this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Hi, I think in metric units, so almost everything is some form of a power of 10, like a kilogram is a 1000 grams, etc.

Sometimes I will think of an hour and half as 150 minutes before remembering that it is 90 minutes.

Does something similar happen to imperial units users? Because as far as I understand you don't have obvious patterns that would cause you to make these mistakes, right?

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (31 children)

Your last sentence is correct. We don't have obvious patterns that would cause us any confusion (beyond the confusion we already have with this measurement system that makes no sense), so we simply memorize it.

I can't believe after all these decades, the USA still sticks with the imperial system. It's nonsense. But I grew up with the imperial system so that's what feels natural to me and I can "feel" what a mile feels like, I can "feel" what an inch feels like, but if you speak to me in metric, since we in the USA are not as exposed to it over here, I need to pull out my calculator to make the conversions to understand how a meter relates to a foot and a yard, yes I hate it, I would rather be able to think and feel in metric because it's more logical.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm with you on going metric. It's insane that we still use imperial units.

Congress passed a bill in 1975 that was supposed to transition us to metric, but it obviously didn't take.

I end up using metric units quite regularly for various reasons. My intuitive understanding of imperial units is still better, which irritates me.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

imperial

Strictly speaking, it should be US customary units, not imperial. They're mostly pretty similar or identical, but there are some substantial differences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pint

The pint (/ˈpaɪnt/, listenⓘ; symbol pt, sometimes abbreviated as p) is a unit of volume or capacity in both the imperial and United States customary measurement systems. In both of those systems it is traditionally one eighth of a gallon. The British imperial pint is about 20% larger than the American pint because the two systems are defined differently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_ton

The short ton (abbreviation tn) is a measurement unit equal to 2,000 pounds (907.18 kg). It is commonly used in the United States, where it is known simply as a ton, although the term is ambiguous, the single word "ton" being variously used for short, long, and metric tons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_ton

The long ton (symbol: LT[citation needed]), also known as the imperial ton or displacement ton, is a measurement unit equal to 2,240 pounds (1,016.047 kg). It is the name for the unit called the "ton" in the avoirdupois system of weights or Imperial system of measurements. It was standardised in the 13th century. It is used in the United Kingdom and several other Commonwealth of Nations countries alongside the mass-based tonne defined in 1799, as well as in the United States for bulk commodities.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I am of the opinion that time should be expressed in base 36, much more subdivideable and allows you to express a given time as a two decimal point number between 0.00 and Z.ZZ

Also as you might have noticed, the latest time in the day is literally the Zs, the clock would be telling you to go the fuck to sleep already.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Much as I think this would be pretty confusing, I love that Z.ZZ thing :-)

I'm trying to work this out though - so what we call 24 hours would now be 36 different blocks of time, 1-12 and A to Z, right? (EDIT - wrong! 0-9, not 1-12, duh...)

So a '36th' of a day (or, actually, let's give it a name... A "Frin"? That'll do) would be equivalent to 24/36 of an hour = 2/3 of an hour = 40 minutes.

However would subdivisions of a Frin also be in base 36? If so, then the 36... Terps, let's say... in a Frin, would each last slightly longer than a minute... 40/36 = 10/9 of a minute = 600/9 = 66.666666... of what we call seconds.

But of course the next subdivision would also be in base 36. So each Terp would have 36... Bops... So a Bop would last as long as a 36th of 66.666666... seconds= 66.66666/36 = 1.85185185... seconds per Bop.

36 Bops make a Terp, 36 Terps make a Frin, 36 Frins make a Day.

What a strange world that'd be!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Thanks for doing the math.

36 different blocks of time, 1-12 and A to Z, right?

Not 1-12, but 0-9.

Edit: now that I've spelled it out, O/0 and 1/I/L (for uppercase/lowercase letters) may be problematic.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Not 1-12, but 0-9.

Duh, yeah of course, oops! :-)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'd still call it hours minutes and seconds since it's the same level subdivision,

It'd follow this progression, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z, part of the reason I like base 36 counting is because of just how many cool things just happen to come together with it, and the fact that the Alphanumeric set perfectly fits into it is one, another one I like is that "10" is a square that is also the product of two other squares.

But back to specifics, an "hour" is 40 present minutes, a "minute" is 66 and 2/3rds of a second, and a "second" is 1.85185... seconds, or 1 and 23/27ths of a second.

If I had it my way this would be paired with the Sym454 calendar to ultra-regularize everything

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Yeah, I screwed up saying 1-12, I meant 0-9 but got mixed up while thinking about the next bit!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (2 children)

My favorite thing about my microwave is that if I punch “180” into the 4 character display, it will count down 80 seconds, then switch to 59, meaning it took 180 as 1 minute, 80 seconds, not 3 minutes

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I mean, I get why it does that...

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Similar to your example, I do sometimes have a "brain fart", thinking that X:50 means half. So, like if the microwave says 1:50, I might think that means 1.5 minutes left, but I generally catch myself pretty quickly, and it's never caused any real problems.

I did my undergrad in a science that lends itself to lots of metric measurements, so even though I'm born and raised in the US, I'm pretty comfortable with metric and tend to set my defaults to metric.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

I'm in the USA, and I certainly don't use the imperial system exclusively


my (domestic) education was in metric (undergrad and grad school), and now I work at an American company and use metric exclusively.

And yes, I get confused sometimes. Often I get time and currency confused, so if something is $1.59 I think it's a penny shy of $2, for instance.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

I think in both imperial and metric, imperial forces more fractions into my thought, which may be useful for time divisions. Fractions can definitely be quicker for centering things along a length. But when I’m designing for 3d printing (a fertile that has always been metric based) I prefer mm/cm.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

It can be kind of confusing since seconds are part of SI, but hours and minutes are not. So you are kind of mixing frogs with oranges here. Even with metric units it's not always linear and intuitive. Take for example decibel scale which is logarithmic, which is something that throws people off. Same with Richter scale. Having earthquake at scale of 3 is not half the strength of 6. It's thousand times weaker than 6.

So in short, time keeping is done for convenience sake because 60 is divisible by a lot of numbers many times over. It can throw you off a bit if you are converting from metric to time format but there's a simple formula for that and with some training you can do the calculation in your head. It's a matter of practice.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

Time units being base 12, 24, 60 are fairly convenient in that you can divide them evenly in many ways. I find this highly advantageous, turns out lots of folks did too and that's why we use it today.

I used to get confused doing arithmetic between AM/PM until I switched my life over to a 24 hour clock. Also why folks who do time math often like in hospitals or military use that system. It's comes down to convenience.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Living in the US, I know what mph, inches, feet, yards and pounds all mean. Anything else I'll end up looking up, and yes, I've lived here my whole life. I don't make any mistakes because I always end up checking how my cups are in a quart or whatever.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Sometimes I will think of an hour and half as 150 minutes

You're still thinking of a pattern -- but there is a conflation between cardinal numbers and proportion/percentage. An hour and a half is 150% of one hour.

But no, that doesn't happen with imperial systems, because there just aren't really patterns to that level.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I tend to lean into fractions naturally, so time fits into that well. But like, I design quite a bit in FreeCAD for 3d printing and only work with metric for stuff like that. I hate that we have not switched to metric in the USA.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Time sucks ass. How many seconds in a day? 86400 or something. The whole thing feels like imperial units. I'd prefer if we'd just have percentages instead and work on fractions with special names for them.

Full disclosure, I'm a programmer.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)
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[–] Still 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

no

only time is with some like a microwave where you type in multiple units for the same input
ie 90 is equivalent to 130

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