the metric system is great.
it’s well-designed, and it’s good that it’s an international standard.
it’s also like, clearly and obviously better than the imperial measurement system, for
reasons that have been thoroughly discussed by countless others before me.
it’s very silly that the United States hasn’t fully adopted the metric system yet, since
making the switch would have a large number of very clear advantages.
I want to make this as unambiguous as possible.
the metric system is better than the imperial system, and I will at no point be arguing
otherwise.
however, I don’t think the imperial measurement system is as bad as people make it out to
be. in the discussion surrounding the competing systems of measurement, I think there’s
a lot of nuance that’s been lost.
so, hi, I’m jan Misali, and this is a defense of the imperial measurement system.
before I begin, I should clarify some terminology.
“the imperial measurement system” is not, in fact, one single system of measurement.
it is a family of slightly different systems with a common origin. for the most part, I
will be throughout this video referring to the set of imperial units that I am most familiar
with, the United States customary units, and I’ll try to make it clear whenever I’m
talking about things from the other imperial systems.
also, “metric system” is itself a slightly ambiguous term, but it doesn’t matter and
you all know exactly what I’m talking about.
now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about... the chart.
this is a diagram of English units of length that appears on a few different Wikipedia
articles.
it’s somewhat commonly used to show how complicated and arbitrary the imperial units
are.
I have a complicated relationship with the chart.
while I think the chart is very useful and informative, and it does a great job showing
the relationships between different English units of length, the way it’s presented
is a little bit misleading.
if someone is familiar with the metric system, where all units of length, and indeed all
units, are defined by each other with easy-to-remember powers of ten, a chart like this feels comically
complicated by comparison.
but the thing is, this isn’t, in fact, one single set of units.
like, okay, “Ramsden’s chain” is referring to a unit that was an alternative to Gunter’s
chain proposed in the late 18th century, sometimes called an “engineer’s chain”. it saw
some use, but it was never at any point a standard part of any imperial measurement
system.
a “Roman mile”, listed as being equal to exactly fifty Ramsden’s chains, is.
just a completely unrelated unit, from a completely different system! as the name implies, it’s
a Roman unit.
it has no relationship to Ramsden’s chain or any of the other units on the chart.
it seriously just shouldn’t be here at all.
another rather suspicious thing about this chart is the “nautical mile”, defined
as either 6080 feet or 10 cables. and like, if a cable is 100 fathoms, and a fathom is
2 yards, and a yard is 3 feet, you don’t have to be a professional mathematics communicator
to notice that something doesn’t add up here, or I guess “multiply”, as the case
may be.
by the way, that unit there that’s half a foot, that’s called a “shaftment”.
there’s an F in there, no S on the end.
“shaffftment”. it fell out of use in the fifteenth century.
and that’s something I should reiterate, most units shown here are not used at all
in the modern Anglosphere.
the chart is meant to show the relationships between various historic English units of
length, and it does not in any way represent the system itself as it exits today, or indeed
how it existed at any particular time or place.
that’s why this looks like a random jumble of arbitrarily defined units that don’t
fit together in any sort of internally consistent system that anyone would ever want to use.
because, it literally is that.
and the thing is, if you want to make fun of imperial units, in their modern form, for
being unnecessarily complex, you can easily do that without needing to pretend “barleycorns”
and “poppyseeds” are still part of it.
like, if you wanted to, you could go through Appendix C of the Handbook of the United States
National Institute of Standards and Technology, which thoroughly defines the complete set
of US customary units, and also helpfully explains to what extent and in what context
these units are used in modern times.
you could use that information to generate this new version of the chart, showing every
unit of length defined by the NIST Handbook as part of the customary units.
by the way, every ratio shown here is exact.
like, a “point” is defined as exactly 0.013837 of an inch, which is close to one
seventy-tooth of an inch, as the Wikipedia chart suggests, but not exactly.
now, you might hear that and say, “what?
why would you do that?
that’s such an arbitrary number! how is anyone expected to remember that!” and the
thing is, metric user, we don’t. this is not a unit anyone uses for measuring things.
it is used in exactly one context, and it’s one that you might even already be familiar
with even if you’ve never used feet or inches before.
a point is a typographic unit.
it is literally only used when describing the size of text, as in a “twelve-point
font”.
and that leads me to my first major point, heh, I want to make.
this is the set of US customary units of length, but it is still not one single system of units.
for starters, there’s the metric units over there.
now, these metric units are part of the standard US customary system, technically.
they’re given definitions right alongside the rest of the units here.
but also like, they’re clearly not part of the same system.
like, an inch is defined as exactly 2.54 centimeters, but that’s just a convention that was put
into place to keep these two systems that coexist in sync with each other, so you can
convert between them in a way that’s nice and consistent.
and even if you don’t already know the history behind these units, you can tell that’s
the case because like, 2.54 centimeters is such a random number.
nobody would choose to define a new unit from the ground up to be exactly 2.54 of another
existing unit, no, obviously not, this is clearly a definition that was chosen because
the new standard was put into place and they wanted to redefine their legacy units in terms
of this new standard.
it’s the same reason why a point is an awkward subdivision of an inch, it’s the same reason
why a nautical mile is defined as exactly 1852 meters, and, guess what, it’s also
the same reason why a mile is 5280 feet.
yes, that’s right, the reason a mile is 5280 feet is because a mile and a foot are
units from two completely different systems, and at one point one was redefined in terms
of the other.
and like, yeah, you’re right, it is an inconvenient conversion factor to deal with.
it would be ridiculous for someone to make the decision to build a system of measurement
from the ground up where one unit is defined as five thousand two hundred eighty of another
smaller unit.
that would be a really silly idea.
but for some reason, whenever people who don’t use imperial units make fun of this, (and
to be clear, this is a sensible thing to make fun of) they never take the extra step and
try to think of why it would be that way, or what the implications of it are.
everyone just assumes that yeah, someone had the idea that a mile should be 5280 feet,
and whoever came up with that idea was being very silly.
so, one, as I’ve already said, the reason there are 5280 feet in a mile instead of some
more convenient number is that these units are not from the same system.
the “mile” is from the Roman system of measurement.
it’s the Roman mile we saw before.
it was defined as one thousand paces, or five thousand feet.
but a “foot” in the Roman system was not the same unit as a “foot” in the English
system, so using a Roman mile alongside English units meant that the number of feet in a mile
would no longer be a nice round number.
and, okay, two, yeah, this is kinda silly and inconvenient to deal with.
it’s a pain to convert between feet and miles.
but hey, guess what, we don’t! these units are originally from different systems, and
in the way they’re used today, we treat them accordingly.
Americans straight up do not convert between feet and miles.
these two units are practically never used together.
they are just, two different units we have.
and I want to emphasize that like, a lot of people seem to think that this is a significant
problem.
and don’t get me wrong, it is a little bit of a problem.
it would be more convenient if all of our units of length belonged to the same system.
that’s like, one of the main reasons it would be good if the United States switched
to metric.
however, I think this problem has been overstated by people who aren’t familiar with the imperial
units, who tend to assume that yards and feet are commonly used as subdivisions of miles.
like, I don’t know, you might assume that someone would say “the distance from New
York to Chicago is 737 miles and 4400 feet”, but like, no, we just say “737.84 miles”
if we want to use that level of precision.
and yeah, it would be more convenient if all our units of length were related to each other
in nice easy-to-remember ways.
but presenting the awkward relationship between these multiple systems that coexist as though
it were a problem with the design of one single system that encompasses all of them is just,
incorrect.
we convert between feet and miles about as often as we convert between miles and kilometers.
oh right, I also want to point out another weird relationship you can see on this chart,
the point nine-nine-nine-nine-nine-eight factor between feet and “survey feet”, and between
miles and “statute miles”. you might reasonably ask what the deal is with those, so let’s
talk about them.
this is a quirk unique to the US customary system.
most other versions of the imperial units don’t do this.
in the 1890s, the relationship between the US customary units and the metric system was
defined by declaring that one meter is exactly 39.37 inches, effectively defining the metric
system in terms of the imperial system, even though the meter was the one that had an actual
formal definition.
then, in the late 50s, the imperial units were all officially redefined in terms of
the metric system, with new definitions that all the English-speaking parts of the world
that used imperial units all agreed on, now saying that a foot is exactly 30.48 centimeters.
however, the new foot was just slightly shorter than the value of the foot which had been
used in the US up until that point.
