[HN Gopher] Why A4? - The Mathematical Beauty of Paper Size
___________________________________________________________________
Why A4? - The Mathematical Beauty of Paper Size
Author : casca
Score : 656 points
Date : 2022-09-05 07:47 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scilogs.spektrum.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (scilogs.spektrum.de)
| Jedd wrote:
| ClikeX wrote:
| I never considered that the US mispells metre, considering
| Dutch uses "meter" as well.
| wartijn_ wrote:
| Oh, I didn't know about B5. I knew B size papers exist, but
| never looked into it. Will definitely look at B5 notepad next
| time I'll need to buy a new one, because like you I think A5 is
| a bit too small and A4 too big.
| thechao wrote:
| The US doesn't use imperial. It uses US customary. US customary
| uses imperial "prefixes" but is (mostly) base-2. The idea (from
| the 1790s) was that there'd be a "scientific" system in
| base-10, suitable for high-precision instrument makers; and, a
| "human-scale" base-2 suitable for people with limited
| manufacturing capability: dividing by 2 being far easier than
| by 10.
|
| Jefferson was responsible for US customary and got a lot of it
| working; the French were responsible for metric, but were
| interrupted by The Reign Of Terror.
| janci wrote:
| > dividing by 2 being far easier than by 10
|
| How is dividing by 2 easier than moving the decimal point by
| 1 place?
| mega_dingus wrote:
| Fold a piece of paper in half perfectly. Easy
|
| Fold a piece of paper into 10 equal parts perfectly. Easy?
| jeff-davis wrote:
| I think they meant _literally_ dividing, as in "divide
| this loaf of bread into two equal parts".
| richrichardsson wrote:
| > dividing by 2 being far easier than by 10
|
| Really? I struggle to see how dividing any number by two is
| easier than dividing it by ten, but would like to be
| enlightened. Divide by ten I just need to mentally move the
| decimal point, dividing numbers such as 35 or 123 by two
| requires a _lot_ more mental arithmetic.
| thechao wrote:
| It's 1795, and you're a farmer asked to build a ruler based
| on divide-by-10, or divide-by-2. Anyone with a compass can
| do the latter; the former is nearly impossible.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Not the number, but the "thing" itself.
|
| It's a snap to fold a piece of paper in half, thirds[0],
| quarters, sixths, eighths, (etc), but I'm not aware of a
| trick that lets you divide a sheet into tenths.
|
| [0] Higher powers of three seem tricky too.
| achenet wrote:
| could you please explain how US customary is base 2?
|
| For example, how is "12 inches to a foot, 3 foot to a yard,
| and 1760 yards to a mile" base 2?
|
| My understanding, before reading your post was that US
| customary was basically adapted from imperial which was in
| turn just an adaptation of folk measurements - a foot was
| about the length of a foot, etc.
| shawnz wrote:
| I guess they are referring to how inches for example are
| commonly subdivided into halves, quarters, eighths,
| sixteenths, etc.
| thechao wrote:
| Lengths aren't as important to farmers as volumes -- those
| are base-2. Remember: 1790, not 1990.
| achenet wrote:
| a quart is a quarter of a gallon, an oz is a 32nd of a
| quart... eh I guess that makes sense.
| gs17 wrote:
| Sadly, teaspoons to tablespoons has a jump of 3x, but
| other than that it's mostly binary with a few skips (e.g.
| there's not a real half gallon unit AFAIK, it's just "a
| half gallon", same for 2 fl oz). For some reason a barrel
| is 31.5 gallons instead of 32, with a hogshead being
| twice that at 63, but those are pretty rarely used.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| The ubiquity of B5 notebooks (and just B5 paper in general) is
| one of the things I love about Japan. I don't mind having A5
| and A4 around, but I'm not too fond of A4 being the default
| printer paper size.
| iNerdier wrote:
| And yet all photo print sizes, even internationally are defined
| in inches. Sigh.
| em-bee wrote:
| kodak's influence i guess
| umanwizard wrote:
| Jedd wrote:
| noyoudolt wrote:
| saiya-jin wrote:
| To keep discussion civil even with trolls creating new
| accounts just to post - what a bunch of nonsense sparkled
| with needless insults. You can do better than that.
| noyoudolt wrote:
| Jedd wrote:
| noyoudolt wrote:
| umanwizard wrote:
| > simultaneously, petulantly perhaps, spelling the units
| differently
|
| Utter nonsense.
