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There are some convenient applications of the imperial system. Inches break down into p convenient 16ths which is why even in scientific applications the tubing is generally measured in imperial units even if everything else is metric.
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Mar 26, 2018 17:43
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 03:10 |
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I always think this topic is a good one to expose the I loving love science facebook subscribers vs people who understand the underlying reason for units in the first place. Measurements are all about practicality, scientifically Kelvin (or Rankine if you'd prefer) is the most accurate temperature scale we have to work with, negative temperatures don't make sense from a definition sense and many important calculations would fall apart if you used Celsius, and yet even the most metric loving of countries report their weather in C rather than K because it'd be cumbersome to have your average day range from 273 to 311. Our variety of units are all about having practical numbers to work with while still being convertible to standards when the need arises. There's nothing inherently wrong with using whatever unit is most convenient for your applications that provides an intuitive and understandable range within that area and that's why there are so many options available for any given concept. In actual research sciences people use a variety of non standard units for convenience purposes related to their field. They're used in design, construction, and testing in a way that fits comfortably with the tools available and investigator's practical experience that gives them an underlying understanding of what numbers seem within an appropriate range and which seem unreasonable at a glance. When it comes to writing a paper or publishing a patent, you can always convert them after the fact but it's often unnecessary because everyone else is working with and understands the same sort of units, different fields all have different preferences and standards. People who get super bent out of shape about imperial units in my experience have no actual background in any area where they would actually need to use them in practical applications and seem to be so vocal as a sort of generic homage to some nebulous science gods.
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Mar 27, 2018 08:20
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MrOzzy posted:I don't see many conveniet applications of the imperial system over the metric system other then historical reasons. Often they break down easier, with 10 the extra factors you get are 2, 5, with 12 you get 2, 3, 4, 6 and with 16 you get 2, 4, and 8. You can halve base 12 and base 16 twice before needing a decimal. Same with the weather, Fahrenheit ends up providing a pretty common range from 0 to 100 year round that the majority of days will fall into. You can see the practically in the layman's units hiding somewhere in most countries anyways, there's almost always something that's measured by non metric units everyone understands. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with metric, just that there's nothing wrong with imperial so long as everyone is on the same page. Speaking from experience, even scientists/engineers use a variety of non standard units in different fields because those units are good for getting a feeling of the situation. They're all absolutely capable of going with SI units, and it's not uncommon to convert them after the fact, but it's just easier for them. And it's not like this discrepancy doesn't happen even when you use only metric units, some fields use MKS while others CGS, all metric but at different scales.
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Mar 27, 2018 18:18
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Woden posted:That's the crux of the issue, we're not all on the same page in this globalised world. There's one hold out using deprecated measures for everything and minorly inconveniencing everyone else for no good reason.
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Mar 28, 2018 05:35
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Woden posted:Using the bolded as an analogy, the published works use metric and everyone sort of fell into using it except one hold out. As for different fields using different units it doesn't seem relevant here as the US isn't a different field of expertise, it's the same field. that's just not really true tho. Read plenty of papers that used psi or whatever from foreign countries in my field. And again, it really isn't any difficult converting between that and pascals as it would be converting between two metric units with different magnitudes like pascals and bar, it's just another line in the spreadsheet.
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Mar 28, 2018 06:32
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 03:10 |
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MrOzzy posted:I've got the impression your opinion is pretty baised. My opinion is too, but I've got the rest of the world (except for the US) to agree with me. The metric system is very simple and logical. You only need to know what a "liter" and a "meter" is together with a few basic prefixes. Kids here in Belgium understand the basic concepts length or distance at the age of 7, surface at 8 en volume at 9. It's very simple and easy to learn. I'm not giving a biased opinion I'm giving a professional one as someone who's done a lot of work in research. I am telling you as a matter of actual fact that it's pretty common for different fields to pick different convenient units (often following other major groups out there) and as such you get american papers using metric only stuff and international papers using atmospheres or w/e. Even when the published work is in metric only you can see that they started from an imperial base in some of their calculations, a common one in my area being the tube sizing for the reactors, when someone mentions using something with an OD of of 0.635cm it's obvious they're using a quarter inch pipe. The reality is you're already having to convert metric units back and forth to get the appropriate magnitude for the various derived units, you can't just slap together whatever metric distances and weights at random and such to get newtons or pascals, you have to make sure it's the right kind (such as kilograms instead of grams or meters instead of centimeters), that doesn't mean you're measuring your tubing that's only a couple cm long as 0.05 meters, you record it in cm and convert it after the fact. In the same way shifting inches to meters requires the same extra line in your spreadsheet. This is why I said in general I think people who get super bent out of shape about how much more enlightened metric is are probably less the type that actually work with or do any calculations where it's important, because you realize unit conversion is gonna be a thing regardless of what you're doing and it's easiest to just go with the flow on the industry or published works that already exist in that field.
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Mar 28, 2018 22:16
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