The Enemies of the Metric System
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- čas přidán 19. 06. 2020
- Three countries have never really gotten into the whole Metric System thing: Canada, the US, and the UK. Why not? Let's look at the history.
Thanks to Frank James for voice work. Check out his channel: / @frankjames
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In Finland the COVID-19 guidance is 2 meters distance, but most of Finns feels it’s uncomfortable to suddenly get that close after hundreds of years staying much more apart.
Underrated joke
Good one!! 😁👍
*"Vai niinkö lähelle pitää mennä?"*
Wow... Finland is like an introvert's dream!!
I’m an American, but my grandmother was Finnish. She never got physically close to anyone, not even hugs. My mom remembers when she was a kid, her mom would always stay 15 feet behind her when walking. Also, Finns, don’t really show emotion, but that’s another story.
In Sweden we have a joke about a British PM (Might have been Churchill according to some who tell it) who once said:
"We are adapting to the metric system, inch by inch"..
Sounds like something Churchill would have said!
It’s like the official flat earther society tweeting out that flat earthers from “around the globe” would be meeting at a convention
Do you think, maybe, Churchill was making a joke about the reluctance of the British people to change?
US President Ford in the 1970s really did say that we were "Miles ahead" in metrication
David J either a joke or he just didn’t quite think what he was saying
Fun fact: an Imperial unit that nearly every person in the world uses is the "Point" (pt) which is 1/72 of an inch. Commonly used in typography for font sizes.
Every smug non American on the Internet are dying rn
Why do you think that the fraction 1/72 is important?
I know!
@@HerbertTowers ok... but its a fraction of an arbitrary unit of length, and therefore the fraction is also arbitrary
@@meee_5155 all units are arbitrary. We arbitrate them.
@@HerbertTowers 72 is used because it has a bunch of factors. This means 1,2,3,4,6,8,9,12,18, and 24 pt are all nice simple fractions when converted to inches.
I remember when I went to canada a few years ago my mind was blown by the fact that when I went to throw a frozen pizza in the oven, it was 450 and not whatever the equivalent is in C. And imagine my shock finding out that height and weight are imperial too and a good amount of people don't even know how tall/heavy they are in metric. I always just assumed they were 100% metric
same. I drove through canada to get to alaska and was surprised to discover that outside of the standards enforced by the government, there was exactly zero difference between how Americans and Canadians interact with units
@@Thesupremeone34 and Fungi Factory: That's heartening to know. We Americans are constantly getting "dissed" and criticized and condescended to for our use of Customary units while "the rest of the world" uses metric, so it's nice to hear that we aren't the only ones who continue to use our familiar old units in our regular day-to-day lives!
@@Milesco Liberia and Myanmar also fully use the Imperial system.
Me too. I still live in agony trying to buy things but the store employees doesn't know what I measured in metric...
@@EdwardChan.999 When I would go to McDonalds I would order a Quarter Kilogramer, but nobody knew what I meant 😂
For the enveloppes, in europe no one says 29 x 33 cm envelopes, you just ask for an enveloppe for A4 paper.
Yeah, J.J. kinda failed to understand that just as americans simplify the language of the imperial system for daily lives, everyone that uses the metric does the same thing. We're not speaking sciency at the groceries store.
It's simpler than that.. You ask for a C4 envelope. If you plan on folding the A4 paper in half you can use a C5 envelope.
North America also doesn't use metric paper... It's some weird "Letter" sized thing that's a bit smaller than A4...
standard writing paper is A4 designation, posters example is in B format, post stamp in C format. I us to work in paper industry long ago. User do not need to know this mesaure.
@@bgezal if you fold A4 on half this is A5 format.And so one.
The biggest pain of living in a mixed unit country is that "white collar" scientists and physicists will default to metric, but "blue collar" technicians and mechanics will default to imperial.
Usually leaving the engineer in the middle to bridge the gap.
As an engineer, love the beauty of Metric (hell we invented kips or kilo-pounds for a reason) but all of the building codes are in US customary for a reason.
That being said, psi is a far more sensible unit than Pascals
I work on cars in the US. Even the cars made here are almost entirely metric. The weight is in pounds for who knows why, after market parts often have fractional heads and threads to make things difficult. I have a small set of rarely used imperial tools and thousands of dollars worth of metric tools. My metric sockets go on a 3/8ths or 1/2 inch ratchet though, instead of 10mm or 13mm. Don't even try to think about tire sizing.
@@janmelantu7490 Totally agree with you on PSI
@@LegoDorkTrue, I barely ever use my imperial socket set. Unless it's a really old Chevy or Ford, everything is metric.
@@janmelantu7490 kPa is pretty usable though.
You know, as an American who lived in Europe for a few years, it was definitely an adjustment to get used to the metric system, but like…it wasn’t THAT much of an adjustment. Because even in the US we are taught the metric system in school from a young age, we are taught they are the SI units, used for scientific measuring. So I knew what a liter was, I knew what a meter was, I knew 0 C was freezing and 100 C was boiling, and so does literally every other educated American. We just tend to use the imperial system like JJ described, in relation to ourselves and things on a human scale.
I also think part of the issue is that when I refer to the metric system for science it's fine but I don't know what temperature is considered a nice day out in celsius when in farenheit i would assume it's something like 60-70 degrees F out. It's also the same with height where I really struggle with figuring out if 180 cm is considered tall or not.
I don't know how many Europeans don't get that concept. We are not entirely removed from the system.
@LockGrinder i mean i know my height in cm and that 6 ft ~ 180 cm i think
Good. All you have to learn now is how to spell litre and metre. :-)
If the US passed a law that universally required metric units and banned imperial units. It would take the country no more than 1 month for even the dumbest of boomers to get accustomed.
Philippine use of both systems is relatively similar to Canada's.
Body: imperial
Distance: metric
Goods: both
Schooling: both
Difference in raw ingredients (metric), gas (metric), construction (metric), documents (both)
Cool
In America
Body: Imperial
Distance: Imperial for Longer and Shorter distances, Metric sometimes for more middle-range distances
Goods: Both
Schooling: Both
Guns/Ammunition: Metric
Drugs: Metric, but Imperial in higher quantities
@@walkuro7384 A lot of gun people still think in Imperial, .30 cal. (7.62mm) .45 pistol. A 9mm is about equivalent to a .38, a common day-to-day gun use, cops & gangstas.
The struggles of being a former American colony.
@@walkuro7384 I think the middle range distances are usually in feet unless people are talking about running/swimming, in which case international organisations like the World Athletics and the Olympics make it important to switch to metric. Or your Olympic athletes would have been training and been selected to optimise for the wrong distance
Fun Fact: the US could have been Metric from the beginning. A French representative was on the way to introduce Metric to the US Congress but his ship was captured by pirates
The USA sorta uses one already. They use pounds and "hecta-pounds". That, after all, is what the metric system uses for length: meters and "centi-meters".
Yeah, imagine if! Then I wouldn't have to head to the apocathery and order "grains" of medicine!
Oh, wait...
He probably would have been successful. At that time, the Americans hated the British.
That's not accurate. Even Washington cozied up to the British and the Federalists after him certainly did so. Only Jefferson's supporters were pro-France especially during and after their bloody radical revolution.
British pirates
Los Angeles has two separate grids: the outer part of the city, laid out in miles, and the inner, older part of the city, laid out in Spanish leagues.
Sam Aronow very interesting, the fact u know that is fucking awesome dude
That's pretty dope.
Sam did you give him that 20 NIS bookmark lol
I didn't know that and I am a native born Angeleno, I bet there are other Angelenos who don't know that. Learn something everyday 😀 👩 👩🏫👨🏫🍎
mo bell fanz I did not.
While Japan is firmly metric for pretty much everything, there are a few random things here that tend to be measured in inches specifically due to what I assume is American influence. For example, wheels on a car and TVs/computer monitors are almost exclusively measured in inches. Like you mentioned, there are also still quite a few random things that still use traditional systems of measurement. For example, the size of rooms is almost always measured in tatami mats even in western style rooms. The total floor area of a house or apartment on the other hand favors using square meters from my experience, but the traditional measurement is also sometimes still used.
We measure screens in inches too here in Italy
Same for TVs/monitors in Russia. The package mentions both like xx" (xxx cm) but younger generations use sizes in inches. And since one has to use Pythagoras theorem for determining the actual size anyway, multiplying by 2.54 is not the hardest part of this calculation.
Screens, pants, font size are exceptions in Poland. And I especially hate screen one. If screen have 65" diagonal it says absolutely nothing about it's size. It can be 25x60 or 39x52 and still have same diagonal
I think some exceptions are universal, like the inch screens or shoe sizes or pt fonts.
Also the fact that tatami mat is a measuring size is really cool 😅 because it kind of gives you a little peek behind the curtain into japanese history.
Tyres are a weird one, because the standard way to state a tyre size involves inches, millimetres, and percent.
I'd say in the U.S. the metric system is like a shadow following the imperial system around. It's often shown right beside the imperial system, if in a smaller font, but we don't usually pay much attention to it. I've always thought of it as a concession to the rest of the world, though now that you've mentioned the U.S. did try to switch, I have to wonder if that was our attempt and converting.