|
| The majority of native English speakers are American. Does
| that mean Brits, Australians, etc. are being "petulant" by
| spelling various words differently from Americans? Of
| course not. That's just not how language evolution and
| standardization works.
|
| By the way, nobody had to decide that "meter" specifically
| should be spelled that way. It follows the normal American
| spelling pattern in which all words ending in the consonant
| cluster /tr/ are spelled with "-ter". Commonwealth English
| is actually more inconsistent as it sometimes renders the
| French "-tre" as "-tre" (metre, centre, theatre) and
| sometimes as "-ter" (master, plaster).
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| Please don't pretend any kind of consistency with any
| form of the English language.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| The point is that master and plaster aren't French.
| umanwizard wrote:
| They're cognate to the French words maitre and platre.
| Jedd wrote:
| > Hard alcohol for example is mainly sold in 0.75L
|
| This led me down a minor rabbit-hole.
|
| In Australia, at least, hard liquor is sold in 700ml or 1
| litre bottles. Wines (not what I'd call hard alcohol) are
| typically sold in 750ml.
|
| Why 750ml is the default for wine bottles seems to be
| uncertain.
|
| It may be any or more or none of :
|
| 750ml is roughly 1/5 of a gallon
|
| 750ml provides 6 servings of a 'comfortable' amount (about
| 125ml)
|
| glass bottles, when blown rather than cast, were limited by
| the amount of air a glass blower could push into molten glass
| - this was around that figure.
|
| Either way, none of that, in and of itself, is a compelling
| argument for metric.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > 750ml is roughly 1/5 of a gallon
|
| We still colloquially call 750ml liquor bottles a "fifth",
| so this is a plausible explanation.
|
| (Curiously, we never say "a fifth of wine" even though wine
| is sold in 750ml bottles too.)
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| The USA uses metric all over the place. Everybody knows how big
| 2L is. Syringes are all marked in mL or cc. Socket wrenches
| come with 1/2, 9/16, 5/8 etc. but also 9, 10, 11. Athletes no
| longer run 100-yard dash. The "400" is 400m. Cars have 1.8L
| engines. People wear size 30 footwear, but also size 7.
|
| Yes, the USA uses inches and pounds and gallons. They also use
| m, g, and L. And picas and fingers and miles and decibles and
| watts and joules. Mostly they don't know or care. If they do
| know and care, they are usually capable of using whichever unit
| gets the job done.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Try finding the weather in metric, though. Everything -
| temperature, windspeed (miles per hour, _unless_ it 's an
| offshore report, then it's knots), atmospheric pressure, wave
| heights, precipitation amounts and rate, and so on - is US
| customary.
| dtx1 wrote:
| A0 [?] 1 m2 was new to me but makes perfect sense. Imagine a
| world where the makers of USB used a similarly elegant naming
| convention.
| happymellon wrote:
| A1 should be [?]1m for it to be elegant.
| dtx1 wrote:
| A0 = 0 folds of 1m2. A1 = 1 fold, ...
|
| Though maybe we could have A3.1 Gen 2x2 for thick blue paper
| with glossy texture folded 4 times but 2 of those folds
| weren't down the middle.
| happymellon wrote:
| Oh I completely get that 0 = 0 folds, but if we are
| comparing square meters then A1 is 1 square meter.
|
| It depends on your point of view on what you are comparing.
| Infernal wrote:
| If you want to fit the area into the name you can think
| of it as
|
| A0 = 1/(2^0) m^2
|
| A1 = 1/(2^1) m^2
|
| A2 = 1/(2^2) m^2
|
| And so on
|
| (EDIT for formatting and also to observe a sibling post
| to mine is making the same point)
| ajuc wrote:
| A0 area = 0.5^0 = 1 m^2 A1 area = 0.5^1 = 0.5 m^2
| A2 area = 0.5^2 = 0.25 m^2 A3 area = 0.5^3 =
| 0.125 m^2
|
| If it was your way A1 area = 1 m^2
| A2 area = 0.5 = 0.5 ^ (2-1) m^2 A3 area = 0.25 =
| 0.5 ^ (3-1) m^2
|
| Why shift it one way just to shift it the other way in
| the formula?
| Symbiote wrote:
| No, because 20 = 1.
|
| Paper weight is measure in grammes per square metre. 80gsm is
| typical for ordinary paper. A0 = 20 m2 = 1 m2
| - 80g A1 = 2-1 m2 = 0.5 m2 - 40g ... A4 =
| 2-4 m2 = 0.0625 m2 - 5g
|
| (Fixed typo, thanks.)
| demurgos wrote:
| Small nit: A1 should be half the mass of A0 (40g in your
| example).
| frogpelt wrote:
| I love this little fact but stating, "It is possibly one of the
| greatest innovations of the 18th century" is ridiculous
| hyperbole.
|
| Or maybe the 18th century was severely lacking in innovations.
| xnorswap wrote:
| Surely a joke, given that it can be argued that even the steam
| engine wasn't the most impactful innovation of the century.
| majewsky wrote:
| True, obviously the most impactful innovation of the 19th
| century was Taylorism.
| genezeta wrote:
| There is a secondary series, B, in which the base size, B0,
| -instead of being defined for its area of 1 square meter as is
| A0- is defined to be 1 meter wide. A series is then 1, 1/2, 1/4,
| etc square meters, while B is 1, 1/2, 1/4, etc meters wide.
|
| It's not as common as the A series but it's used occasionally and
| it offers intermediate sizes between those of the A series.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And then you have the C series. Mainly envelopes that are mean
| between A and B thus fitting the A reasonably inside.
| genezeta wrote:
| Yes, but that is really rarely used -at least around here-.
| Most envelopes nowadays have opted for different factors.
| Usually you fold an A4 in thirds on the longer side and use
| an 110x220 envelope.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Nearly all letters I get are in C5 envelopes, i.e. A4
| folded in half. But Denmark is so electronic that "nearly
| all" is about one a month.
|
| Folding in thirds isn't worth the bother when I post things
| so infrequently.
|
| Choosing a large British supermarket, they have C4, C5 and
| C6 sizes, plus DL (A4 in thirds) which are cheapest:
| https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-
| GB/search?query=envelopes
| shakesbeard wrote:
| Same in Switzerland. Almost all letters are A4 folded in
| half inside a C5 envelope.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _The dimensions of DL [size] are 110 x 220 mm (4 1/3 " x 8
| 2/3 ") and as such the DL envelope will hold an A4 sheet of
| paper folded into 3 equal sections parallel to its shortest
| sides._
|
| * https://www.papersizes.org/c-envelope-sizes.htm
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmBvP0KOZP0
| odiroot wrote:
| In Poland some school supplies use B series. Like notebooks and
| coloured paper for a&c.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Similarly in Britain, typical notebooks (especially at
| school) use the B sizes. I think it's probably common across
| Europe.
|
| It means you can paste an A5 sheet handed out by the teacher
| into your B5 notebook, leaving a reasonable margin around it.
| Or you can fold an A4 sheet in half, and paste that in.
| genezeta wrote:
| Yes. It's common in most of Europe afaik. B5 is a quite
| nice size for notebooks.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > A series is then 1, 1/2, 1/4, etc square meters, while B is
| 1, 1/2, 1/4, etc meters wide.
|
| It's folded in alternating direction so it doesn't go down as
| fast. It's 1m wide, then 1m long, then 50cm wide, 50cm long,
| etc.
| genezeta wrote:
| You're absolutely right. Thanks.
| afiori wrote:
| I think that B width goes 1, [?]2/2, 1/2, [?]2/4, 1/4, [?]2/8
| Bakary wrote:
| B5 is very common in Japanese stationary, in particular those
| silky-smooth notebooks.
| spaintech wrote:
| Sure there is math behind it, I was at a paper factory once, I
| asked them about the whole A0 and so forth sizing, I was told in
| prefect german and translated that originally they made 1M^2
| sheet (alle) and they would them take those and cut them by
| halfs, so when an order came in, it would read Alle/2 Alle/4 a so
| forth since they would then say take this pile to A, A2 and A4
| cutting station. Who knows, but that is what the Aschaffenburg
| guide tolde me back in 1998, been telling everyone that story
| since... :/
| mihaaly wrote:
| So A1 is half of 'Alle', so Alle/2, no? A2 is Alle/4 and so on,
| making A4 Alle/16?