I’m talking like, less than a micrometer shorter.
this difference did not matter to anyone.
well, except for surveyors, who had been using the barely-longer foot to measure things to
an extremely high level of precision.
so now there’s two different feet in use in the United States: one that’s only used
by surveyors, and another used by everyone else.
this creates a divide between “survey units” and the rest of the US customary system, which,
you might be able to tell, is very silly, and causes problems.
and because of this, starting in 2023, the survey units are all going to be redefined
to get them back in sync with the rest of the length units, redrawing this chart to
look like this instead, so finally the American furlong will be precisely the same length
as the British furlong, and all will be right in the world.
now, okay, if we look back at the version of these units as they are currently defined
in the United States, I would argue that showing all of these exact relationships, while useful,
can still be misleading, right, because like the Wikipedia chart, it implies that this
is one single system where a yard is a subdivision of a mile and a meter is a subdivision of
a nautical mile and all that stuff.
so, if you just remove all of the numbers that are “inconvenient” conversion factors,
you get what I think is a more useful way to think of these units.
it’s not one system, it’s like four different systems, with a few disconnected units that
are just, also here. and, once the survey foot and statute mile are out of the picture,
those will be merged together into just three systems, with only two disconnected units.
you have the metric system, the “foot” set of units, and the “mile” set of units.
and of course now we’ve lost a lot of the connections, so the way these are organized
is a little too complicated to read, so we can rearrange this a little bit to get something
like this instead.
I think this way of looking at it makes what I’m talking about much more clear.
even though, yes, individually these systems are still less elegant than metric, and it
would be more convenient if we only used one system for everything instead of mixing these
together, treating them all like they are one single system makes it look more complex
than it really is.
and also, for the record, most of these units aren’t actually used like, ever.
length is measured in feet and inches, sometimes yards, and distance is pretty much always
measured in miles.
the rest of the units here, besides the metric ones, are things that most people straight
up never have to deal with.
ask an American what a “furlong” is and nine times out of ten you won’t get an answer.
of course, unlike imperial units, metric units were all designed to work together as a system.
like, the main unit of volume, the liter, is exactly one cubic decimeter.
compare that to US customary, where the units of length and volume are just completely disconnected.
a gallon is 231 cubic inches, and I have literally never been expected to know that.
I had to memorize for school that a mile is 5280 feet, even though that’s not something
I use in my everyday life at all, but before making this video I literally was unaware
that a gallon is equal to an integer number of cubic inches.
and this is, again, because the imperial units aren’t really one single system.
these units were never designed to work together, so of course it’s awkward to try to use
them together.
my point here isn’t that this needless complexity is like, a good thing.
it’s mainly that the amount of complexity implied by things like that one Wikipedia
chart is not reflective of the way imperial units are actually used.
learning to use the imperial measurement system does not involve learning dozens of rare units
and all of their conversion factors.
yes, it is pretty complicated, especially when compared to a more practical measurement
system, but it’s not this complicated.
another strangely common thing for people to make fun of is how calling a unit a “foot”
sounds kinda silly.