We have never ed the Impral Sstem in the Unted States. We use US Customary units.
Metric should be mandatory for *professional work* (no one cares what you do in your personal life).
But shipping companies and engineering facilities should ALL use metric.
This failure caused millions of dollars of loss, for NASA, when they ruined a conversion while calculating a trajectory.
@@GH-oi2jf ok but it's tied to the british one and it's part of the same "class" of measurements.
I have never seen it in a smaller font
@@red2theelectricboogaloo961 That "class" is called customary units of weight and measure. The "Imperial System" is the customary system of the British Empire. Despite being related, the units used in the United States are distinct and are best identified as the United States Customary System, because that is both a more accurate description of what they are and that is the real actual name of the system.
To say any “properly metric country” uses mm rather than cm may be a stretch. My experience growing up in Brazil is that cm is conventionally used for anything that is smaller than a metre and mm is used for anything smaller than a centimetre. That was also my experience travelling/talking to people in the EU
Just a mildly interesting addition to your comment:
I'm from Germany and in an industrial setting you generally use millimeters for everything to the point where people will often just omit the unit and only say a number. "That piece is 52."
0.1 millimeters are then simply refered to as "a tenth" without stating that it's a tenth of a millimeter. "I need to mill off two tenths from this piece."
Same in France, were I learn that the A4 sheet of paper is 21 x 29.7, not 210 x 297.
@@TimTYT My dad's a contractor and he basically gets lowkey triggered if I use cm instead of mm
He sayed where the inche is used mm is used in metric countries, wich is at least true for Germany. Though in Germany we also still use a lot of imperial numbers. For instance I know how tall my monitor or TV is in inches but I have to look it up what the diagonal is in cm though when buying those items the shops prioritize cm over inches.
@@TimTYT live in france and we all use cm mm make to large number
This was definitely the most comprehensive video on Canada using Metric.
You need to use 4:17 in your bad map videos
Didn't expect you here!
Why hello, i didn’t know you watched J.J. too
Hey tigerstar
Unlike all of your videos of course? Which are the opposite of comprehensive.
I was born in New Zealand and lived there for 28 years and now live in Australia, both countries are metric in every area, although we still understand our height in terms of feet and inches, it is very uncommon, but not unheard of to speak of our height in metric terms, although at a doctors office if height is taken it will be in meters.
Yeah, most often in centimetres.
Growing up in Bangladesh, we measured our weight in pounds. Weight of bulk foodstuff was in sher and mon, both traditional units (less frequently used these days I think). I remember my dad measuring construction-related stuff in feet and inches, clothing measured in yards (which happened to be equal to the gauze, a traditional unit, that broke down to fingers, joints, and hands). The older people regaled stories of walking miles to school. Land is measured in square feet or acres (or bigha and katha, traditional units for area). Meter was (and I think still is) nonexistent, altho highway mile-markers have switched to kms. Speed is always measured in kph, gas sold in liters, and individual soda bottles in mls. Temperature is measured in C, unless you have a fever -- body temp is always measured in, and referenced by, F ("The fever isn't bad, barely crossing 100"). We never learned imperial or traditional units in school tho -- it was always metric.
I do remember learning traditional units in 8th grade, already forgot tho. The imperial system was taught from 6th to 8th but then didn't see it being referenced
1.43 meters? That's like 10 American hands per freedom eagle.
That's 12 war crimes per cardiac arrest.
We only use hands to measure horses
Come to think of it ... he forgot about that too ... US uses a decimal point, while we use a comma ... and the US uses the comma to separate the thousands and we use the point ... if that's not a recipe for disaster
@@patrickcardon1643 The US uses a full stop, or period in Mercun, instead of a decimal point, which I was taught to be halfway up the line space; that is bad enough but to use a comma is sheer lunacy as is using a full stop as a thousands separator but then the Yanks use a spurious and quite illogical billion, trillion etc.
The measure of hand in the imperial system is 10.16cm definition of US units.A hogshead is two wine barrels. After you are well into the imperial system you go through many wine barrels to straighten things out
It's all fun and games until conversion errors crash a satellite.
Wah-wah-wah-WAHAHAHAHAHA
It happened in Canada: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
Keeping with the theme of this video, the satellite didn’t actually crash from a conversion error but some more complex interaction which is far less memable.
@@YuFanLou "NASA lost its $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter because spacecraft engineers failed to convert from English to metric measurements when exchanging vital data" Complex error started with conversion errors.
Or an airplane, I recall a Mayday episode where a plane was under-fueled due to a conversion error.
"The thing about Metric in the US is that if you get into any kind of engineering or science or construction you'll have to learn about Metric and how to convert between the two. In factories machines will often be in either imperial or metric but rarely both, and you just have to hope that your schematics for what you are making come in both "
Converting is the problem in imperial. And I am not just talking about between imperial and metric. Imperial conversions between feets yards miles and inches and in fact all divisions of the imperial system requires all kinds of mathematical gymnastics. Metric requires just the number ten. The name of the unit tells you how many times you need to apply ten.
@@BalefulBunyip This isn't a problem in imperial measuremeants because it is extremely rare that you actually have any reason to convert between most of them, at least with most of them, and with the ones where conversions are actually common like between feet and inches, not being base 10 is actually helpful for common math operations because you are much less likely to encounter numbers that aren't nice round numbers when doing common divisions. When is the last time you had to convert between kilometeres and milimeters? It doesn't matter how easy or difficult the conversion is if the scales are so radically different that there aren't situations where both are relevant and useful.
@@BalefulBunyip can you give me an example of when you're using miles and inches together? Asking for a friend. What you're doing is argumentative gymnastics to try to prove a non-point. Metric requires me to stare cross eyed at the butt ugly fucking graduated scale. But I'm sure that's nothing you know about yourself. When the hell are you ever using measurements to make anything? Have you ever made anything with your hands? And if you have what kind of precision was required? I've made things with a precision greater than a ten thousandth of an inch. That's 0.00254 mm for you metric weenies. Basically smaller than you can possibly see!
@@coopercummings8370 how about that. Someone with a modicum of sense in the comments. Kudos to you.
I learned the lesson the hard way when I bought my first socket wrench set to work on my Volkswagen and spent half an hour trying to figure out why my 1/2 inch and 3/4 inch sockets almost fit but did not. I figured it out eventually. lol.
I like the M&M analogy. I'm British myself, and use Metric primarily. Cars are very Imperial, MPH & MPG, beer and milk are often sold in pints, but also ml, varies from store to store. Other grocery stuff is overwhelmingly metric though. People often use ft and stone+pounds for personal weight. Rules and tape measures here tend to mark both cm and inches, and I just use cm. I know in my case I sorta mentally equate a few Imperial measures as Metric ones even if it's slightly inaccurate. 1ft being 30cm, 1 inch being 2.5cm and 1lb being around abouts 500g
The UK is so weird. Beer and milk will always be pints, but all other liquids are in l/ml. Petrol is sold by the litre but mileage is measured per gallon. Distances are miles and yards when a car is involved, but for walking distances (i.e. shorter/local) it's more common to use metres. Weight is traditionally stones and pounds - if you give someone your weight in pounds-only they will think you're American and not understand. However most people I know use KG for their weight - I don't know my weight in stones/lbs for example. Personal height is always feet and inches, never metric - but building height is a mix - I've never heard of The Shard (tallest building in London) being referred to as 1000 feet tall - but 1 or 2 storey constructions might be 15ft or 20ft etc, and square-foot is used for floor area. Temperature is celcius almost everywhere and people under-50 will use it exclusively - but newspapers have a lot of older readers who still have love for fahrenheit - they love big headlines with 100 degrees in hot summers. It's a mess basically.
Ben W I always think of it is metric small imperial large and metric for very large (like mt Everest and stuff like that)
Everything correct except for the last part about temperature, no one uses farrenheit in the UK, not even any old person I've ever spoke to
For personal weight I tend to convert kg from stones ie 45kg makes more sense to converted to 7st, otherwise I don't really have an idea for it. Distance (cars, walking, flying, whatever) is in metres until around 1km at which point it's miles - I only tend to use km in Europe - really weird. Also I tend to think of ALL liquids in terms of pints, except larger amounts 10 litres+ (despite it being sold in ml/l) as well and convert to pints. Though no British person would know what a gallon is btw.
I literally don’t know anyone that uses metres for anything outside of school. Everything- distances etc. Are literally only feet. No-one uses metres.
Also depends on where in UK you are. A market in London will sell vegetables in KGs while a market in Leeds will only have pounds. Also I haven't seen houses measures in square feet in London, only square meters.
This one's "HELLO FRIENDS" was the greatest ever.
You really think it tops the Kim Campbell one?
(When you go to the video, filter the comments by most recent)
Didnt even notice until I read this comment lll
@@FloridaManGraySTOP I hate you
I was gonna say lol it was so enthusiastic
I noticed the enthusiasm as well!! Great comment!
I’m American and did track and field in school when I was younger. I always found it funny that football fields were in yards, but the track that wrapped around them was always in meters. For example, I ran the 1600m and 3200m races, which is what how would officially list them on the schedule or what they would announce, but informally we called them the mile and two miles races even though they were both shorter than a mile and two miles respectively. I do think having done track for most of my childhood, I am actually far better at visualizing medium distances in meters, while still using feet/inches for small distances and miles for long ones. However, where I live, we measure long distances in hours anyway and the number of miles is honestly meaningless.
Nothing funny about that. Football and track are entirely distinct sports, each with its own rules. Track was measured in yards when I was in high school. I’m not sure when it went metric, but it had to for international competition.
We had both 1600m and 1-mile events, and the finish line was 9m forward from the starting line for the mile
The only way I can get my head around metric distances is to think in terms of rifle ranges, because I've done long distance shooting and metric is becoming the standard after the military converted.
The only imperial unit I am able to understand is miles... because of driving and running, though I use metric for 99.9% of things.
The crazy one is swimming, I have swam in pools in meters and yards in the US for both high school and club. In fact, this actually affects the all races in regards to times as the race though the same amount of laps, will have a 1.0936 conversion from meters to yards (I found that my area tended to have the yard times as the standard). However, when you get to longer races like the 500, you have to deal with lap changes. In 25-yard pools, the 500 race is 20 lengths or 10 laps, however the same race in a 25-meter pool is called the 400m is 16 lengths or 8 laps though the times are compared to each other just like any event such as the 25.
Funny story. When I used to be involved with selling bowling alleys to companies abroad, one of the strange things was that we always had to export lumber packages with our units to anywhere outside the US (all treated and legal for export, of course), but anywhere in the US or Canada did not require this. The reason is that bowling alleys are actually built _extremely_ precisely (for wood). It actually takes a _lot_ of precision tools and very carefully shaving down and shimming up every board on layer of the subscructure right up to the "wooden" lane panels themselves (they're actually not wood anymore and haven't been for a long time, they're some sort of proprietary synthetic plastic and wood pulp sort of mix pressed into shape). We're talking about crews with special, precise leveling tools going up and down for hours or days doing nothing but taping on these tiny little shims to nudge every board into place at every joist.
So, since lumber outside the US and Canada (and a couple other places, IIRC) was in _metric units,_ this means that there is no real way to give the local installation crews a parts list that wouldn't completely jack up all the dimensions because _how do you buy a US standard 2x4 (inch) board in a country that uses the metric system!?_ In the US, we can just tell the crews to go buy wood from a local lumber yard, but in, say, Germany we have to ship the damn wood across the Atlantic just to make sure that the Kaiser's private bowling alley doesn't tilt 15⁰ to the right.
Also, most rulers here in the US have both metric and imperial units on them, too.
One thing that I always found strange in the UK is the use of "Stone" to measure your weight. Never seen it used in any other country, or any other context.
It gets used in Rugby a lot for player weights, it's bizarre.
We use it in Ireland as well.
That one actually makes some sense, the stone is a unit of mass like the kilogram is. The pound is a unit of force like the metric Newton is. Someone’s weight in pounds is really measuring how much force they apply on the floor when standing on the earth. If you go to the moon, your mass in stones/kg’s will be unchanged but your weight in pounds/Newton’s will be considerable lighter there.
CannonFodder64 the stone is a derived unit from the pound. It’s both a unit of force and mass, like the pound. They are both defined as the force from one unit of the respective mass on the Earth
14 pounds=1 stone
UK we use the following units:
For volume: Olympic Swimming Pools
For Area: Wembley Football Pitch
For Jumping stunts: the equivalent length of London buses.
In Brazil we use the same method for volume measuring, however we use football fields as a way of measuring areas and distances, on the other hand we should up our game on the jumping stunts units.
Can confirm that it is relatively common place in the US to measure volume in Olympic swimming pools and distance by (US) football fields, slightly less common but still used is school busses for jumping stunts....
You forgot the size of Wales.
The length of Wales is approximately equal to the average distance between consecutive vowels in a multisyllabic word in the Welsh language.
Austria still frequently uses bathtubs, even though nobody actually knows which volume this ominous standard bathtub is supposed to have.
You forgot, when you buy bulk produce, they advertise it as price/pound, but then they weigh it on the cashier's scale in kilos.
When I first left the U.S. (starting in New Zealand) back in 1991, I was put out by the metric system.....for about a day. Once that's the system in use, you get used to it lightning fast, and it's a lot easier to use. Celsius took the longest to get used to, I think, but even that one I adjusted to fairly quickly. The problem with that one was that the difference between two degrees of celsius is much bigger than the difference between two degrees of fahrenheit. But I adjusted to that pretty quickly too. In China, weights in the market had their own local measurements, but since they corresponded pretty closely to the metrics, it was pretty easy to adjust to one "jin" being .5kg.
When the US finally switches to metric, a good idea would be to also use the older units but pegged to the metric system, so they'll mainly be used for old convinience and tradition. For example 1 foot = 30 cm. 1 inch = 2.5 cm. And miles are already too impractical so they just won't be used.
That's exactly what happened in Europe as well. A pound was redefined to be exactly 500g. So, the people could still buy their pound of bread (this is still very common after 200 years of metrification). Interestingly, it's only used with one pound or half a pound. If you buy two pounds of bread, you would say one kilogram.
Is he sitting on like a yoga ball? he's always bouncy.
Yes
Same observation
He looks like he's ready to head the bathroom so he can use his "Low Water Usage Toilet"
A low-flush toilet (or low-flow toilet or high-efficiency toilet) is a flush toilet that uses significantly less water than a full-flush toilet. Low-flush toilets use 4.8 litres (1.3 US gal; 1.1 imp gal) or less per flush, as opposed to 6 litres (1.6 US gal; 1.3 imp gal) or more.
No, he just has a very nice bubble butt.
@@Mycenaea Lol.
European countries: It's great to have a common measurement system.
Britain: *Nope*
European countries: It's great to be part of a big European alliance.
Britain: *Nope*
European countries: Yep.
Britain: Nope.
>Alliance
ewwwwwww, what you gonna suggest next? A united military?
European countries: It's great to have a common measurement system with the rest of the world.
Britain, USA, Myanmar & Liberia: Nope.
@@iteachyou1575 A friendly reminder that we wanted to be a founding member of the EEC but France blocked us and then veto'd our entry because they were in a hissy fit that we didnt form a union with them after the Suez Crisis
(Half sarcasm half truth)
Le Pepp yep
There is definitely a generational divide in the UK. My mother in law uses Fahrenheit as it's what she was taught in schools, whereas everyone else I know uses Celsius.
Moreover, I work in a DIY store in which older customers will give me measurements in inches, whereas younger once give me measurements is mm or cm.
I grew up using the imperial system being born in the states and all, around middle school age I moved to Mexico and had to basically go full metric. I feel can I can use both systems pretty well especially when it comes to temperature, and weight but where I struggle a lot is with long distance measurements such as miles and kilometers.
You just need a point of reference.
60 miles / hour => 100 KM/H
I studied in Britain so I will explain the British imperial/ metric situation:
Road signs are written in miles.
In schools, they are taught metric.
In informal discussions, imperial is used.
In formal discussions, metric is used.
Older people use more imperial and younger people use more metric.
In summary, in Britain, metric is formal and imperial is informal.
I feel like it's going in that way in America. We are taught both of them but in an academic setting, metric is always preferred. However, we still use imperial to measure our body and what not. I always preferred metric because it's easier to convert lol
Really depends who your talking to in the uk, in my day to day life, no one uses imperial at all.
@@barrrakudam so you go to the pub and ask for 568ml of John Smiths?
@@23Stork No you ask for a half liter Edit: pints in the UK
@@Khaled-oti where in the uk do you order in litres, i only ever hear people order in pints
As a Brit I'd say that that M&M analogy is pretty much accurate for the UK.
Road signs often show the distance to a place written as if it's in miles when it's actually measured in kilometers and then rounded to the nearest mile.
Things that are served as "pints" are overwhelmingly likely to actually be 568 millilitres, which is very slightly less than an actual British pint.
There's loads if stuff like that.
I mean, some stuff just stays, even here in germany, some of the old names survived, like Mass, Pfund and Zentner. They have all been standardised to round metric values (Pfund is 500g, Mass is 1l, Zentner is 50kg)
@@whannabi Pfund was the equivalent to the english Pound (ancient german 1pf(und) approx. 327g = 12 Unzen (oz.). In middle age between 467g (Berlin) - 510g (Nuremberg) now "metrificated" as 500g).
And I didn't found an english word combination as an Example how to pronounce it (The Pf is the problem) :-)
You are wrong. Bottled beer has to be sold in metric units.
Draught ints are pints.
The legal units for the sale of drought Beer and Cider. Are third, half, and two thirds of a pint. Pints and multiples of half pints.
www.gov.uk/weights-measures-and-packaging-the-law/specified-quantities.
Here in Australia, pretty much everything is metric except for our height which is more commonly still feet and inches, as well as the old people. I remember my Nan once asking me to help her just figure out a centimetre so she could do something (she's not senile or anything, just never learned it), and my step-pop knows millimetres because he's a builder. Even to this day though, I still know my height is 183cm and ~6ft.
Don't forget our babies are weighed in pounds for some reason. Well officially weighed in metric but everyone wants to know the weight in pounds to compare to every other baby in history. Sewing seems not to have made the change either for some reason. Beer is measured in ounces in pubs by default. I also hear Mile per hour a lot but only in abstract never with the number.
I do think you make a good point with that language analogy, because in many ways the use of measurements is like a language unto itself. We use it so often to communicate with each other, and there are so many connotations and references and ideas made with them. And really, while people blame the U.S. for not getting behind metric, it's not as if we don't use it in the plaves where it matters. Metric within scientific circles is basically the lingua franca in much the same way English is in business and other areas, and while there are some hiccups, it's not as if we can expect cultures to suddenly change.
That's not to say that it's not worth moving to metric, of course, but it does feel like an aspect people miss. It's difficult to make those broad cultural/lingual changes in any immediate fashion, and it's not as if we don't use it already where it matters.
11:55 In America, every tape measure I ever bought included Imperial on one side, and Metric on the other side, or some way to measure both. It's handy.
It is easy to buy a tape measure in the US without metric units, but it is difficult to buy a metric-only tape. They can be found, but there aren’t as many choices.
Same in UK
it's the same here in israel
@Daniel Marinho I don't think he's talking about continents lol
@@zweks Maybe not but having lived in Chile and the US... it's still accurate
The metric system is overrated. I'm 11 shaftments, a hand, and three barleycorns tall and I'm perfectly happy with that.
The metric system is definitely overrated. How many yards in a kiloyard? THAT is how dumb your preening over the lack of unit conversion in the same dimension really is.
You still need conversion units to convert between different dimensions. A litre of water is not one kilo, but even if you redefined it to be precisely that, a litre of mercury still wouldn't be a kilo, or anywhere near.
A pint of water weighed a pound. Pretty simple, yes?
@@markhackett2302 BASED
@@markhackett2302
"A litre of water is not one kilo"
1 cubic decimeter of pure water is 1kg. It's also equal to 1 liter. So 1 liter of water is 1 kg. Water is almost never pure so there will be slight differences in the real world.
@@alyssashady BASED yourself.
Whatever THAT was supposed to mean.
@@MrC0MPUT3R "1 cubic decimeter of pure water is 1kg"
Nope. It ain't sunshine. E.g. from USGS:
_Actually, the exact density of water is not really 1 g/ml, but rather a bit less (very, very little less), at 0.9998395 g/ml at 4.0° Celsius (39.2° Fahrenheit). The rounded value of 1 g/ml is what you'll most often see, though._
See, metric fundies are like christian fundies. They THINK they know what they are talking about, but they don't.
as someone who lives in a metric country but grew up with both systems, i can tell you the imperial system has always baffled people a lot, because of how random it can get: 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard and 1760 yards in a mile. no one here ever really understands it fully. the 10*10*10 of the metric system is just far simpler and makes more sense
It isn’t random. You just don’t know the meaning of “random.”
@@GH-oi2jf i know what random means. i'm know there is a reason for why it works the way it does. but it seems like random numbers, because it aint consistent
@@GH-oi2jf It seems random, but I guess archaic is more accurate.
Fun one about Britain is traditional food ingredients; we list almost all food for sale in Metric, but traditional things like custard powder, golden syrup / treacle and the like get sold in 454g jars.... 1lb. The size has persisted because people are used to it, and the manufacturers don't want to go that extra 10% to make a 500g standard size. Milk is still sold in pints too, but every other drink in the fridge is in 250, 330 or 500ml bottles or cans.
India, for some weird reason, loves using the square feet for measuring land & house size, but rejects EVERY other imperial measure (except feet- used for rough estimates in conversations).
yeah we use feet only for human height and fahrenheit only for fever temperature but when talking about the weather, we use celsius.
@@kushal4956 true lmao.
It does make since in a standpoint that there is no feet equivalent in metric a yard is more like a meter
We measure cake in pounds for sunne arbitrary reason, I never heard anyone say give me 1kg cake people say 2 pound cake
@@harshwardhan228 I would have to disagree, I have never seen anyone use pounds to measure weight in India, everyone I know just uses kilogram. Guess we aren't great at being consistent with our systems lol.
Regarding the paper sizes, most of the people where I'm from, Ireland, use terms such as A4 and A3 to describe pages.
Same in Turkey
A series of paper is metric. A0 is one square meter with the dimensions 1 x the square root of 2. this is so when you cut it in half by the longside it will retain its dimensions and form two new sheets 1 greater then the previous A series number.
A side effect of this is that paper is metric and so naturally the USA does not abide by the standards making it so while the rest of the world can trade hole punchers, staplers, fax machines, binders and other dimension sensitive paper products freely american variants will not fit the rest of the worlds standard paper.
Same in India
Same in Brazil
Same in Germany
In Chile we have been using metric for all my life (I'm 77). Except for traditional building materials, probably because the early processing machines were mostly imported from the US or UK. So here we mix and match: we buy a 3,40 m length of 2x4" board or a 2m length of 1/2" copper pipe. While particle boards and pvc pipes are fully metric. Nails and screws come in assorted metric and imperial sizes and threads, while most rulers and tapes are marked in both.
Back in the fifties when I was in primary school we had to learn how to add, subtract and multiply pounds, shillings and pence because the pound sterling was still important in import/export. I have a reasonably good grasp of what inches and yards look like, but I'm quite lost in fluid ounces and Fahrenheit. I know what a US gallon is because my father had an old gallon glass jug at home. Can't remember what it contained originally, though...
Living in Canada, I can tell you one annoying thing about this dual system. When flyers advertise meat in pounds/$ , but when in the store, it's labeled as KG/$. Makes me wonder am I really paying correct price?
Quite literally the ONLY thing most of the world uses inches for is to measure the size of TVs, laptop/monitor screens, etc
There are a few others - bicycle frame sizes, cymbal sizes, vehicle wheel diameters, and plumbing thread diameters - these are given in inches even if in practice everything is made to metric specifications. Shipping containers are given in feet, because they were a US invention, even though the construction standards are all specified in metric dimensions (though it would have been nicer to have that be, say, 10 meters exactly rather than 12.192 m). And, of course, aviation often uses feet for altitude, though it should be note that knots/nautical miles are a quasi-metric unit, 1852 m exactly, which is pretty much the distance of one minute of arc on the earth's surface.
Penises
Tailors use inches to measure clothes.
@@hlynnkeith9334 Many do, but it's not worldwide. Inches for jeans is pretty universal, though, because of the influence of Levi's.
In belgium, tailoring is done in metric as far as I know - and true, bicycle wheels are in inches too. Penises are in metric as well 😂
As a 6 year old kid in an Australian school back in the mid 1970’s, I thought it super cool that 1litre of water weighs one kilogram, and would take up the volume of a cube 10cmx10cmx10cm (1 cubic decimetre). So, in metric, you could, if you wanted, make your own physical reference measure out of water if you only have one of the other measuring devices handy. We don’t really use imperial here at all anymore, except maybe sometimes if we want a pint of beer and that only works if the pub in question has pint glasses available. When I visited Russia, the sold half-liter cans of beer - which is approximately the same as a pint and seemed adequately satisfying as a standard measure of beer.
One pound of water is a pint in volume.
Are you now flabbergasted and converted over to imperial measures?
I'm from the US and yet I can tell you that one litre of water does not weigh one kilogram. It has a mass of one kilogram. Gram is not a unit of weight!
@@tlv1117 I'm a native English speaker and we use mass and weight both for "something that weighs 1 kilo".
Maybe if you bothered learning rather than look things up on google, you'd know how the language is used by actual humans.
Mark Hackett except that a pint of water only approximates a pound, which of course is fine for recipes and stuff. Also, there isn’t an easy cubic inch equivalent for pints.
kc8rwr yes except for most people doing everyday stuff on planet earth the difference is irrelevant.
I've noticed a bit of a generational divide (in the UK) about which systems we use
My parents, born in the early 60s making them boomers, use the imperial system, and still to this day get confused my metres and kilograms.
Meanwhile, me and my siblings don't really understand imperial as well as metric, although we still measure ourselves in feet and inches
As an immigrant (from a European country to Canada) who have used the metric system for my whole life, I like to confuse my Canadian friends with metric units in conversations. Luckily, the system supports it.
One thing I'm really struggling with is builder tools that use the imperial system, because how can one quickly choose between 3/18 and 5/24 or 2/43 and know which one is smaller?? And also how do you measure 5/8 on a ruler? It's much easier in mm.
Nobody uses any of those first three fractions for anything. Building with the carpenters’ scale is generally done in inches to 1/16” precision, so the fractions have denominators of 2, 4, 8, or 16. Finding 5/8 on the carpenters’ scale is so easy that children can do it after using the scale for awhile. The trick is that the marks have different lengths depending on the denominator.
