• Welcome to The Cave of Dragonflies forums, where the smallest bugs live alongside the strongest dragons.

    Guests are not able to post messages or even read certain areas of the forums. Now, that's boring, don't you think? Registration, on the other hand, is simple, completely free of charge, and does not require you to give out any personal information at all. As soon as you register, you can take part in some of the happy fun things at the forums such as posting messages, voting in polls, sending private messages to people and being told that this is where we drink tea and eat cod.

    Of course I'm not forcing you to do anything if you don't want to, but seriously, what have you got to lose? Five seconds of your life?

Imperial or Metric?

Imperial or Metric?

  • Imperial

    Votes: 12 20.3%

  • Metric

    Votes: 25 42.4%

  • Both

    Votes: 22 37.3%
  • Total voters
    59
I use Metric for pretty much everything. Temperature, distances, weights of inanimate objects, etc. The only thing i use imperial for is height and weight of people, and Pokemon. Ironically, when I was 5 I received my first Pokemon card. And if I recall correctly that was the first time I was aware of any measurement systems at all. Of course, at that time the cards only used imperial measurements. And I've used feet, inches, and pounds ever since.
 
I live in america, so I was born with Imperial and everyone else I know uses it. That means I should learn the conversions so I sound smart around my friends.

But the one thing I don't get is how a mile is imperial, and translates to the imperial 5280 feet, when translated to metric it's 1600 meters.
 
Pig-serpent said:
But the one thing I don't get is how a mile is imperial, and translates to the imperial 5280 feet, when translated to metric it's 1600 meters.
Click to expand...
It's not exactly 1600 metres. Wikipedia says it's "about 1609.3", but 1600 is easier to work with, and it's close enough to get you a mostly accurate answer.
 
meters being defined as c*s/299792458 annoys me -- would it really have been so much work just to define it as c*s/3 10^-8? it only changes things after the third sig fig; do they really matter that much?

I mean, if they could define µ₀ to be 4π 10^-7, it's not that much of a stretch to fiddle with lengths to make it work out nicely, is it?
 
er, the idea is that all units are defined according to natural constants. Not approximations of natural constants.
 
if it were defined, it wouldn't really be an approximation?

admittedly, it was defined in terms of c late enough that changing it would have screwed plenty of things up, but it would have been nice, since I can never remember any further than 299 and that it rounds to 3.00 10^8 m/s.

(if only they'd screwed up a bit less on the expedition to define the meter in terms of the earth!)
 
imperial, because as an american we learned imperial. well we did have to learn metric for most of my high school science classes and even though I tried to force myself to use metric I'm already absolutely horrid at approximating measurements so metric just confuses me more and I just generally try not to approximate measurements period.

(My attempts to convert to metric aren't really helped by marching band, where we measure in yards (owing to the whole "we march on football fields" thing) and step sizes of 22 1/2 inches.)
 
Mostly the imperial system (inch/foot/yard, pound, etc.), though I've always had trouble with the ridiculous liquid measurements in that system (cups, pints, quarts, gallons, etc.) and can never remember exactly how many of what goes into the other.

Liters/mililiters seems to make a lot more sense to me. The only bad part about metric liquid measurements is that soda bottles get oddball numbers like "591 mL" rather than the pretty simple "20 oz.", and it would sound kinda silly to order a "591-milileter bottle of Dr. Pepper" from some place. Though I guess that could be corrected by sizing them up or down to 500 or 600 mL (500 seems to make the most sense, since the next size up is 1 full liter.)
 
I use Kelvin, inches/feet, kilograms, and I avoid liquid measurements like the plague.
 
FnrrfYgmSchnish said:
Liters/mililiters seems to make a lot more sense to me. The only bad part about metric liquid measurements is that soda bottles get oddball numbers like "591 mL" rather than the pretty simple "20 oz.", and it would sound kinda silly to order a "591-milileter bottle of Dr. Pepper" from some place. Though I guess that could be corrected by sizing them up or down to 500 or 600 mL (500 seems to make the most sense, since the next size up is 1 full liter.)
Click to expand...

I order "a bottle" of Dr. Pepper. If they have two plastic bottle sizes, like 591mL and 2L, I order "a 591 millilitre bottle". :/ It flows off the tongue smoothly for me.
 
FnrrfYgmSchnish said:
Liters/mililiters seems to make a lot more sense to me. The only bad part about metric liquid measurements is that soda bottles get oddball numbers like "591 mL" rather than the pretty simple "20 oz.", and it would sound kinda silly to order a "591-milileter bottle of Dr. Pepper" from some place. Though I guess that could be corrected by sizing them up or down to 500 or 600 mL (500 seems to make the most sense, since the next size up is 1 full liter.)
Click to expand...

Heheh, 591... thought you might be happy to know that over here (ie. in a place using primarily metric system stuff) drinks are sold in 600mL bottles. Or 1L... 1.5L... nice rounded numbers. >> Depending on the drink of course, but it'd most likely round up if all your measurements were converted tomorrow or something.

You also get 9mL extra ISN'T THAT NEAT?!

(anyway I answered metric, for the record. I guess there are a couple of measurements in cooking books that aren't strictly metric but I don't really do a lot of cooking anyway so that's too minor to bother mentioning Iguess)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom