Measurements can fuck off.
All right, all right, come back. That’s unfair, I know. Measurements in general don’t have to fuck off. It is, upon occasion, quite useful to be able to quantify certain things. Like the amount of flour to put in a cake. How many photos you can fit on a memory card. How long your cock is. Actually, forget I said that last one.
But do we really need quite so many different ways to measure things? And quite so many different ways in which to convert from one to another? And so many with stupid names?
Let’s take length, for example. (Just general length. Not cock length.) There are 100 centimetres in a metre. There are 1000 metres in a kilometre. (Swap the “r” and “e” around if you’re reading in American.) These, to me, are logical. Units of 10s, 100s and 1000s make sense. They’re nice round numbers. I have ten fingers and ten toes. It’s a number that I’m used to dealing with.
Now let’s consider an alternative unit of measurement. Inches. There are twelve inches in a foot. And a foot is roughly 30 centimetres. Okay. Fine. Why “foot”? My foot isn’t twelve inches long. I don’t think. Someone’s might be. Someone’s inhuman cock might be twelve inches long. Does that mean there are twelve inches in a “cock”, too? (Enough with the cock already.) But the thing with feet, they’re not exactly a universally-sized thing. My foot is considerably bigger than that of a 5-year old, for example. So why f— oh, never mind. What comes after foot? A yard? A yard is 3 feet? Okay. Why, again? I hear “yard”, I think “wide open space”. 3 feet isn’t very big. It’s 12 inches times 3, which is… *thinks* 36 inches? Which means it must be about 90 centimetres. So many different numbers.
Then what? A mile? How many yards in a mile? 1760? One thousand seven hundred and sixty? How the hell is anyone supposed to remember that?
The other problem that this causes is that when you go to another country, you often have a whole new measurement system to worry about. And the amounts that these units represent are often inconsistent between different countries, which doesn’t help matters. And don’t even think about trying to cook something.
Yes! Cookery. If you’re American, chances are you deal with an oven that has big numbers on it. Come over to the UK and you might be dealing with an oven with very small numbers on it (like 1-7 small) or an oven with slightly-smaller-than-American numbers on it (like 150-200). If you aren’t aware of the intricacies of conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit and the black magic required to determine what the hell a “Gas Mark” is, then you can forget about cooking something and not burning it to a fine crisp.
So I’m firmly in favour of a globalised system for measurement that is resolutely based in good old base 10. There are 10 things in a bigger thing, 100 things in a much bigger thing and 1000 things in a really big thing. That’ll do me just fine. And it’ll save me running to Google every single time a website asks me my height in centimetres and I only know it in feet and inches.
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Yeah, this is way overdue. Way, way overdue. I have no doubt that people (alright, mostly just assholes in the US) would pitch a fucking fit over it though.
You, sir, measure 0 blargh.
Oddly I think in both metric and imperial, but for the life of me I can’t seem to translate between the two!
It’s weird. Some things are imperial (my height, travelling distances, milk) some are metric (size of paper, room measurements, shots of alcohol) but I normally don’t know the equivalent in the other system. Metric makes more sense (10s are much easier to count/calculate) but it’s difficult to get that many people to change, even more so when it’s the way you think!
@Rhiarti and @icicle_halo_:
I’m the same, actually. I think of my height and weight, amounts of milk and/or beer, and altitude in Imperial measurements because that’s what I learned when I was growing up… but all the way through school it was Metric in the maths books. One thing they never taught us right up until GCSE was how to convert between the two!
Thank heavens for Google, eh?
Imperial does make so much more sense. But as Calin says above, there would certainly be uproar from certain people with traditional viewpoints, both here in the UK and (particularly?) in America, too.
Imperial? Bollocks, now I’m confused. Metric would make more sense. Is what. I meant. To say.
Shush.
What really fries my mind is that some imperial measurements are slightly different to the US customary imperial system take weight for example an UK imperial ton is 2240 pounds (lbs why lbs)? but the US sometime use 2000lbs as a ton measurement. It makes software internationalization very interesting (as I have found at work) Widespread air travel has effectivly blurred international borders so a unified system is long overdue (so long as its base 10).