Here in Australia we only swapped to metric about 50 years ago and it worked well as far as I can tell, Living here almost 20 years I never hear anyone use imperial unless they are at subway or they are trying to sound taller.
Well that’s because Australia completely banned imperial units which I think is a little too excessive; imagine how many people are going to protest that and Australia has less people than Texas alone so the entire country would go insane if that happened.
@@therealspeedwagon1451 forget population, americans will protest anything mandated by any level of government regardless of rationale. See seatbelts for instance.
@@correctionguy7632 I don’t see people protesting against seatbelts. They protect people and most people only don’t use them when you are going on a very short journey which honestly should be done by walking or by bike or scooter
@@therealspeedwagon1451 We passed legislation that it was to be used officially sounds similar to laws Canada has about packaging in this video. No one will come here and arrest you if you start talking in imperial units (people probably won't understand you though).
Before he died my Grandpa was always talking about the fish he caught in "Pounds and Stones" like "I caught a 12 pound fish the other day" I had no idea what he was saying but didn't stop him.
I have vague notions about Imperial units but no real understanding of it. Like parent comment said if you go to Subway take away store they sell foot long and 6 inch sandwiches. Every other takeaway store here in Aus would just sell you a small or a large sandwich no idea why subway has to be special.
I am an engineer sometimes I will read technical papers published from a country that uses Imperial units and it just causes my brain to bluescreen when I see units like 'pounds per square inch' to describe Pressure (we use Pa). Or BTU instead of KW I have a lot of problems rationalizing it with my experience which has always been working in metric units. I imagine the reverse would be true as well.
Many Australians still use feet for their height and will tell a baby’s birth sight in ounces.
When asked for your body size, we metric thinkers usually answer something like one-seventy-five. No need to mention the units. Every one knows that the "one" stands for the meter and the "seventy five" stands for the centimeters.
Yeah I literally say 1meter 75 not 175.
It it’s all the same anyway, people understand each other. You don’t think about if « the numbers are complicated « but just what you know is represented by those numbers
It helps that 175 cm is 1.75 m
In japan we would say one hundred and seventy five, because we tend to use centimeters in those types of things for some reason
しゃべるアヒル。 I think it has to do with the way people interact with numbers too. One major factor is the way people count money.
When I’m in the Uk, units tend to be measured in a 1-100 scale since money spent is generally in the range of £1-£100. Metric height is normally measured in meters instead of cm in the Uk.
When I’m in the Philippines, units tend to be make more sense in 100-1000 scales as money spent is generally within php100-php1000. I’m guessing this would be similar for Japan where most things are priced within ¥100-¥1000?
@@kuyaleinad4195 yes, i suppose that would be true since money spent tends to range from 100¥~10000¥
In New Zealand we use metric for essentially everything and have it fully integrated. However something odd I've noticed is that we use feet and inches for a singular purpose: height. We kinda do both, but I feel it's more common to say your height is 6 foot rather than 183cm. Which is odd because I think it might be new. It's a case of me only really noticing it like 7 odd years ago, when I was in high-school. And I can't tell if that's because I was growing up or if we culturally just shifted around then. Either way I point the finger soley at america, as we always used cm in my childhood.
One other funny thing about imperial in New Zealand is that Dungeons and Dragons, which uses imperial as its measurement, is the only reason a lot of the people I know understands feet as a measurement, besides using 6 foot people as visual indicators
Same in Australia lol
I live in Norway where we mainly use the metric system for everything. Except for boats where we use feet, and TVs where we use inches. Also almost all rulers have inches on one side, and cm/mm on the other. Don't remember any other examples, but fellow Norwegians please let me know.
I don't know why it's like that, but my mother tends to call Norway a "mini USA" so maybe there is a little correlation to the US? Who knows
Inches are also used for other screen sizes (laptop, pc monitor, etc), vinyl records, loudspeakers and pants sizes. Engine effect of cars and boats are usually in horsepowers, rather than watts.
Screens are in inches because of how they often were designed in the US I think. We only use imperial for those in Sweden, not boats either.
As a mainland European living in England, I really struggle with knowing which system is appropriate in which situation (besides the fact that I have no clue how to convert one into the other, even roughly). I'll say a temperature in °C and everyone understands me fine, but as soon as I start talking about my height in cm I have to look up what it is in feet because no one knows what I'm talking about. It's very strange lol
In general stuff to do with ones body, weight and height, is given in imperial. Distances are usually miles. If I was going to eyeball a measurement I'd probably say it in imperial but if I wanted an actual measurement I'd use metric. Cooking is a crap shoot and depends on how old your recipe is. Temperature is also always metric. Liquids are a bit more subtle but are mostly metric apart from milk, and what is sold at the bar which will probably be pints. I think this will cover it pretty well, however, I probably have more of a metric bias due to having old fashioned parents and playing Warhammer so your mileage may vary.
@@nicgreaves3484 BMI FTW :)
Beer and cider is in pints, spirits and wine mils (due to the weights and measurement act (1987?)) The reason they kept the pint, with its extra 86ml, is so when we visit the continent, we can theoretically handle our drink and not tarnish our reputation, which has most assuredly succeeded.
Celsius is intuitive linguistically, as in "the weather is boiling/freezing"
My opinion is body height is in ft as it has a better rhythm when spoken. Whereas when measuring out cuts of skirting board I will use mm, for accuracy.
Slightly off topic, when it comes to time, we say "quarter past/ to and half past, but 20 minutes is a third but we dont say "a third to/past" which I think we should from here on out.
@@boltaurelius376 "we can theoretically handle our drink and not tarnish our reputation, which has most assuredly succeeded"
Na, mate, in the rest of Europe, especially in the south (I'm from Spain) you're considered the most reckless type of drunkards. How can you say so when britons come to spain and jump from fucking hotel balconies into the pool?
@@NicoLReino I was joking pal. I'm fully aware.
Israel uses the metric system except for housing and zoning, which still uses Ottoman dunams.
Interesting,and how big is a dunam?
@@kavorkaa 1/4 of an acre= 1 dunam
The modern dunam has been standardised to one decare (1000m², ⅒ of a hectare)
kavorkaa i dunnom... lol
This is only true for plots of land. Floor size is measured in m^2. (Source: My wife and I are currently looking to rent an appartment)
Also, I never realized that Canada was imperial until this video. But some time back Canadian relatives visited us in Michigan. They drove through Detroit for obvious reasons. He had recently bought a new car and was talking about the distance in those weird kilometer units. So I asked, "so does your car get good gas kilometrage?" Not sure how to spell that.
the funniest thing is a lot of metric countries(like mine) say mileage but are really talking about km/l (kilometers per litre)
I never heard somebody say mileage because miljotraža sounds quite unnatural in the native language. So yes we do say kilometrage (kilometraža)
People struggling with metrics should just learn these basics:
60 miles / hour => 100 KM/H
water freezes => 0°C / water boils => 100°C / confortable for humans => 25°C
A tall man is 2 meters, his legs are 1 meter. And 1kg of water = 1 liter of water. (a bottle is 1.5L in Europe)
@@goofygrandlouis6296 what are thoooooseeee 🤢🤢🤢🤢
@@goofygrandlouis6296 2 meteres is very tall
I love the fact that so many of your videos are about things that i have over the past few years become aware of or different things i have stumbled upon and then see your videos talking about them...
signs synchronicities and what not
❤💛💚💙💜🖤
My favorite temperature is -40° because it is the only time when Celsus and Fahrenheit are exactly the same so almost everyone understands how cold it is ❆☃️🥶
@Cary B 😂, Yeah being in -40° weather would be brutal. While writing that I was thinking of a time I was on an Air Canada flight when I was 15 and looking at the TV screen saying the outside temperature was -40° and totally understanding how cold it was even though I usually use Fahrenheit. In other words, -40° is the same whether you prefer to use Celsius or Fahrenheit which is pretty cool 😎 .
Cary B the wind chill gets that cold in the winter sometimes where I live
Come to Winnipeg in the Winter and you'll find out how cold it is.
No problem at -40• every one agree to say : it’s very cold.
Nspnspker speaking from experience, everything under 0 f feels the same
“Oh man what an ungodly mess those Canadians have made for themselves, their lives must be agony”
I personally think this everyday
I'm an engineer for a US military contractor; we use thousandths of an in (known as a mil, thou, or E-3) for our RF devices, we will switch to mm on those same devices for soldering macro components, those macro components are measured in inches, our environmental and sealing departments use in/ib for torque, PSI for air pressure but use Pka for pressure of a sealed device and Celsius for temperature (except for the weather which we use Fahrenheit). for wires we use mils for gold wire, thous for machined copper wire, and AWG (American wire gauge) for copper wires and if for any reason we use special wire from another country we instead measure it in millimeters. We have a handbook that goes over all of the units of measurement we use and its about 8 pages long. Funny part is, it's not that confusing, it took some time getting use to it when I started but after a year or two in the field it just kinda made sense and I kinda wouldn't want it to change at this point as I have an understanding of each size based upon what I'm using it for. they're all just made up units anyways
In my field, I'm just thankful that electrical and electronics units are always metric.
