this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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And pretending imperial measurements are better than metric!
As a non-American who didn't grow up with imperial, I still prefer it for fantasy. Metric sounds too modern and scientific. Also I feel like I have more room to fudge distances because it already sounds imprecise.
Would be a fun bit to make the players use metric in a magitech world though.
I use metric for the fantasy that my country isn't dumb 😥
Oof lol
In the UK the government was considering switching back to imperial (just to pretend we're not in Europe). Honestly I think they didn't because otherwise they'd get too many milkshakes thrown at them.
Don't care. My sheets have all the measurements without major mechanical significance listed in SI units. Length of hempen rope? 15 metres. Darkvision range? 18 metres. Character weight? Kilograms. The only imperial unit I keep using is speed (ft/turn)
Most of them I guess, I only just learned there's 2 types, one for Americans and one for whoever else is dumb enough to not use metric. Imperial units are dumb, inconsistent, arbitrary increments that make little sense. Metric is uniform, even increments of ten/hundred/thousand no matter how far up/down in scale you go.
Measuring distance, the smallest increment imperial has is the inch. 12 inches make a foot, and 3 feet make a yard. The next increment up is a mile, which is 1780 yards, why the giant leap?
Meanwhile with metric, no matter what you're measuring, the next step up is just a multiple or factor of 100 or 1000 of whatever you're measuring. 100cm = 1m, and 1000m = 1km.
And don't even get me started on Ferenheit vs Celsius, nevermind the fact that Kelvin is better than both.
I say all this as an American who grew up struggling with our dumb ways of doing things.
I mean, I'm European, on metric and fully agree with you.
But you're not right about the units. They're just the most well known, and used ones.
An inch is 3 barleycorns. A barleycorn is 4 poppyseeds. A poppyseed (2.11mm) is six points. A point, 0.35mm is twenty twips. A twip is 17 micrometers. 0.0176mm, roughly the width of a human hair.
Which makes it even dumber, because it shows it's from a time in people could measure things in twips, yet those people still chose to make a unit called "a twip" instead of just saying "fuck this we're going metric". Nevermind I checked and point and twip are both typographical measurements, so it's less unreasonable.
With most common and best known ones, the same things still exist in metric, but they're just minimally confusing, as people know it's prefix+unit. A milliliter is very common. Deciliter as well, but probably less so (someone once told me their country don't use it as much despite being on metric, can't remember the country), but something like a decimeter or a decigram would sound pretty weird. Hectogram however, isn't too unfamiliar, pretty used in the drug world. I'm sure a lot of people would be confused by the prefix "yotta" or "ronna", which I was too. Yonna is above zetta, above exa, above peta. I'm sure a lot of people on Lemmy know at least "peta" and probably exa.
Discounting those amazingly big prefixes, even if I use a less used combo like, say, "megasecond", you don't need additional information to figure out how long that is. But with seconds it's annoying to transform them into days and hours and minutes, because you have to also use base 60, but still doable. Here's a tangentially related example: a nice comparison between millionaires and billionaires; if you earned a dollar a second, you'd be a millionaire in a megasecond, a billionaire in a gigasecond. A megasecond is is 11.57 days. A gigasecond is 32 years.
Celsius and Kelvin are exactly the same temperature scale, only shifted by 273.
Yeah I just came back from Lowe's after cutting a bunch of 2x6s into feet, inches, and 1/4 of an inch... wish I could've just said cm
I've used Celsius for decades in America, I just look up the weather every day in Celsius and figured it out pretty quickly (although I have to use F for all my kitchen appliances for cooking at least my climate control systems in car/home all work with C)
The imperial vs metric thing doesn't really bother me as an imperial user, since it's all I've ever known and is ingrained. However, fahrenheit is the superior temperature unit. Celsius is too narrow, for effectively portraying temps, at least with weather and cooking, IMO.
The difference between 20ºC and 21ºC is imperceptible to a human. Ignoring the fact that you can easily increment in halves (20.5ºC), making your point complete moot, how is it narrow? Also, Celsius is an absolute scale, just like Kelvin. Fahrenheit is an abomination.
Fahrenheit is more descriptive. You could do half degrees, but it's better to use whole degrees and have more to choose from. It's better for cooking because it offers more granularity. I personally feel it's vastly superior but to each their own.
Why and how? You haven't provided any evidence of this.
Why? You haven't provided any evidence of this.
Again, you can use any value between any two degrees as needed. Are 'muricans so slow that they can't deal with decimal fractions?
Which is completely irrelevant. Your feelings mean literally nothing when we're discussing the inherent characteristics of a system.
Holy shit dude... You're acting like I killed your fucking dog or something. I think fahrenheit is better, you don't. They are both opinions, and your's doesn't mean any more than mine.
The reason I think it's more descriptive is because interpreting whole numbers is easier and more intuitive, which is the main crux of my opinion, and for standard ranges that most people use, I think its clearer to use fahrenheit. You can throw your casserole in the oven at a nice 182.22C, and I'll put mine in at 350F.
Honestly, what's worse than the imperial system are metric users than think they're hot shit because they were born into a different system and can't figure imperial out.
Are you a child? Because otherwise you're possibly the most infantile adult I've ever seen. You make broad unfounded statements, then immediately backpedal and feel offended when called out for it.
No, opinions aren't equivalent to facts. You can't just say "hurr durr, I belive 2 is a bigger number than 3, you keep your opinion and I keep mine".
Where did you find this information? What research did you look into that states people find the specific set of numbers used in Fahrenheit clearer? No, "my 'murican friends think so" doesn't count as research.
Fallacious argumentation. As previously stated, the difference between 182 and 183 is negligible. You try to ascribe an extra level of complexity which doesn't exist in reality.
There's no need to "figure out" an inferior system which was abandoned by the world for being too archaic. Or are you still "figuring out" old English?
I don't think that a source is required to explain that whole numbers are easier to comprehend than decimals. You yourself have brought to the table exactly zero reasons you think Celsius is better. Cool, you remember 0 and 100, I remember 32 and 212, but because I'm not an idiot I can also remember Celsius.
Unless you can provide some sort of study that definitively finds Celsius as a better system, then you are just presenting your own opinion.
And the imperial system is going plenty strong. It's used in the majority of aerospace manufacturing around the world. But I'm not out here defending imperial, because it isn't as clear as metric.
Sure the difference between 1 degree of Celsius or Fahrenheit is feels negligible, but I'd still rather use a system that is clearer to understand at a glance and provides more whole number granularity when reading it off.
The fact you don't even know that Celsius is the same as Kelvin with a constant 273 added to it tells me so much about your failed education.
It isn't. Once again, deluded 'murican doesn't understand anything about the world. How shocking.
You still haven't provided any evidence that this is true. I'm starting to think you're mentally challenged.
So you still haven't given any reason why Celsius is better. You keep saying I haven't put forth anything, but you just fucking jerk off to "hur dur 'murica. Did you hear me say 'murica? I'm a one trick fucking pony that can insult but not defend his point. Lol 'murica."
Touch grass, experience the world, grow the fuck up.
A 'murican talking about experiencing the world, that's fucking rich. Also, I did provide you with the reason why Celsius is better than Fahrenheit - is your shitty 'murican education failing you?