“oh how antiquated they sound, measuring things with their feet!”
so uh, hot take, units having silly names is a good thing, actually.
there is literally no downside. and like, okay, everyone already knows the reason why
it’s called a foot, right?
like, in ancient times, the normal way to measure things was using actual parts of your
body.
uh, “anthropometric” is the fancy word for it.
but as technology progressed and it became important for units to have consistent values,
standard formalized definitions were made for the anthropometric units people were already
casually using.
so, sure, why not just keep calling it a “foot”? the only real problem with doing that is since
there were a lot of competing standards back in history times, it was pretty confusing
figuring out exactly which foot you were referring to, and now people aren’t sure if Napoleon
was five foot two or five foot seven.
however, we’re currently living in present times, not the past, so that’s not a problem
anymore, so now if something is measured in feet you can be confident that the foot being
referred to is thirty and a half centimeters.
and I gotta say, a unit that’s about thirty centimeters really comes in handy.
it’s a very conveniently sized unit, and that’s directly because of its anthropometric
origin.
it’s definitely larger than an average actual human foot, but it’s still, by design, at
a scale that works great for measuring human-sized things.
and the metric system, as nice as it is, doesn’t really have anything that’s quite at that
scale.
a meter is about three times bigger, and a decimeter is about three times smaller.
like, it’s fine, it still works, but the foot was defined with measuring person-sized
things in mind, and I think you can feel the difference.
and that brings me to another very common argument people make against imperial units
in general.
as the argument goes, imperial units were all created by standardizing these weird arbitrary
historical units, whereas metric units, from the ground up, were designed to be far more
“objective”. a meter was originally one ten-millionth the distance from the equator
to the north pole, a kilogram was defined as the mass of a liter of water, stuff like
that.
and now, they’re even more objective, because today all the metric units are defined using
universal constants.
the thing is, the imperial units are defined using metric.
a foot is exactly 30.48 centimeters.
a pound is exactly 453.59237 grams. all of the advantages that metric gains from being
defined using universal constants apply just as well to imperial units.
now you might say, “why does that matter?
anyone who says that imperial units aren’t objective enough is talking about their original
definitions, not their current definitions”, and you’re right.
it is completely arbitrary to define a unit to be equal to the mass of seven thousand
grains of barley.
there is no objective reason to do that.
and also, there are so many factors that could result in major fluctuations in exactly how
much that mass is, right?
like, it’s so unreasonable to expect a definition like that to actually result in a consistent
unit.
now, compare that to the original definition of a kilogram, which is the mass of one liter
of water.
I don’t think I need to spell this out, but I’ll do it anyway.
this is also completely arbitrary! sure, it might sound less arbitrary, but like, what’s
the actual objective difference? is water a more “objective” substance than barley?
just like grains of barley, the mass of a liter of water isn’t actually constant,
and it can fluctuate due to any number of factors.
and, sure, the definition of a kilogram was later adjusted to account for these factors,
and then it was defined as the mass of one specific physical object, and eventually it
was redefined in terms of the Planck constant.
but like, the pound was also defined to be the mass of one specific physical object,
and then it was defined in terms of kilograms.
which means it’s currently defined in terms of the Planck constant.
I’m not saying I don’t see the difference between these definitions.
the metric units definitely do feel less arbitrary than their imperial counterparts.
but I hate to break it to you, literally all units are arbitrary.
unless, that is, you measure things with universal constants directly, but that tends to result
in units that are nowhere near a scale that’s actually practical to use.
so you gotta scale them up or down to fit the size you actually need, and that’s always
an arbitrary decision.
there is no way around this.
and since all units are arbitrary, and since the two main systems that see modern use are
defined with the same set of universal constants anyway, there is no reason to claim that one
system is “more objective” than the other.
more practical, yes, more elegant, certainly, but not more objective.
but, there is another thing I should address.
one of the primary design principles behind the metric system is the use of consistent
conversion factors across all types of unit.
there is a set of prefixes you can use with whatever unit you want, all defined in nice
and easy to remember decimally terms.
if you’re familiar with uh, my body of work, you might be able to predict where I’m going
with this.
so, hi, no, it’s not objectively superior to use powers of ten for everything, actually.
