Every system of measurement is anthropocentric
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Not Planck units! They’re just extremely impractical.
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Looks around…
But I don’t see anyone measuring anything using it but us humans…
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In my experience “intuitive” ALWAYS means “what I grew up with”
As I was a kid in Australia in the early ‘70’s I kind-of think in both metric and Imperial, particularly for distances. ASk me how tall I am and I’ll say "about 5’ 8" “. Tell me you’re 185 cm and I have to do a quick conversion in my head to get to 6’ 2”
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I once asked a Canadian friend if the Celsius thermostats in Canada had between-degree increments. Nope, she said. I couldn’t live there. An air conditioner set at 77 degrees is comfortable to me. At 78, I’m breaking into a sweat.
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Mine do. They can be set in 0.5 degree increments. Or you can just change them to Fahrenheit, since the manufacturers aren’t going to make special ones for Canada.
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Wait a minute, people are using the metric system to weigh pot?
What happened to 2 fingers equaling a quarter and 4 fingers equaling a half?
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How much pot to a cubit?
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… so, set the thermostat to 25°C? 
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God: Get some wood and build it 300 cubits by 80 cubits by 40 cubits.
Noah: Right … What’s a cubit?
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I like to use octal numerals in addition to decimal. It can be confusing at Halloween and Christmas though, since 31 OCT = 25 DEC.
Anyway, I choose to measure distance in beard-seconds, and volume in barn-megaparsecs.
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Please, let us let that person’s legacy die
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The real question is what the heck you use for the material.
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You are correct. I should have said “anthropometric”.
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We still do. My wife, who’s Japanese and therefore measures distances in kilometres, complains about it every time we’re in the car and I tell her we’ve got X miles to go.
Most British cars have a speedometer calibrated in m.p.h. with a second dial calibrated in k.p.h for when you drive on the continent. Very modern cars have a configurable screen for a dashboard, so you can use whichever you like.
We buy our petrol in litres, though. (Well, I have an electric car now.) When I used to have a petrol car I had to do some mental arithmetic to convert from litres to gallons so I could work out my m.p.g.
British gallons are different to US, of course.
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litres per 100 kilometers is more linear.
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I have always suspected that the 88 miles per hour threshold for the time traveling DeLorean in Back to the Future was inspired by the 1970s PSAs that were trying to prepare us for the conversion to metric with everyday examples such at the then-mandated 55 mph speed limit changing to 88 kilometers per hour.
We buy our milk by the gallon but our soda by the 2-liter bottle, or 1-liter bottle, or 12 ounce cans, or the smaller 7.5 ounce cans, which were chosen to get the Calories below 100. Of course a Calorie is almost a metric unit; 1 Calorie = 1 kilocalorie. Almost all of the nutrition information on food packaging is metric.
I find Fahrenheit more convenient for weather reports and thermostats. It’s very intuitive to know that the day’s temperatures in my area will be in the 60s. And bumping the heater up a degree or two feels more natural than using half degrees Celsius.
Being from California, I’m used to distances being given in terms of travel time rather than actual distance. While it usually took me only 60 minutes to drive to work, it often took 100 minutes or more to drive home. The second is the metric unit of time, but our clocks are notably non-metric with increments based on multiples of 60 and 12. Few people know that a day is 86.4 kiloseconds.
There used to be 72 points per inch in printing. But when the inch was redefined in terms of mm, the adjustment resulted in there being 72.27 points per inch. When desktop publishing took off, using expensive floating point or other fractional measurements was prohibitive, so the the most commonly used point size once again became 1/72 of an inch, which has caused all sorts of confusion ever since. Some systems distinguish between points and computer points (or, as TeX calls them, big points).
Nearly all line printers (dot-matrix, daisy wheel, band) advanced 1/6 of an inch per line, which is fine until somebody asks you to fix some software that’s supposed to align text precisely inside boxes pre-printed on A4 forms in continuous fan-fold tractor-feed format. The A4 height is not a multiple of 1/6 of an inch, but many suppliers who made slightly longer pages (rounding the A4 length up to a multiple of 1/6 inch) for just this reason. But it’s not truly A4 paper anymore. And if your company switches vendors, you may find yourself with a whole bunch of useless stationery.
And don’t forget that unit conversion problems can happen even when you think you’re working entirely within one system. I recall there were some experiments that ran on Space Shuttle missions that failed because one team treated “miles” as miles while another thought of them as “nautical miles.”
A college classmate of mine interned with Walt Disney Imagineering about that time plans were being drawn up for the Disney park near Paris. In some cases, they wanted to replicate an attraction that already existed at one of the U.S. parks, so interns were given the blueprints and asked to convert all the dimensions to metric because French builders would naturally insist on working meters. In many cases, however, the plans had to be redrawn from scratch. If the track in your dark ride has a bend with a 25-foot radius and you simply mark the blueprint with 7.620 meters, concerns rise over whether the contractors will actually build to the necessary precision to get all the track to fit together. So in many cases, the sizes were changed to more convenient values (like 7.5 or 8 meters). But that necessitated redesigning all of the track, and sometimes the building.
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How stupid. Just change it to 90km/h. This sort of thing is exactly why people think metric is weird: they convert what they know into metric and are then surprised it’s a strange number they could never get used to. They don’t seem to realise that those of us who grew up in metric
obviously use round numbers.
Because you grew up with it, not because of any inherent superiority of the system.
See my post further up in the thread. I doubt you can actually feel a difference of 1°F or 0.5°C. You don’t need to bump up your thermostat in .5°C increments because 1°C is plenty precise.
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There is an Iliza Shlesinger (comedian) take on metric. I can’t post it here because I’m new, but you can find it on the Tubes of You at DL72gFuHKf8
It’s a little over eight minutes long, but the punch line is worth it.
Here you go.
Note: The actual joke ends after about 4 and a half minutes, and this is followed by almost four minutes of generic dance music above a still-frame with a big “Click to Subscribe.”
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