300 MHz = one metre wavelength and I'm glad I never had to convert to feet and inches.
Yeah until you start making PCBs... mil vs mm drives me crazy
@@alexjenner1108 COVID rule: maintain a distance of 2 wave lengths at 150MHz.
@@alexjenner1108 Although a light nanosecond is about a foot. :)
@@alexjenner1108 just call them cycles per second instead of Hertz 😂 and FLOPS is non SI isn't it?
i love how he sarcasticly says things that i would say totally normally, like "i need to lose 2 kilos"
Same with height. Albeit in metric you usually include only the first two decimals, or just say the whole thing in cm. Like, "He is 1.82 m tall/ He is 182 cm tall".
@@DoubleCGamesStudios is that a JoJo reference?
DoubleC I think you just wanted to boast about your height there 😂
@@michaelheeheejackson7255 Oh, sorry, not at all. It was just an example. Never thought about height as a boasting thing honestly. There, fixed it :)
@@DoubleCGamesStudios I use decimetres...just for the look. Metric is supposed to allow this. And 13,000 kilometres? Simplify as every maths teacher will tell you. 13 megametres.
And replace lightyears with petametres or more. The milky way galaxy is 100,000 lightyears across or 946,073 Pm (946 exametres).
When I was on a tour of a glacier in Banff National park, the tour guide asked the group if anyone was uncomfortable with him using metric units in his descriptions. He went on to use metric units to describe distances for the rest of the tour.
In Japan the one area that the imperial system is used is in certain products, like jeans and televisions. It’s really annoying to try to figure out how many cm they are when going to buy.
Interestingly enough, the construction industry uses Japan’s own system of measurement to some extent, mostly for room and building measurements.
The US military uses the metric system and the 24 hour clock. I have never encounter imperial measurement in official military manuals or in field exercises.
I believe that was the Anglo-American concession to the French when NATO was created. All of NATO had to use metric, that why the bullet calibers are 5.56 mm and 7.62 mm instead of .223 and .308
The reason for that is all other members of NATO can only divide by 10.
The metric system is only used for distance because of the need for standardized maps. However, a kilometer is called a klick. Long distances not involving maps use miles, such as you would tell Soldiers that we need to move 10 miles.
All other measurements use Imperial, such as weight, amount of fuel or water, altitude above the ground, temperature, ect.
The U.S. military also uses their own version of the Julian calendar. It's a serial day within the year. OTOH astronomers use a Julian calendar which is a serial day going back to the (assumed) founding of Rome.
@@rparl AUC?
In the UK we don’t ever say paper size in metric or imperial. We say A4, A5 etc.
A4, A5, etc. are all metric standards. Our paper sizes are all metric.
@@MrSpeakerCone Well, yes, but the point is that Brits tend to say the name of the paper size, while certain other countries say the exact measurements.
@@MrSpeakerCone "metric standard" is the wrong term. It's DIN, actually a German industry standard since 1922.
@@dediver it is the official metric standard though according to the ISO
@Crabman Coconut yea well we only rly use imperial in Sayings or when ordering a subway.
Hi JJ, as a 40-ish Scottish woman I got taught both metric and imperial which is the best of both worlds in my opinion. Yeah that m&m description is fairly accurate in UK's respect, I'm right in the middle of my family everyone older than me only got taught imperial and everyone younger than me got taught both until the millennium then the kids got asked if they wanted to know both or just imperial.
Wait, both or just imperial (in reference to what younger kids are being thaught)? Is that a typo or really how it is going?
Fantastic observations mate, well done! & hilarious to boot!
10:36 "No one is ever going to say oh I'm 1.4327m"
Of course not. Why are you giving your height to a precision of 0.1mm? That's 1/254 of an inch, the thickness of a human hair!
Are they going to say "I'm 4 foot 8 and 103/254ths of an inch"...?
Perhaps round it off to a more standard "4 foot 8 and 26/64ths of an inch", which is already 4 times less precise than 1.4327m...
Most metric users would settle for saying 143cm, or 1.4m
3cm is more than an inch, and that IS an appreciable difference between heights of humans. So someone using 1.4m needs to explain why they didn't say 1m.
Mark Hackett I‘ll explain it: 1.4 m is 1m 40 cm or 140 cm.
@@markhackett2302 It all depends on how exact you want to be:
Rounding to 1.43m is 0.2% off.
Rounding/converting to 4'8" is 1% off.
Rounding to 1.4m is 2% off.
Rounding to 1m is 43% off.
Most rational people would agree that being 43% off the true value is too much.
If you are fine with rounding to integer inches in imperial, then rounding to a single decimal in metric isn't much different. It's mostly done when giving a rough idea, like saying "about 5 foot", only clearer.
Personally, I would always give 2 decimal places, or simply use integer centimetres (same thing, just without the decimal point). In reality, we'd say one-forty-three, so it doesn't actually matter if it's m or cm.
The beauty of the metric system is that you can be as precise or approximate as you want, just by adding more or fewer digits. No conversions, random multipliers or fractions needed.
Yeah, I thought that was comical as well. It's like someone saying they're 1.3777 yards tall. I reality I think Imperial users estimate in ½ or ¼ segments of a foot. (~15cm, ~7.5cm) segments... 5' (short) , 5½' , 6' (tall), 6'6" (super tall) ... just like those height signs... whereas metric users tend to estimate in 10cm segments ( 4")... 150(short),160,170,180 (tall), 190, 200 (super tall) It's a BIG deal for some guys to say... Ohhh I'm 6'! and if you're under 5' it's like... WHOA you're NOT 5'??? In reality, the foot is too big and the inch is too small... but people can visualize ½ or ¼ foot pretty easily... so metric and imperial are the same. metricistas think in terms of the decimetre (10cm) which is about 4" and imperialistas more in terms of fractions of a foot. Sure, 5'7" and 5'8" are different... but they're not hugely different are they?
@@TheNewGreenIsBlue Well 30cm is one foot, so 10cm is a third of a foot. So imperial is still very much a factor, and the inch is used more often than "fractional feet", and the cm is implied by a glottal pause after the unit meters.
That makes the metric more accurate, but not to a level that makes a difference. 2cm is "margin of error", as is 1in. But cm is pretty negligible.
That, however, wasn't the point of the cm. That WAS the point of the inch, which you can still say someone is 68 inches tall, and that is pretty darn easy.
The first time a UK Internet friend said his weight in stone i thought he was messing with me.
Hi JJ, nice talk, interesting topic. I'm from that country to your south, but lived in Germany for 6 won•der•ful years, back in the '80s. After a few fits and starts, I fell in love with the metric system. You only buy 2 kilos of butter once.... (farmers' market). But the Germans aren't 100% metric, either - at least in Bavaria. They still will order a Pfund of this or that, meaning 500g. I was in a pub once, and a local told me a German joke and tried to catch me up in terminology. The joke: What is eine Maß Bier? A: 1 litre. Q: What's a beer half that size? A: A Hoibe (a half = 500ml) Q: and what is half of that? A: Pure foam. Then he asked me if I knew what a Quartel was (German pronunciation = Kvart'l) - and he was surprised that I knew it was also a Hoibe - 500ml.
German cookbooks are wonderful. Dry ingredients are almost always measured by weight, the most notable exception being small amounts, for which they've borrowed the table spoon & fractions there of. Liquids are in milliliters.
You may still hear some old-timers use Zentner (from "cent" = 100). In Germany, a Zentner is 50kg (100 metric pounds) but in Switzerland, a Zentner is 100kg).
Sheets of paper, notebooks etc. have their own system, the "DIN" (German Institute for Normalization). This site is in German, but its graphics make it easily understandable. www.schlender.de/din-formate/
Clothing. ....clothing sizes in Germany - Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'intrate. It is a deep and frightful place.....
When I was looking for housing in Korea, I noticed on the listings, floorspace was displayed using 평 (pyeong) and square meters. 평, according to Wikipedia, is roughly 3.03 square meters/35.583 sq ft.
As a brit i can confirm that the M&M analogy is basically perfect.
Agreed
Spot on!
Yah in Canada we only and I mean only inches feet and kinda miles
@@hitpointalpha8691 I think the big difference that the M&M analogy gets to is the units measured for road distances. As a Brit who has visited and driven in both the US and Canada, the single most noticeable difference between Canada and the UK/ US is in the fact that kilometres are used for road distances, whereas in the UK and US miles are used exclusively. So superficially it seems as though Canada uses the metric system more than the UK, when actually, as this video has pointed out to me, we both mix the systems to a similar extent.
Didnt know kanye was british damn
The Use of the Metric System in Ireland is wierd as while all government services and most shops as well as the majority of young people use it older people (age 40+) use the imperial system
I think other than Miles most people here use imperial except for measuring yourself
To give you a taste of how often I use metric, I'm not entirely sure how the Imperial system works since I was taught Metric since I started school.
Imperial system more like boomer system.
Glad to know that you're guys are more metric similar to Australia than the metric/imperial mess the UK uses. Major props for using Kilometres.
Which system does the Holy See use again?