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| Maybe it's the number of levels down the tree of cuts. With
| one cut, it's A1; cut the results one more time to get A2;
| cut the results one more time to get A3; &c.
| santimoller66 wrote:
| Beauty of maths https://www.digistore24.com/redir/438708/sddorld/
| gennarro wrote:
| Here is another good explainer which might be a bit easier to
| parse: https://unsharpen.com/paper-sizes/
|
| Minor side point, I've never seen an x written as )( but always
| as / and then \ (or vice versa). I wonder if this is a regional
| thing ir just one person's preference.
| Symbiote wrote:
| x is usually written _x_ in mathematics (including handwriting)
| to distinguish it from x.
|
| I was taught the ")(" way at primary school.
| nautilius wrote:
| Just because _you_ use it doesn 't make it in any way
| 'usual'. Just because you learned it in some school doesn't
| make it non-regional. Also, your own example "x" is decidedly
| not of the )( form, but of the x form.
| SamBam wrote:
| Doing an image search for "handwritten algebra" I find
| quite a few examples of ")(".
|
| "I was taught the ")(" way at primary school" is a
| perfectly reasonable response to your question, which
| wondered whether it was just one person's preference. That
| answer tells you it isn't.
|
| Nowhere did the reply suggest it wasn't regional, nor, for
| that matter, that "/ \" isn't regional. Both are presumably
| regional, but whether one is more common requires a fair
| bit of work to answer.
| Symbiote wrote:
| You might have read my comment more carefully before
| resorting to a snarky reply.
| kuschku wrote:
| In _Lateinische Ausgangsschrift_ the )( form is commonly
| used. Which is the most common type of cursive taught in
| German schools nowadays.
| anomas01010 wrote:
| anomas01010
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| The fact A-series has a sqrt(2) radio is obviously neat on its
| own, but does it save material, or have much benefit in general
| in practice?
|
| My (very limited) experience in printing seems to be
|
| 1) they still trim tons of bleed regardless;
|
| 2) the fact you can cut A3 into two A4 etc. is great, but doesn't
| really matter when 99% of the printing paper will be just one
| size (A4) anyway?
|
| 3) Lots of magazines and books use non-standard sizes.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm from a metric country. This is a genuine
| question, not in anyway trying to make excuses for The US' letter
| size or what not.
| malermeister wrote:
| A lot of printshops lease their printers and pay per page.
|
| When they print A4 for customers, they actually print A3 and
| cut it in half, saving half the printing cost.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's no different than the US, where your 8 1/2" x 11"
| often starts as an 11" x 17"
| doikor wrote:
| > 2) the fact you can cut A3 into two A4 etc. is great, but
| doesn't really matter when 99% of the printing paper will be
| just one size (A4) anyway?
|
| This is more for the manufacturing side. At the factory they
| really only have to make A0 paper that can then be cut to any
| other A size without any waste. You can't do this if the paper
| sizes are not related which is the case with North American
| sizes.
|
| Also the fact that you can fold a A4 into A5 (what is used for
| letters here) with a single fold is really neat.
| _ZeD_ wrote:
| FWIW _I_ found it very useful when I was going to university,
| and broke, and needed to print articles and or books online
| with the minimum number of sheets, and relying on booklet
| printing[1] to put up to 4 a4 pages (back and front) on a a5
| "book"
|
| https://www.printingcenterusa.com/blog/how-to-arrange-pages-...
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| The most important practical advantage -- one reason I like the
| A4 / A5 family -- is simply that proportions are preserved when
| you print two pages on one sheet and fold over. Adjacent to
| that is the advantage that there are a family of sheets to work
| with in practical sizes -- A5, A6 and A7 are all quite useful
| -- and they bear a certain logical relationship to one another
| that is easy to work out, in terms of how many of one size fit
| on another size.
| tankenmate wrote:
| It saves a lot of resources on the supply side, not on the
| consumption side. So it does lead to lower prices for
| consumers, just indirectly.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Sorry I wasn't clear. My point is that, since majority of the
| demand is A4/letter, in letter's case, they can still use
| certain size of big rectangular paper and cut them into
| letter. The fact these larger paper can't be cut into other
| shapes doesn't really matter on supply side because they're
| not going to.
|
| If they need some other odd shaped papers, just like metric
| B-series, they do that separately.
| pornel wrote:
| Mass printing isn't done on A4 directly. It's done on
| printing machines of a larger size and then cut and folded
| as needed.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I get that, I'm saying that precisely will make the size
| of a single page (A4 or letter) or its ratio irrelevant
| in practice.
