From John Bazell “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”

1917 shitpost with obstinate opinions held to this day. Brilliant!

The idea that a simpler system of weights and measures that operate in base-10 will somehow cripple America is somehow fucking hilarious.

What was the point of this propaganda? To keep products incompatible somehow?

Try farming in Canada. I will actually use liters per acre as a unit to measure in liquid fertilizer into a sprayer, spray it at gallons per acre and drive the sprayer at kph with a pump pressure in PSI on a field that was surveyed in rods.

It'll get harvested by a machine that has all metric bolts and uses a 30' cutting platform, the grain will be measured in bushels on the yield monitor and sold in $/bushel with the selling agent but the contract will be in tonnes and delivered that way.

How awful. Making someone divide things by 10 instead of 12, 16, or fucking 64.

I stopped caring about British units in 1776! Metric all the way, baby! 🇺🇸 We decimalized their dumb ass currency and we need to finish the job with weights and measures! A vote for imperial units is a vote for red coats! Vote for me for President and I will liberate us from British tyranny! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🦅🦅🦅

Poster shows the metric system giving Uncle Sam giant balls of steel?

Imperial emasculates.

One kilometer is 1000 meters, one meter is 1000 millimeters. One square meter is 1,000,000 millimeters, one cubic meter is 1000 liters.

1 liter of water is 1 kilograms, so 1 cubic meter is 1000 kilograms. Sand is about 2.3 times heavier than water, so 1 cubic meter of sand is 2300 kilograms, or 2.3 metric tonnes.

I'm 1.96 meters tall, or 1 meter and 960 millimeters, or 1 meter and 96 centimeters. I weigh about 85 kilos, or 85.000 grams. Being 65% water, I carry about 55.25 kilograms of water, which will fill a little over 55 one liter water bottles

I can do this all day

Now let's do the same with imperial units! You first, cuz I'm not going to touch that shit with a 10 foot pole...

It's possible! We can switch! I'm US born and raised and I voluntarily switched to metric in college. It took me maybe we few months to start building an intuition for Celsius, grams, liters, and meters. And that was with me in isolation. I would imagine it would be much faster if everyone else was also transitioning.

Over the years, other people have asked me about this and I've been shocked at how many people don't realize most of the world uses metric. Someone asked why I was using "Mexico units" once... Also, I've met lots of people who think the US invented inches, pounds, etc, which is... uh... interesting. The arguments y'all are having here are way more advanced than what I've run into.

For anyone who wants to voluntarily switch, I highly recommend not to convert between imperial and metric. Just read the metric number and that's it. The weather says it's 25c outside? Don't convert to F. Go outside, experience 25c. Over time you'll build an intuition. Smartphones and computers have made the switch easier these days.

Of course, until we all switch you'll really end up being bilingual...

uncle sam you dense motherfucker go to SCHOOL

1l of (4°C) water weighs 1kg. 1kg (of anything) is 1000g. 1g of water is 1cm³. Stack 1000 1cm³ blocks to get a 10m high column. This column exerts 100kPa of pressure on its base. To heat it by 1°C requires 1kcal. And 1N would accelerate it by 1m/s every second.

I've posted this before on my mastodon, and on feddit.de, before the instance was shut down, but I think it's still a nice showcase how SI units interact with one another.

The worst thing we have in the metric system is kWh/1000h. It's just watts, but whoever designed the energy labels thought a bunch of zeros would be funny or something.

How many centimeters in a kilometer?

How many inches in a mile?

The medical system ended up using the metric system anyway

Ugh, who wants to change to a base-10 system when we keep what ever we have now?

The US Government is entirely metric. It’s just the US Citizens that aren’t. So there’s this entire separation where no one uses metric, so nothing is made for metric, since nothing is made for metric, no one uses metric.

Obviously that’s changing over time plenty of people use a mixture of both systems all the time. The machines are mostly driving adoption at this point. 3D printers, cars, etc.

Metric is just easier and the founders of the US actually considered it but wars -obviously- distracted them from switching to it.