I’m not going to say it was the wrong choice.
there are a lot of very clear advantages, the biggest of which is if you’re doing
math in decimal, and almost everyone does, powers of ten are super convenient to work
with.
it makes perfect sense, and I think it was completely justified.
however! there are also some disadvantages to the way the metric prefixes work.
the most obvious one, I think, is that ten isn’t actually a very nice number.
this isn’t really a problem with the metric system, but rather a much broader problem
with decimal notation itself, one which I’ve spoken about at length.
it’s not a problem that it would be reasonable to expect a humble measurement system to solve,
so it’s fine, and I get it, but it’s still unfortunate that, for example, none of the
metric units can be evenly divided into thirds.
and this is one of the best things, by which I mean one of the very few good things, about
the imperial units.
the conversion factors in the imperial system, by which I mean the ones that were intentionally
put into it and not just artifacts from disconnected units being thrown together, strike a balance
between numbers that are convenient to deal with and units that are convenient sizes.
because, yeah, it’s nice that there are twelve inches in a foot, and it’s also nice
that there are sixteen ounces in a pound.
it would definitely be improved if this was more consistent, but the way it works is like,
fine.
what else did I want to say?
let me check my notes here.
oh, right, I almost forgot about Fahrenheit!
while internet arguments about different systems of measurement are pretty intense in general,
the discussion around units of temperature in particular always tends to get pretty “heated”.
wow that is not funny at all I should cut th-
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Fahrenheit.
its creator, Dan Fahrenheit, was, among other things, a thermometer manufacturer, and the
Fahrenheit scale was designed specifically for his thermometers.
you can read about the history of the scale on Wikipedia, I’m not gonna get into it,
but the point is, like everything about the units the United States stubbornly refuses
to stop using, the Fahrenheit scale isn’t quite as arbitrary as you might have been
led to believe.
some of the arguments people make in favor of Fahrenheit are so common that I got people
preemptively responding to them back when I first announced this video, so I won’t
go super deep into it.
I’m sure there’s a very nuanced and respectful discussion going on in the comments if you’re
interested in hearing more.
but for the sake of chaos, here’s something to note: despite what literally everyone says
all the time about it, the Celsius scale is not defined with zero degrees set to the freezing
point of water and one hundred degrees set to the boiling point of water.
while that was the original definition, the actual two points used to define Celsius are
absolute zero, set to negative 273.15 degrees, and the triple point of water, set to one
hundredth of a degree.
that is, until 2019, when it was redefined in terms of the Boltzmann constant.
but still, the boiling point of water at one standard atmosphere is about 99.984 degrees
Celsius.
it’s close to a hundred degrees, but not exactly.
okay, I’m gonna start wrapping up here.
there’s definitely a lot more stuff I could have said here, but I didn’t want to spend
too long on this video, because of circumstances.
don’t worry, I can explain those at a future point.
one big thing is how there are a lot of traditional systems of measurement around the world.
they’re pretty cool, and I also don’t feel informed enough to say anything else
about them.
I’ll leave a couple links in the description as jumping off points if you want to read
about this stuff though.
anyway right, time to summarize.
the metric system is good, in ways that are very obvious that everyone already talks about
all the time.
the imperial system is very complicated, but that’s because it’s not really a single
measurement system at all; it’s actually a large group of disconnected sets units that
all coexist.
additionally, by looking at any list or diagram of different units, you might get a false
impression of how complex the system really is in practice, because there are a lot of
units that technically exist but are very rarely used.
the original definitions of imperial units were super arbitrary, but the same thing can
be said of metric, and since imperial units are all defined in terms of metric now anyway
this is kinda irrelevant.
the way metric uses a consistent set of power-of-ten prefixes to generate units of different sizes
is very nice, but it unfortunately inherits the problems of decimal itself, which is completely
fine, and not even remotely worth complaining about.
imperial units avoid those specific problems, but only sometimes, and at the cost of not
being internally consistent.
generally, the imperial measurement system is not very good, and the metric system is
a lot better.
but I still think the problems that imperial units have are often exaggerated, which is
weird, because you don’t have to do that.
it’s already obviously bad.
I’ve been jan Misali, and no, seriously, have you seen the units of mass they use in
the UK?
like, here in the US we just use ounces and pounds and tons.
what are all of these?
what the heck is a “stone”?
why is a “hundredweight” 112 pounds?
what’s going on?