| tankenmate wrote:
| The benefit for A* and B* sizes is that you can buy a
| roll of A0 or B0 and then print directly and then you can
| cut to any A* of B* without any offcuts.
|
| For documents that need bleed to edge you have RA* and
| SRA* sizes.
| omnimus wrote:
| For digital printing this standard is very important and handy
| especially at home/work.
|
| 1. Not really - if you go to professional digital printer they
| have other formats +, RA and SRA (A3+, RA3, SRA3) that are
| slightly bigger to accommodate for bleed.
|
| 2. It matters if you want to make saddle stitched binding
| yourself - you fold A3 and get A4 booklets.
|
| 3. If you make bigger runs of anything at professional (offset)
| printer the standard sizes don't matter that much because you
| print on big sheets (like B0) that get cut (often multiple
| different jobs on same sheets). So it's about waste (not
| printed space that gets trimmed). But the paper waste really
| matters only in very big runs 5k+. Whats more expensive are
| offset printer plates that need to be made.
|
| So yes the magazines/books can be any size but the space on
| rest of the plate/paper will be filled as much as possible.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| > they have other formats +, RA and SRA (A3+, RA3, SRA3)
|
| This is what I'm trying to say though, the whole ratio thing
| or 1m^2 area thing will be irrelevant, isn't it?
| Symbiote wrote:
| The best advantage, which you might not realize until you need
| to use US sizes, is the easy scaling up and down.
|
| You can put an A3 sheet on a photocopier and press the "A3-A4"
| button and have the original perfectly scaled onto a single A4
| sheet, or vice-versa. There's usually a button that does A4-2
| A5, so you get two half-size copies on the A4 paper, which you
| can cut into A5 sheets. (In my school, university and workplace
| experience, it's very common for A3 paper to be loaded in
| photocopiers and some printers.)
|
| Equally, you can design something in A4 size on the computer,
| then print it on A3 paper without any changes. Then send it to
| the print shop for an A1 print, still with no changes.
|
| An envelope that fits A5 paper will fit once-folded A4 paper
| perfectly.
|
| (Magazines people expect to be photocopied, like scientific
| journals, are often A4 sized.)
| kergonath wrote:
| > Equally, you can design something in A4 size on the
| computer, then print it on A3 paper without any changes. Then
| send it to the print shop for an A1 print, still with no
| changes.
|
| My equivalent experience in academia is that you can design
| posters and print drafts on A4 sheets to see how they look
| and be confident that they won't be butchered when put on A0
| at the print shop.
| jstanley wrote:
| The article makes these 2 contradictory claims:
|
| > I can tell you now it is precisely 210mm by 297mm
|
| > So the only ratio that has this important property is the
| square root of 2, famously - and ironically in this case - not a
| ratio
|
| I suspect either:
|
| - A4 paper is not _precisely_ 210x297 mm, or
|
| - the precision of the ratio has been sacrificed in order to
| allow integer numbers; but if we're willing to make that
| sacrifice, why not round up to 212x300 mm? and then we can have
| the nice round number that the classmate wanted in the first
| place, with a bonus that both dimensions are even-numbered so can
| be halved with mm-graduated rulers.
| eckesicle wrote:
| Typically, paper comes in A0 size (841x1188mm) which is then
| cut in half X times to get the desired paper size, which is
| either eyeballed against a ruler, or measured by laser.
|
| If the operator is skilled, or the machine is well-calibrated
| most A4 paper is therefore exactly 297mm tall, and 210.25mm
| wide (so slightly wider than the standard)
| [deleted]
| pgorczak wrote:
| I guess the second claim is referring to the fact that the
| square root of 2 is an irrational number, so it can't be
| expressed as a ratio of integers anyway.
| DominikPeters wrote:
| A4 paper is precisely 210x297mm (according to the standard), so
| the aspect ratio deviates from 1:sqrt(2) a little. Following
| that aspect ratio, the size would be 210x296.985..mm, so the
| rounding is really very slight.
| jwilk wrote:
| How exactly is it defined in the standard? Is there a
| formula? Or just a list of sizes for A0, A1, etc.?
|
| I wanted to read the standard myself, but CHF 58 is a bit too
| much:
|
| https://www.iso.org/standard/36631.html
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| y : x = [?]2 : 1 = 1,414
|
| http://www.ikserang.com/qa/ISO_PAPER_BOARD/standards/en/iso
| _...
