you can’t compare it with someone else than a system of measurement is broken. Metric is so far superior it isn’t even funny. Americans are just stubborn whiny old men about it.
Sure, not everyone’s feet and thumbs are calibrated as precisely as mine, but they still serve as a handy reference point when an estimate is all that is needed.
If you cannot accurately compare a measurement with someone else than it is pointless. Might as well just invent your own measurement then. My car is 12 cubic nanudes long.
If you know your foot is 10 inches long, it is easy to estimate a foot by mentally adding 2 inches to that.
Also, cubic nanudes is a unit of volume and not length. Everyone knows that.
Yeah but you could say the same thing about metric. If you know your foot is 100mm long then you use that as the relative measurement. My point is not everyone has the same size foot so why call it a foot?
Are those billionths of a nevernude?
Your finger is about 1cm wide. 1m is roughly the distance from the tip of an outstretched arm to your nose.
There’s a couple of homely comparisons for you, but I get more use out of knowing that a 10cm cube is one litre, and one litre of water weighs one kilo. That makes guesstimating things much easier.
As a Brit I grew up being taught both metric and imperial, and I prefer metric. Makes maths much easier.
Exactly. For everyday use, metric is trash. For length, the common units are millimeters and meters (yes, I know there are intermediary units but no one uses them). For things like height, millimeters are too small, while meters are too large. Likewise you nailed it with Fahrenheit vs Celsius. The most common thing anyone uses temperature for is air temp. Celsius squeezes the temps normally felt by humans on Earth into a much smaller range.
The centimeter would like a word…. Also Fahrenheit degrees are arguably smaller than humans can reliably differentiate whereas Celsius degrees are large enough to be more reliably differentiated by a human, making them a more meaningful way to convey temperature for humans.
Anyway people please, it’s just what units you are used to. Stop the unit wars. Someone think of the children!
Ah yeah forgot to add those – also too small.
Wrong. Imperial is trash.
I remember in high school auto shop we had a while class lesson on converting fractions just to know all the SAE socket sizes. Yeah, doing math to simply figure out the next size socket is SO awesome!! ‘Murica!!! Can we do ANYTHING right here?????
Meanwhile, the 10mm doesn’t fit, let me go up to the 11mm.
Or try to find what’s halfway between 9/64 and 3/32… I can do it because I like math, but most people would just leave if they had to figure that out.
I am going to guess that you also claim to be 6tf tall!
If you use the metric system, you’d know that your foot is 30cm long and your thumb is 25mm wide. That would work fine as well, you just are fixated on the number “1”.
Torch previously established standardized Beetle-based measurements: https://jalopnik.com/why-the-vw-beetle-is-a-universal-standard-of-weight-and-1518385122
My evidently hot take: In the age of effectively unlimited computing power at everyone’s fingertips, the metric vs. imperial debate no longer matters. If you’re curious about how many pints are in a cubic meter, just ask the damned rectangle in your pocket. It’ll give you the answer out to several dozen decimal points of precision.
Here: I’ll give every Autopian the secret to my success as an engineer for all these years: https://joshmadison.com/convert-for-windows/ I’ve used this little widget for *decades*. Simple and easy. Now you don’t need to bitch about inches versus millimeters on the internet anymore! (it’s 25.4 mm to the inch, by the way.)
Most important app you can put on your computer.
Some Euro bitched about the length of a vintage 11-foot American camper not being expressed in metric terms in one of Mercedes’ camper articles not long ago, so I helpfully converted it for them: “11 feet = 1.16 D-Day casket flags.”
I support us adopting the Metric System, but we should keep Fahrenheit. Imagining a one’s central heating/cooling being adjusted in Centigrade makes me sweat. There’s a massive difference between a 1 degree F temp change and a 1 degree C change.
As a Canadian I can tell you it is a non-issue, because thermostats typically have half degrees, which is close to 1 degree F.
Going by half degrees feels too far for me.
It is a long way from the stone age, yes.
As an engineer who does a lot of international work, I am 10,000% in support of the USA moving to the metric system. The imperial system is full of nonsensical gibberish, as highlighted by the Nate Bargatze SNL skit others have mentioned.
There ought to be a level of hell for those who invented “slugs.”
6 years of engineering school and I never learnt it right. Every time I had to use it I just converted it to metric and ran with that.
Thankfully now in practice we just use percent of g.
There are 18 barleycorns in a shaftment; 33 shaftments make a rod. It’s easy.
Yup, I work in a lab and metric is so much easier and effective.
Amazing skit on SNL with Nick Bargaze around avoiding the metric system!
https://youtu.be/JYqfVE-fykk?si=7Vvpr7rfaPkWRvpz
“A hammock of cake?”
Y’know what, forget both Metric and Imperial/Standard. I’m not upset about us using normal objects for comparison.
I’ve been using CAD software for… more than a decade now? Somehow I’m still amazed at how big something that has a build envelope of 14″ x 36″ x 8″ is when I get it back from a machinist or someone else. The same goes the other direction, this 1″x2″x6″ component is small enough to fit in my pocket? :mind blown:
My monitor is the size of a large CAD modelling monitor, or a small gaming monitor. Everything I design should fit in that size and its weird when it doesn’t
Has refers to my username, I have a similar problem with drum nomenclature. The drumset, and the several instruments that compose a typical drum set, is over a century old by now, and yet drum manufacturers still have not agreed on a standard way to express sizes. Some use diameter X depth, others use depth X diameter, they have never locked themselves in the smoke-filled room at the NAMM Show to figure this shit out.
