Are there really Britons doing this? I lived there from birth until just shy of my 30th and I’ve never witnessed it. I’ve seen plenty of people make fun of Americans for getting the British flag wrong, though, I’m suddenly reminded.
No, not at all. My best guess is that the OP is confused with mainland Europe, who actually do use metric a lot more… the UK uses a mix of imperial and metric.
My point is that if I give someone directions in meters they’re going to look at me like I have two heads, it’s literally like speaking two different languages.
They made fun of that on For All Mankind. An incident on Mars because Russia and America were doing calculations using different systems and someone forgot to convert.
While I don’t disagree with that, that’s just a convention. Metric is inherently superior, solves issues that other systems have and is used by, well basically the whole world.
There is a reason. When you grow up with people around you using imperial units to describe things, you think in terms of it. If you tell me 10 ft., I can picture that in my head, I have an idea of how much that is in real terms. If you tell me 10m, I have no mental idea of how much that is, even if I can convert it. It’s like a language you grow up speaking, versus one you learn later in life.
I do think metric the sole system used in schools, to be honest.
The good thing with metric though is it’s easier to visualise other measurements once you know one of them, cause you just know that each other measurement is just a multiple or division of the one you know. Like if you know roughly how long a centimetre is then you can take a good estimate of how long a meter is knowing that it’s 100cm
It was much more mixed when i was in primary school but by the time I left secondary school it was fully metric. It might’ve fully changed before I noticed though just cause I was little and parents and grandparents would still be using imperial. I do remember having to learn imperial in school though.
I mean, yeah, I’m not arguing that imperial is a better system. Metric is superior, absolutely. I’m just arguing against the statement that there’s no reason to use it.
That’s true, but it’s also a double edged sword: you can easily learn metric just by switching to it.
Try setting a weather widget on your phone to only show you Celsius and don’t convert it to Fahrenheit, over time you will get an intuitive understanding of what feels cold to you.
The biggest block to learning a new system is insulating yourself with conversions IMO, imagine trying to learn a new language by just having everyone speak into Google translate
That’s a good idea that I think I will try out. To be honest, I have a pretty hard time visualizing distance, even with imperial, so sadly I don’t think that help will help me in that area.
Yep, that’s my life, pretty much. OTOH, my kids don’t have to live under the curse of arbitrary units of measurement and only have a vague idea of what a foot is.
It needs more panels. It needs talking heads deliberately pronouncing the words frighteningly while giving only the worst interpretation of their effects, or uses in other situations.
“The same chemical used to remove plastic buildup from steel molds!” Or whatever. Meanwhile the chemical is dihydrogen monoxide.
Like, it needs 8 or 10 panels in between those two.
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