a defense of the imperial measurement system

it's not as bad as people say it is (but it is still pretty bad)

see also:

[petersmythe]

"Mass of a liter of water"
Diogenes walks into the room, holding one liter of Deuterated Oxygen-18 water: *BEHOLD, THE KILOGRAM!*

[nickthompson]

This chart is missing so many of the most used measurements in the US: blocks, football fields, over yonder’s, down-a-ways, go-thata-ways, hop-skip-and-a-jumps, ain’t-too-fars, outa-my-ways, and many others.

[mcglk]

To be fair, barleycorns are actually still used in the present-day US.

They're hidden behind "shoe size, " but the difference between any two consecutive shoe sizes is a barleycorn: 1/3 of an inch.

[frtzkng]

The weirder and more obscure the units sound, e.g. furlong and hand, the more likely it is that they're used by people involved in some way with horses

[SirHarryDave]

I think an interesting quirk about Americans and the imperial system is how we don’t actually use miles to measure distance all that often, we use time! This is because the average highway speed limit in the US is generally around 60 miles per hour, or a mile a minute, making conversion really easy. So while the distance between NYC and Chicago is 790 miles, it’s more practical to say it’s a 12.5 hour drive

[Skip]

I’m an American who moved to Canada, and it is infuriating. Imperial for measuring short distances and heights, metric for long distance. Celsius for the weather, Fahrenheit for cooking (the exact OPPOSITE of what it should be!) At least in the US we just have one system for the most part!

[Crissov]

Creator of “the chart” here; I never intended it to illustrate how ridiculous a system the English (length) units are, because I agree with your point: there is no actual system at all!
When I made the graph, I did so to get a better overview of historic and accidental relationships myself. The 6000 ≠ 6080 paths are in there deliberately, for instance, because those are two alternate definitions that have been used. The sibling weight chart has more of such cases.
By the way, did you publish your NIST chart to Wikicommons as well? It’s a nice and welcome addition.

[thejellydonut]

For those who have always wondered whose massive feet we based the "foot" off of, try measuring a hefty work boot, which is more like what most people would have worn on a daily basis at the time. Nobody is barefoot when they want to measure something out.

[ryanm.]

As my engineering professor says; imperial is fine as long as you’re not doing anything important

[iivin]

You might define a unit of weight as being equal to 7000 grains of barely because it was the volume of a commonly used shipping crate. Then it might turn out that it makes sense to reckon the volume of ships' holds in terms of the this customary unit, the amount of barley it can hold.
Usually there are reasons for things. Usually those reasons made more sense at the time.

[demetriosb]

Just a note, a nautical mile has nothing to do with a typical mile. A nautical mile is the median arc length corresponding to one minute of latitude. Or 1/60th of a degree of latitude

[RobinBlackett]

My favorite quote about metric and imperial system goes like this:

“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.”

[Probba]

Metric would be vastly improved if it were base-10 instead of base-10.

[LMB]

You know why the French adopted the metric system? (They didn't invent all of it)

It's because they had over 400 sets of definitions of weights and measures. There was Parisian pound and lyonnaise pound, this foot and that foot and yet another 399 feet definitions. Each town had one. Same of course for ounces, inches and so on.

So instead of trying to unify all that, they cut the Gordian knot and got rid of all of it.

[appa]

Nautical miles are actually a great unit for navigation. It's 1 arc minute of lattitude. You can go straight from nautical miles to latlong coordinates

[nathangamble]

Barleycorns *are* still used, we just don't call them barleycorns any more. They're used to measure shoe sizes.

[ohno]

I think this is an instance of a larger problem where people conflate "the difference between X and Y is extremely obvious" and "the difference between X and Y is extremely large"

[GingerGames]

For people who want to know why there are 5280 feet or 1760 yards in a mile, it is because of a compromise, and standardization from around 13th century England. Official unit systems historically were always a _legal_ standardization of what people were using and came up with themselves (evolutionary developed, not designed) that they found useful. So when the first English standardization happened, they had to settle on the definition of the English foot, which they defined in relation to the (legacy) Saxon foot. The English foot was defined to be 10/11 of the Saxon foot. But this then meant that the new hypothetical English mile would be 10/11 of the old amount, and the cost of changing all the road signs (yes, even back then) would be too much. The original Saxon mile was defined as 1600 Saxon yards or 4800 Saxon feet (why this was chosen requires a little more of a history lesson). So instead of changing all the road signs and maps etc, they just changed the definition of the mile to be 11/10 (10%) larger, and that's where the 1760 (1600 + 160) yards and 5280 (4800 + 480) feet comes from for the definition of a mile.

[oskarihonkasaari]

Fun fact:
Having a separate unit for temperature is itself completely arbitrary. If you fix the Boltzmann constant as 1, you get temperature in terms of Joules. Some statistical physics books actually do this.

[arnauadell]

In catalan, we have an unofficial unit of measurement called a "hand" ("pam"), which was used quite often at least by our grandparents' generation.
A hand is commonly defined as 20cm, but the truth is that people just measured things with THEIR hands and got a number out of them. So if your grandma says that the table is "7 hands long", you actually have to take into account the size of her hand. What she's actually saying is "this table is 7 grandma hands long".

Essentially everyone had their own unique unit of measurement, in a very toki pona-like manner. Of course we use metric when any semblance of precision is required, but it isn't uncommon to say things like "he's two hands taller than me".

There were also a lot of people who knew the exact conversion between their hand length and metric, and could get scarily accurate measurements of things just by sizing them up with their hands.