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POLL for Americans...What kind of units do you use?

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View Poll Results: Imperial or Metric
Imperial
41
59.42%
Metric
18
26.09%
Units...I don't need no stinkin' units
10
14.49%
Voters: 69. You may not vote on this poll

POLL for Americans...What kind of units do you use?

Old 02-19-21, 11:09 AM
  #51  
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I use Smoots, Tatums, Sagans and MegaFonzies. I also find Potrzebies and Banana Equivalent Doses to be acceptable as well. The silly Murican and EuroDisney measurements aren't really worth using, I mean they are so outdated.
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Old 02-19-21, 11:54 AM
  #52  
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For cycling distance, big distances are in miles, smaller ones in meters. I lived in a metric country for awhile, so I'm fairly comfortable with it, but for daily life it's pretty much imperial.
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Old 02-19-21, 12:21 PM
  #53  
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Originally Posted by veganbikes
Coincidently, I only learned of that unit last night. (Kid asked about radio-active potassium in bananas.)
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Old 02-19-21, 12:53 PM
  #54  
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Bikes are sort of a lawless Wild West of measurements. We happily weigh components in metric units of mass, not force, and then list the weight of the complete bike in Imperial units of weight, which is a force. One psychological advantage of the metric system is that speeds read higher and your weight reads lower, on the dials.
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Old 02-19-21, 01:02 PM
  #55  
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Like most Americans, I think, my mind thinks in Imperial simply from a lifetime of using it. I think in miles and pounds and gallons.

I can understand volume and length in Metric without too much trouble, but Metric weight is something I can't seem to grasp.

They say a paperclip weighs about a gram. So a kilogram weighs as much as a thousand paperclips? I have a hard time imagining how heavy or light that would be. And when you get into lots of kilograms, I'm just lost.

Metric tools are no problem at all.
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Old 02-19-21, 01:02 PM
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Originally Posted by indyfabz
When I went to tour Andalucia for two months I was glad I could reprogram my CatEye to metric.

The biggest pain was converting currency on the fly. One dollar equaled about 167 pesetas. Try doing that math in your head when looking at something like a restaurant menu.
Maybe not so hard because it's about the same ratio as miles and km which I'm more used to.

I'm in the UK where everything is a hideous mixture of both systems.
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Old 02-19-21, 01:25 PM
  #57  
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mm cm

When ever I see something in kilometers , meters , cm, mm, celsius, I have to convert in my head into miles , feet , inches, pounds degrees, before I can determine what size it is or how far away it is or how cold it really is.I dont know how big ten meters is until I convert in my brain
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Old 02-19-21, 01:30 PM
  #58  
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WAIT!!! Who cooks with their wife? I come to a recipe and it calls for "ounces" of an ingredient...

Is that "ounces - mass" or "ounces - volume"? She rolls her eyes. Am I the only one?
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Old 02-19-21, 01:38 PM
  #59  
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Does the rest of the world need to two sets of wrenches like we do?
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Old 02-19-21, 01:40 PM
  #60  
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Originally Posted by Phil_gretz
WAIT!!! Who cooks with their wife? I come to a recipe and it calls for "ounces" of an ingredient...

Is that "ounces - mass" or "ounces - volume"? She rolls her eyes. Am I the only one?
This has been an on going "discussion" in my house for going on 20 years now. At this point it's just one of those shared things that cement familiarity.

Our relationship now exceeds 40 MegaFonzies.

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Old 02-19-21, 01:41 PM
  #61  
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I spent most of my adult life living overseas and simply got used to thinking in metric units. Since returning to the US about ten years ago, I have constantly had to "translate" in my head to make sense of imperial measurements.
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Old 02-19-21, 02:12 PM
  #62  
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I use Smoots, like they offer on Google Earth.
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Old 02-19-21, 02:43 PM
  #63  
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Originally Posted by Reflector Guy
Like most people, I use both. Depends on what I am doing.
What he said! Especially since as an engineer, I have to be able to work in both systems.
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Old 02-19-21, 02:54 PM
  #64  
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Don't forget nanoVolts per square root of Hertz.
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Old 02-19-21, 03:00 PM
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Originally Posted by Reflector Guy

To put it another way, your car probably needs a 19mm socket to remove the lugnuts. A 3/4-inch socket will fit.... But it might damage the lugnuts. Why risk it?
3/4 and 19mm are so close they're probably within the tolerance that the tool is manufactured to anyway.