The metre was defined as it is today in 1983 over the light speed. It was the kg that was redefined around 2018/2019.
the metric system is more consistent (jumps of 10) so it is much easier to make conversions but it doesn't mean that the imperial system is bad.
it is also easier to count money
Very interesting. I always imagined that Canada was fully metric.
Australia went metric in 1960 and we've never looked back. I can still remember the horror of having to convert feet to miles, gallons to bushels, square feet to acres, and all that nonsense. When we went metric, my teacher said "can you multiply and divide by ten? That's all you need to know." It was like being released from gaol.
Chuckle... "gaol"... much more traditional English than the way we spell jail in Canada
@@DaveSmithCA You bring up a good point, in many ways, Australians of a certain age correlate British English with the "proper" spelling of words, I'd say older people might write "gaol" but I'd say these days younger people would be more inclined to use "jail" - I have chastised myself for falling into this habit. The weird thing with English is that might is right really...and US English has the global might now...so it just continues to mutate with the US its most potent generative engine. There really is no "proper" we just like to think there is based on whatever constitutes the hegemonic power of the day. By 1960 Australia was getting further removed culturally from Britain in so many ways with waves of mass immigration and so on - the allegiance to the politics of a British "standard" was breaking down with the decline of their influence. There are still vestiges of Imperial measurement in Australia though especially like height and weight. Height is still often in feet...as a cultural remnant. Weight still gets discussed in stone. But rarely expressed in pounds these days. Maybe older people only.
I lived in rural NSW for a few years in the 90s, dunno if things have changed but I pretty much remember everyone using imperial back then. My friends would measure their weight in stones and their height in feet and inches. I met an Aussie woman in her 60s a few years ago who got confused and said "What's that??" when I told her I'm 182cm.
He overstates the case a lot, in Quebec it isn't really used at all. Other than buying lumber and hardware, clothing sizes and weed dealers there's really very little use of it in the province. Not that much in Ontario either. But a lot of the products and white goods we have come from the US so there's imperial measurements slapped on it.
Not surprising that Canada is similar to Australia. I can go to my favorite hardware store in OZ now and buy a bold that is 120mm long and 1/2 inch threat! I'm part of a team that builds the most advanced fast ferries in the world and I need to carry two sets of tools metric and imperial, probably to keep the older folks happy as they haven adopted yet! I adapted to mm instead of cm but that is easy, just shift the comma, but what I don't get is that they still teach up to the table of twelve at schools here, something to do with the imperial system perhaps? 60 years after the introduction of the metric system!
Where I’m from, Hong Kong, it is even more confusing as we have three systems of measurement. Officially we use metric in things like roads but imperial measurements from the colonial era still remain for property (sq. ft) and for food in markets, which we use pounds. Some clothing measurements also use inches. We also have a traditional Chinese measurement used in wet markets (a measurement called the catty)
Joshua Leung you can thank us Brits for the confusing mishmash
I am from Hong Kong as well.
If my memory correct, in was in the late 1970s to entire 1980s, the British ruled colonial government started to switch to and promoting the metric system.
As a child in that era, being educated with the metric system, particularly with the understanding how those definition originated, I would say I am a metric guy for most of the time.
For the general public, however, the metric transformation is a total failure! Just as Joshua Leung said, people just keep using yards, inches, feet, pounds, old Chinese catty, tael and mace, even today. Temperature is the only successful metric adoption. People have no idea of Fahrenheit (only been used to describe body temperature in older generation).
Car owners are in a particular confusing condition. It is officially adopt the metric system. The speed limit, the tickets (the most important thing) are all in metric. So the drivers adopted it... sort of. The drivers adopt the number part, but keep saying the old unit. For example, speed limit at 70 km/h, they will say 70 咪 (Cantonese pronounced as "mic"), which actually is miles. But I could understand that there is no one single Chinese character to conveniently describe km/h. You have to say 每(per)小時(hour) XX(the number) 公里("metric" "mile")/千(kilo)米(metre).
Even we the metric campaign, linguistically, we still put words of the old units in our metric units. For example kilogram should be 千(thousand/kilo)克(gram), but we often say 公(metric)斤(tael); kilometre should be 千(thousand/kilo)米(metre), but we often say 公(metric)里(mile).
I said generally I am a metric guy because there are a few exceptions: when describing high heel shoes, talking about bust/waist/hips, I will switch to inches. (I'm s so politically wrong!)
Brazil exclusively uses the metric system. The only places a regular person will see imperial units are the labels of products that happen to be either imported from or exported to countries which use the imperial system. However, one sector in particular has to comply with the fact that worldwide there's an usage of imperial standards, that being the industries. When I was studying to become a mechanical technician, there was pretty much an entire block of our machinery elements class dedicated to teach us how to convert to inches, and we also had to learn of imperial-based standards for the profiles of screws and gears. Piping, tools, raw materials (like steel) and machinery bits will often be sold and used under imperial measurements, although metric standards are also available.
couple of years old video, I know, but from my experience I genuinly think Imperial might go extinct naturally in the UK. its barely taught in schools (or atleast I never really learned it when I went a few decades back) and most people I know default to metric units.
Pints in pubs will always be an exception but thats almost more cultural than anything.
In India, there's a visible mess of measurements too. A person's height and short distances are still measured in feet/inches, while body weight or any weight is always in kilograms. Body temperature is measured in F, while all the other temperatures like that of air have C as the only standard unit. Acres and sq. feet are more common than any other units for property listing. Mile (meel in Hindi) is a poetic term that you encounter frequently, especially in metaphors, idioms and songs. I've never heard anyone using pounds and gallons though; most of us don't even know what they are. For everything else, it's the metric unit as the only standard, mainly because India's modernisation and educational development was a recent success when metric was already mainstream. Our ancestors didn't go to school when imperial system was being taught, so no one really got to measure more technical things like paper thickness back in the imperial days. India has had its own traditional units too.
Part of the reason for the mess is that it was early on an empire. Meaning it subsumed at a time when there was little international trade, several different countries, all with their own imperial measures.
Then got the British Imperial system landed on them.
Very well said. To quote your final sentence "India has had its own traditional units too.", I thought of Gold and Silver. What on earth is a Tola? And explain Lakh and Crore to the rest of the world :)
@@ponugups Lakh is 1/10th of a million and crore is 10 million. And Tola is 10 grams of gold i.e, almost equal to 11.6 grams. See it's not that hard.
I'll never understand all the fuss about round numbers. I mean, going up or down the metric scale is just as matter of multiplying X10. For me it doesn't matter if the label says 17.5 cm, 175 mm, 0.175 m or any of the others.
America should switch to base-12 numbers. Then build their own better metric system around the inch and foot. That'd show them.
@@jasonl7651 Base 12 is mathematically an awesome number system - much better than the Base 10 most of us use. So 12 inches making a foot isn't a bad thing all by itself. The problem is that even the Imperial system doesn't use base 12 for much else - go smaller and we tend to use dyadic fractions (x over 2/4/8/16/32 etc) and going larger we use yards (1 foot x 3) and miles (1 yard x 1,760, or 1 inch x 5,280).
This is why the metric system is simply better. It uses the same number base most of us commonly use (base 10) and it's consistent in that larger and smaller units are some multiple of 10 from each other. In terms of distance, 10 millimeters is 1 centimeter, 100 centimeters are 1 meter, 1000 meters is 1 kilometer - which means that with our base 10 numbering system, converting between those units is simply a matter of shifting the decimal place.
Intuitively can you picture how long 17.5cm is? Idk I obviously use metric everyday in Canada and being in a scientific field. But I have no clue how long that is. I think the centimetre is one of the most useless units as nothing in real life is about that size. Inches are sort of a better size like I can relatively guess how big 6” is or the length of a foot. Kg vs lbs is just whichever you use more of I guess.
@@rashadarbab2769 Seriously? Landmark numbers change from culture to culture and from person to person. I have not idea how long 17.5 cm is, but I do now how long 20 cm is (roughly the length of my open palm, so 17.5 is slightly less). Conversely, I have no idea how long 6 ft is, as I haven't had previous exposure to imperial, so to me imperial is unintuitive. I recommend you to watch Matt Parker's latest video on landmark numbers y2u.be/LYKn0yUTIU4
MasterPeibol yea so I think I know about how one 20cm is it’s about 8 inches I’d saying the top of my mind. 20/2.54 = 8ish 6ft is about the length of a tall man. I’m about 510 so pretty much me lying down head to toe. I guess it all depends on what you’re accustomed to. Btw if you don’t mind me asking where you live like what country?
Most importantly though metric comes into its own when your talking about physics or sort of compound units. Newtons, watts, joules, Newton meters (torque), also when it comes to going from big to small the base 10 is definitely useful there. But more or less these things are only useful when your doing science and not so much day to day.
I'm from El Salvador. Our official measurements system is Metric but we buy gasoline using gallons, weight is measured in pounds and things like nails and screws are sold in inches.
House construction in Canada is Imperial in most cases however larger commercial projects are most often metric and use mm.
Canada: Just metric enough to confuse Americans.