Mostly, you can guess – 8×12 or 12×8 will almost always be a 12″ diameter tom that is 8″ deep – but not always. Take 18×6 – is that a “pancake” bass drum that’s 6″ deep, or an Octaban that’s 18″ long, with a 6″ head? Someone tells you to buy heads for an 18×6 drum without telling you what it is, you might make a mistake in either direction by 300%.
Manufacturers have even flip-flopped between the two over the course of their history. One Ludwig catalog might tell you that a snare drum is 14×5, while the same drum might be listed in a catalog from a decade earlier or later as 5×14.
Y’all please fix this shit.
Man, I thought some of my hobbies had weird shit in them.
Reminds me of the recent Nate Bargatze as Washington skit on SNL, freedom to choose our own weights and measures. Hilariously accurate. “How many Liters to a Gallon?”, “No one knows.”
Everyone should watch this gem of a skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk
“And what about the slaves, sir?”
“You asked about the temperature.”
“I did not.”
Yes! Keenan was awesome on that, and Nate’s deadpan just touching his shoulder and walking away. “For all men right???”
They forgot to point out the most glaring issue: the imperial system of weights and measures is based on the Winchester measure, instituted by King Henry VII of England. What the hell kinda republicans uses the royal measuring system of the country they fought to free themselves from??? The metric system was literally anti-king.
As of 1933 the US has been using the metric inch. It’s slightly smaller than your old inch, but still bigger than the old English inch. Stealth metric.
The US Survey kept the old inch until 2020, because I guess they weren’t that serious about producing useful data.
The original inch is based on the old barley corn measurement, which still makes way more sense than that stupid Fahrenheit temperature scale.
The rest of the world can’t understand why Americans hate science so much.
One political party is almost completely about hating science yet using it every day. That is why.
After the last four years, I don’t want to hear another goddamn word about “science” from politicians. Their “science” is why the memorial service for my best friend from high school, taken too young at 48, had to take place over A FUCKING ZOOM CALL.
Anybody says “trust the science” to me ever again, I’m telling them bluntly that there is no THE science to listen to, that people who say such things are peddling their own sciencw for nefarious or ignorant reasons, and that catching whatever’s going around is nothing compared to catching these hands for breathing those words in my presence.
Maybe that’s why my house it built like a piece of shit?
My newish house in the UK was built, like most of them are, with a combination of sensible metric and stupid imperial units that just won’t die. It was built terribly.
I’m not sure if the units were directly to blame.
My favorite American measurement would have to be the classic “A large boulder the size of a small boulder”
For those not familiar, the boulder comment was posted by a sheriff’s department about a traffic hazard. It’s the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline for this article. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/a-large-boulder-the-size-of-a-small-boulder
One of the great things about living in Colorado is how often we use this measurement now. “A large bear the size of a small bear was spotted in neighborhood x” or some such comes across my feed weekly for the last couple years.
I worked with a guy who would ask you to move things one red pubic hair
The only people I know who use that specific unit are all machinists. And they’re all a bit more specific about the origin of said pube.
Guys on our team use it when we’re setting up machines and yeah, the term is a little more specific and much more crude. It is very effective though!
But are you supposed to stretch it out before you measure it? Or just measure the static example?
I hope there’s not a test on this crap.
The understanding, for our team anyway, is it’s not the length of said hair, it’s the thickness. We do sometimes for larger gaps specify a curly hair too.
Yeah he was too- I did glass installations so not that much precision needed, he was from London and always had a cigarette hanging out the corner of his mouth
When I worked on a survey crew we nailed a location down to “a gnat’s ass”. Sometimes we even measured the correct gnat, which was a great way to explain the difference between PRECISION and ACCURACY.
You mean the system of measurement developed by the renowned Director of Precison Quality Control of NPR’s “Car Talk,” Nat Sass?
Never heard the character, but did like the show the few times I got to listen.
He was one of the phony staff they named in the phony credits at the end, i.e.:
Seat cushion tester: Mike Easter
Russian chauffeur: Pikov Andropov
Personal makeup artist: Bud Tugly
Automotive Medical Researcher: Dr. Denton Fender
Bungee jumping instructor: Hugo First
Customer Car Care Representative: Haywood Jabuzoff
Director of Top Secret Strategy: Donatello Nobatti
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and I like it that way!!!
To this, I have this meme as a response:
https://imgur.com/vpMeH01
Upper Midwest checking in: ‘I think we move er a couple two ta tree feet over dat a ways, er no?’
UHaul rep in Lake Charles, Louisiana helping me reattach a tow bar: “Aight, back up just a taste.”
‘Just a taste’ Now thats a new one to me – nice!
That is a very Louisiana term for a small amount of anything, including distance.
I dig it
Imagine using any synthetic number as the basis of your counting system. Disgusting.
This post made by P-adic gang
Imperial Short Hairs or GTFO!
I think if the stereotypes are to be believed the French are leaders in both research and application fields
British imperial, or American imperial?
I did learn from a friend in college that one shitload (SAE) = 1.667 metric shitloads.
What is that in fucktons?
In America, “football field” is an official unit of measurement.
I at least feel a little better knowing that the ubiquitous “car length” as discussed in road safety instruction is only getting longer as the years go by. Any port in the storm in our era of “not paying attention to driving” maybe.
Which is silly, because some people mean 100 yards when they say it, others mean 120 yards. What is it? Are we including end zones or not? If we aren’t, why aren’t we using a nice round 100 yards?
Honestly, having spent a fair amount of time on football fields (even as a non-football player) anytime I’m told something is 10 yards/meters my mind goes immediately to the field.