But yes I agree in general use the right size tool.
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Old 02-19-21, 03:48 PM
  #66  
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Furlongs per fortnight, FTW.
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Old 02-19-21, 04:03 PM
  #67  
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Originally Posted by guy153
3/4 and 19mm are so close they're probably within the tolerance that the tool is manufactured to anyway.

But yes I agree in general use the right size tool.
I happen to have an old 19/32 wrench from my wife's grandpa's toolbox that's a perfect pedal wrench. Like it was made for the job.
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Old 02-19-21, 04:08 PM
  #68  
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U.S. customary units are defined in terms of metric units. So I suppose I can say I'm using the metric system.
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Old 02-19-21, 08:40 PM
  #69  
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Both....unfortunately. Wish it were all metric
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Old 02-20-21, 12:56 PM
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I’m comfortable working in both. On one of my first jobs out of college I had to convert a load of house dimensions from the feet and inches on the plans being provided to the public, into millimeters for the brickies who would be building the walls. The most efficient way to do this was to pull out a tape measure that had both, to the length required.

When I first came to California, I found out that engineering here is done in feet as the base units, and 10ths and 100ths of feet. It was a true facepalm moment.

in fairness, I will say that when I go home to Ireland and see the newly developed roads, buildings etc that weren’t there when I was younger, I see a bit more sterility in the modern designs there than in the US, and I wonder if it’s that things there are built to decimal ratios of 10 and 5 and 2, versus the more organic ratios of 2, 3 and 4 that can more easily be done with feet and inches.
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Old 02-20-21, 01:07 PM
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Originally Posted by Squeeze
Like most Americans, I think, my mind thinks in Imperial simply from a lifetime of using it. I think in miles and pounds and gallons.

I can understand volume and length in Metric without too much trouble, but Metric weight is something I can't seem to grasp.

They say a paperclip weighs about a gram. So a kilogram weighs as much as a thousand paperclips? I have a hard time imagining how heavy or light that would be. And when you get into lots of kilograms, I'm just lost.

Metric tools are no problem at all.
A liter of water weighs one kilogram (at STP, near enough). And a liter is a cube 10cm on one side. And a hectare is a square 100m on one side. That is the great thing about the metric system, is how easy it is to convert lengths and volumes and areas and weights between each other, instead of having to remember 43560sq ft/acre.
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Old 02-20-21, 05:21 PM
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From a bumper sticker I saw the other day

Fight Metric - don’t give an inch
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Old 02-20-21, 07:02 PM
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Originally Posted by Troul
is there a difference when referencing midgets & dwarfs?
Does 4 midgets equate to 1 little guy? 7 dwarfs sum to 0.0625?
64ths of an inch don't count and 32nds doubly so, in carpentry or home mechanicing context anyway.

I find for normal general use, measuring tapes should be solely imperial. I stopped buying those that also have metric side to them since depending from which side you need to read the tape, the metric side of it gets in the way. Metric on measuring tapes is for nerds or geeks, and for European mentalities. Big difference between the two worlds, Europeans like to have their appliances knob controls marked with fine divisions and give way too many choices while North American appliances have fewer knobs with much fewer choices, so you don't need to read the manual when doing your laundry. It is a totally different mindset.

And mind you, I grew up in Europe but live long time in Canada.
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Old 02-20-21, 07:16 PM
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Originally Posted by Leinster
in fairness, I will say that when I go home to Ireland and see the newly developed roads, buildings etc that weren’t there when I was younger, I see a bit more sterility in the modern designs there than in the US, and I wonder if it’s that things there are built to decimal ratios of 10 and 5 and 2, versus the more organic ratios of 2, 3 and 4 that can more easily be done with feet and inches.
You know, you have something there. European infrastructure is generally more puny, less generously designed than North American ways of doing things. It always strikes me whenever I travel over there. And it carries over to everything. I can't say much about UK, Ireland parts since the heritage there is British Imperial system which is also based on 12. I believe they only converted to metric sometimes in the twentieth century and it probably wears thin, that is inconsistent, same as in US?
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Old 02-20-21, 10:15 PM
  #75  
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Originally Posted by Phil_gretz
WAIT!!! Who cooks with their wife? I come to a recipe and it calls for "ounces" of an ingredient...

Is that "ounces - mass" or "ounces - volume"? She rolls her eyes. Am I the only one?
Aaand that’s why metric is better.
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