Saturday, February 4, 2023

Americans Don't Like Imperial Either

Why didn't the "metric" system just use gigafeet or whatever? Millimiles? Centipounds? Kilogallons?

"Why are Americans so terrified of the metric system?"

Answer: politics. Which is religion. The metric system is not a scientific institution, it's a religious polemic. It's not done to be Efficient, nor Rational. It's a shibboleth. 

"Imperial distances are like imperial temperature measurements - human-centric. 

Units that are made up of 12 of a smaller unit are easier to divide into thirds or quarters. 

What's a third of a meter?"
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/CovfefeAnon/status/1621718913032544258

Humanism, as always, is misanthropic.

 

Americans don't like imperial either, it's all who/whom.
Felix Rex can't mind his own business. He wants to make Americans use metric, to show he can. Americans want to make Felix Rex use imperial, to show they can.
Everyone just trying desperately to look cool. 

"Your measurements are too parochial! That's why you all have to speak French instead."
Basically the jealousy, due to GMT being in, you know, Greenwich, was literally killing the French. There would be no France today without the metric system. They would have all Canadian Healthcared themselves. Nothing but a desert from Spain to Germany.

2 comments:

Dividualist said...

Europeans very often don't use SI metric, just a bunch of traditional measures rounded to some close enough metric number, 25 millimeter inches (Zoll, toli, coll) and 15 ml tablespoons.

That's because a tablespoon is what you have at hand when cooking, not lab equipment. And (metric) inches have the property that you can tell a three inch pipe from a four inch pipe by looking at it, no need to measure it. So the builders don't buy wrong pipes.

Alrenous said...

A bunch of places sell 454 grams of stuff. In other words, one pound.