The US military has been using the metric system since the end of WWI so I doubt it would confuse anyone...
@@AsymmetricalCrimes because every US citizen is in the US military?
Almost anything confuses Americans
But even no metric at all still confuses Americans. That's why metric is better.
@@AsymmetricalCrimes As has NASA too I understand.
American rulers usually have centimeters and inches too
Fun fact: they are the same rulers indeed
Tape measures used in construction are never metric.
@@rooster0143 ive seen some with both.
Yeah, but most people only use the metric when measuring their 🥒.
@@ephraimboateng5239 Me, too. But usually the cheap ones in the $4.99 bin.
I'd live to hear your take on Australia's and New Zealand's path to Metrication.
You honestly think construction is done in imperial because _marketing_ is imperial? Which one do you think is properly hard to change? Which one requires costly government intervention to even be feasible?
Sure people don't personally adapt well to changes in measurement system, but when the plumbing code says your horizontal pipe runs must drop 1/4" per foot, and 85% of Canada's plumbing code is just borrowed from the U.S. federal standard...and your pipe is mass-produced by a U.S. supplier with inner diameter in inches, by imperial-centric manufacturing equipment...and the entire structure of all existing housing and standard architecturally-sound approaches is scaled by 4'x8' subdivisions and similar...need I continue?
As hard as it is to change people's minds, that's actually the _easiest_ hurdle by far.
Nobody says 1.432 cm. Just like you'd say "5 foot 7", we say "1 meter 70". Easy.
The people I've met who say their height in centimeters don't even touch meters they just say "I'm 170cm". But yeah, no one goes into the that far past the decimal.
If one needs to spare time or just doesn't, it is also common around where I live to say „I am one 70” or „I am a hundred 70” cutting out ands, units and Kommata (or periods).
This clearly shows how they don't know how the metric system works hahahahha
@Rae the Alien because judging by his pfp and name he is probably European, and in most European languages it is the other way around? Non-native English speakers tend to unwittingly slip artifacts of their native tongue when they speak English. So stop being so JUDGEMENTAL
@Rae the Alien good for you. Stay true, Americans, never change!
It's not true that we value millimeters more than centimeters. They're just interchangeable because it's so extremely easy to do so. We use meters, centimeters and millimeters depending on how convenient it is. If something is small scale, or needs to be very precise we'll use millimeters. If something is conventionally small and doesn't need to be extremely precise we use centimeters and if it's any bigger we may use meters.
Beor Eviols hardly any use of cm in the uk
@@fivish That's you guys being weird though. You also measure all liquids in milliliters, even when deciliters would be more convenient. Here in Sweden we even use decimeters quite regularly, I don't know how common that is in the rest of the world.
We rarely use decimeters though, that's strange.
@@Tyranastrasza It's the least common of the four main units (meter, decimeter, centimeter, millimeter) for sure, but it is used and everyone is familiar with it here.
@@Theorimlig Not in France, barely ever used (we know what it is, we just don't use it) except when I was in school where our rulers had the names double or triple decimeters.
As an American, while I readily acknowledge the superiority of the metric system, my mind thinks in imperial units. If I hear a temperature in degrees C, I don't know whether or not I'll need a jacket on a given day; if I hear the temp in degrees F, I know instantly. When it comes to distance, I can easily visualize what 10 miles is; if I hear a distance in metric, I can't. If I used metric exclusively, then I'd probably develop the same, intuitive feel that I have for the old system.
At the end of the day though, I think you're on to something when you pointed out peoples' resistance to change. People, particularly older people, prefer that which is familiar to them.
We’re metric here, but we still use inches (or thumbs as they’re called here) when measuring screens…
@@janmamu8721 Oh yeah, i hate that
I live in America, and I work in jewelry manufacturing. A bunch of my coworkers have a machining background, which uses Imperial as the standard. On the other hand, the bench jewelers and a few former apprentices (including myself) were trained using SI. There are a lot of blank stares when we all talk to each other. In my opinion, anything less than an inch should be measured in millimeters.
From my experience in Germany we never say "I'm one-point-seven-one-four metres tall" rather "I'm one seventy-one".
All other things in life are also normed. Paper for example is made in different norms which are built to work together. Do you can fold an A3 paper in half, it will become an A4 sized paper which perfectly into an A4 Stapler. Or fold it once more and it will become A5 which fits into an A5 envelope.
Rulers have cm mainly, because it's more often used. Millimetres are only used in maths classes and engineering.
Checkered paper seem also be normed so that 4 clustered squares make 1cm².
And metric is also great when measuring water (like in a pool or transportation) since one litre of water is 1dm² which also is 1kg of water.
It's all connected.
Portuguese is quite distant from German, but yup, we use a similar structure when talking about meter.
For height we could say something like "I measure one *and* seventy five". You could also say one meter and seventy five, or one seventy five meters, but you'd never say x meters y centimeters.
Duh!
And centimetres are more popular than millimeters! He confused an industrial ruler with a school one.
*1dm cubed ;)
@@everythingiseconomics9742 In Dutch it's 1 meter 75 usually
In the US the military uses metric and so does anyone who studies science and engineering. I can use both systems with no problem.
Which is also the main reason of all using the same system ... everyone knows what you're talking about. Always reminds me of the problem, in aerospace I think, where one contractor mixed up metric and imperial and the components delivered did not match. If that is not proof enough ... on top of that metric is made to be easy, base 10, like the amount of fingers most of us have. Piece of cake, no weird conversions going up or down the scale like between feet and inches
@@patrickcardon1643 ... or between feet and feet!
@Chooey Sooares He mentioned that in the video
The metric system used in the sciences are not human-scale. Measuring the size of the sun or width of bacteria is easier with metric but for day to day life of a layman, there is no advantage of one system over the other
@@jconti123 there is actually, in the imperial system you have to multiply in weird numbers to move between units unlike the metric where you only need to divide/multiply by 10 or 100.
1km= 1000meters
1meter= 100cm
1cm= 10mm
As a Brit I’d say that there are some sort of rules when dealing with metric or imperial, such as human measurements being imperial, but like the English language and British place names, it’s got so many exceptions that practically you just have to learn everything.
Also, I’m a bit odd because I was raised purely on metric, simply because my family didn’t bring up measurements much, it was just school.
Well Canada’s sister country Australia managed to properly convert. We now use completely metric after converting in 1966. When I was a kid (I was born in 1968) some things were still imperial ie. old cars had mph on their speedos but that hasn’t been the case for years and years… Now the only imperial measurements we encounter are Luddites from the three countries you mentioned + Burma and Myanmar. I think in Kilograms for my weight, centimetres for my height, Celcius for temperature, grams and kg for weight…
Australia mandated conversion. They even made the race horses convert. What an unnecessary gesture!
Actually, Myanmar (formerly Burma) uses its own system entirely.
Interesting anecdote: The confusion caused during Canada's transition period to measuring fuel using metric system very *nearly* caused a crash of Air Canada Flight 143, if weren't for the incredible heroics of the pilots. Google the term "Gimli Glider" to read more.
I know someone on that flight.
If memory serves, they measured the weight of the fuel incorrectly. So, if they needed 30,000 kg to fly from Ottawa to Vancouver, they got 30,000 pounds. Ooops!
As an avgeek, I’m glad you told this tale.
Part of the problem was the "new" aircraft in the Air Canada fleet were metric and the older aircraft were imperial. This was a 767 and it was just starting to join Air Canada. Last month Air Canada announced plans to retire all of these now old 767.
Nice.Another mayday fan
Didn’t talk about Quebec. Real estate and construction all uses metric! House were advertised in squared meters.
rebeccafridaylove
Australia went metric during the mass conversion of the '70s and we use it in almost all circumstances - apart from personal stuff like a person's height.
I couldn't imagine the building industry using Imperial measurements! It is so cumbersome!
I guess the French-Canadian sector is more metric than the Brit-Canadian because of your ties to France?
Canada is so interesting!
Quebec- Canada’s Canada.
I was going to ask about Quebec. It seems improbable that French speaking people would have used a British based system of weights and measures.
I've generally suspected that American cultural integration played a significant role in this. Quebec being an exception would be a strong supporter of that argument.
@Very Bored ALL of Canada uses metric!
The bit about using millimeters instead of inches in Japan is interesting to me, because that wasn't true of naval guns in the Second World War: the Japanese Nagato-class battleships would be said to have 41cm main guns, 15.5cm secondary guns, 12.7cm AA guns, and so on, while the French Richelieu-class ships would be said to have 380mm main guns, 152mm secondary guns, 100mm AA guns, and so on. However, the smaller AA autocannons were still described in millimeters (almost all Japanese ships used Type 96 25mm autocannons). I'm guessing this is because it was based off of the French 25mm Hotchkiss.
Usually missed with this discussion is that the Inch is also decimalized, divided into ten parts too, where more precision is necessary. So instead of fractions you can use tenths, hundredths, thousandths.
In Mongolia it's 100% metric so i have 0 notion of the imperial measurements so when i find a nice recipe on the internet or on CZcams it feels like i'm playing a video game on inverted😂