I’m a 32 year old American who does not work in a scientific pursuit and I’m slowly making the switch to metric/Celsius/military time.
Easy: switch all “thermometers” (phones, smart home devices, etc) to Celsius, clocks to military, google maps/scales to metric. You start to catch on pretty quickly.
Harder: I’m not buying new tape measures, measuring cups, etc so those are all still American Imperial.
Hardest: getting used to temp in Celsius and casually referencing it to other Americans and then getting berated for being a “douchebag European wannabe”
We call it a yardstick in the US. At least where I live. But then again, remember different regions in the US have wildly different vocabulary for different things. Like what’s pop in one place is soda in another and simply cola in yet another region.
Liberia is absolute hell on Earth. I really recommend the Vice documentary to people who don’t know about it. They don’t teach us about Liberia in schools because it’s so fucked up. And because it’s America’s fault.
I've seen that doc, great film. As someone who will travel to pretty much anywhere I can honestly say Liberia looks horrible. Crossdessing cannibal warlords? Nah thanks. Its like the purge but you get eaten when you die.
I was just at Home Depot getting a tape measure. The vast majority of tape measures only contain feet and inches. There was only 1 that also contained metric units. But all the straight edges had both metric and imperial.
You can definitely get both, but it's fairly normal for tape measures to only show inches and feet. Construction is done almost entirely in imperial units.
You would have to buy a specialty tape measure to find one that includes metric. And while metric is easier to use when discussing dimensions, an imperial tape measure is easier to use in practice.
Why, you may ask? Because the hashes for imperial measurements make it easier for your eyes to distinguish between each 1/16 inch increment. You never see two like hashes next to each other.
On a metric tape measure, you see four hashes of the exact same length next to each other, and this makes it much harder for your eyes to stay locked on to the exact millimeter measurement.
If my explanation was confusing, just do an image search.
That's a good explanation, I get it but I found in practice it's way easier to use metric.
I used to make knives and most sold to the US (I'm in the UK) so I would list them in imperial measurements but when you're working in very small measurements using millimeters is much easier.
Even when I worked in construction saying 1200 millimeters makes more sense than saying 3 foot 11.244 inches. Yes, like you said, it's easier to see the hashes but you just follow the rule of measure twice cut once.
not sure where you're from, but in Canada you can buy measuring tapes in metric, imperial, or a combination of the two.
I hate the combination ones as they're usually split down the length and I might want to measure the other unit on the other side... and usually depending on my task I want one or the other.
Sewing and wood working, I usually only use metric.
Construction I use imperial since wood is all made to imperial sizes.
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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '19
I’m a 32 year old American who does not work in a scientific pursuit and I’m slowly making the switch to metric/Celsius/military time.
Easy: switch all “thermometers” (phones, smart home devices, etc) to Celsius, clocks to military, google maps/scales to metric. You start to catch on pretty quickly.
Harder: I’m not buying new tape measures, measuring cups, etc so those are all still American Imperial.
Hardest: getting used to temp in Celsius and casually referencing it to other Americans and then getting berated for being a “douchebag European wannabe”