| DominikPeters wrote:
| This seems to be a sample containing the relevant parts. ht
| tps://cdn.standards.iteh.ai/samples/36631/c0883203ea25445c.
| ..
| matja wrote:
| I'd guess because 210x297 is closer to 1/16 of a m^2 than
| 212x300 is.
| orlp wrote:
| > why not round up to 212x300 mm?
|
| Because the A standard's baseline is A0 which has exactly 1m^2
| area. So that nice rounding did happen, just at the baseline
| scale, and on area. The B series is a tad larger, B0 happens to
| exactly be 1,000 x 1,414 mm.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I love describing 41,4% as tad. Then again I suppose concept
| of comparing areas is bit harder.
| ygra wrote:
| Which also makes it quite nice to know how much a sheet of
| paper weighs. At 80 g/m2 you'll get 5 g (80 / 24) for A4.
| Handy for quickly determining how much postage to put on an
| envelope based on how many pages you put inside it.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| If you change the size of A4 you have to change the size of all
| the other A- sizes too.
|
| A0 is anchored at 1 metre squared, so everything else follows
| from that.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| 1) The integer number is A0 being 1 square meter of area.
|
| 2) Rounding to whole centimeters, or an even number of
| millimeters, is too coarse.
| fsh wrote:
| A0 has an area of 1 m2 and the long edge is sqrt(2) of the
| short one. This fixes the edge lengths to 841 mm x 1189 mm
| (rounded to the nearest mm). A4 is obtained by halving A0 four
| times.
| [deleted]
| richdougherty wrote:
| I was wondering that too! I got to the end and still no
| explanation of 210x297mm.
|
| Well, it turns out that it's based on the fact that A0 is
| defined as having an area of ~1m2, then each subsequent size
| halves the area. So A4 has dimensions that give an aspect ratio
| [?]2 and an area of ~1/16m2. A0: 1,189 mm x
| 841 mm = 999,949mm2 [?] 1m2 ... A4: 297 mm x
| 210 mm = 62,370mm2 [?] 1/16m2
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#A_series :
|
| "The A0 base size is defined as having an area of 1 m2 ...
| rounded to the nearest millimetre, 1,189 mm x 841 mm".
| maweki wrote:
| That's a beautifully short definition, I think.
|
| "Base-size has 1sqm area. Halving does not change ratio of
| the sides."
| niklasrde wrote:
| You may have skimmed over this bit in the article then:
|
| "the international A-size system now starts with A0 paper,
| with sides in the correct 2-[?] ratio, but with exactly 1m2
| of area, or as near as you can get with whole millimetre side
| lengths (1189mm 841mm, to be precise). Then folding or
| cutting it a few times until it is conveniently desk/folder
| sized gets you to A4, hence the '4' bit in the name."
| Nokinside wrote:
| _" Unnecessary accuracy is technical incompetence"_ -
| Engineering saying. You need accuracy to serve some purpose.
| Too much is inefficient and expensive. Too little does not
| work. 212x300 would not serve the purpose. Try folding and you
| see how bad it is.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| [curses in Tschichold]
| samloveshummus wrote:
| I had a major epiphany deriving this myself as a teenager,
| because it was the first time I used algebra to calculate
| something "real". The equation was trivial, but the principle of
| mathematical modelling struck me like lightning. In an instant
| the world felt more comprehensible and tractable, I suddenly felt
| like Neo seeing the Matrix.
| c7b wrote:
| Beautiful! One more thing to add re A4 vs letter size: A4 is also
| a better approximation of the 'golden ratio', so supposedly more
| aesthetically pleasing (though neither is a particularly good
| approximation, which shouldn't surprise since A4 is an
| approximation of sqrt(2) not (1+sqrt(5))/2).
| rvba wrote:
| I wish EU would force the manufacturers to advertise phone and TV
| screen sizes in centimeters, not inches.
| beAbU wrote:
| It's not going to be helpful anyway, because the size is
| measured in diagonals, and it's quite difficult to imagine how
| large a screen is if you only have the diagonals.
|
| If, instead, we had height and width, I can roughly use my body
| to estimate screen size.
|
| Last time I bought a TV I had to tape out its size on my wall
| to get a better understanding of its size relative to the size
| of my living room.
| kazinator wrote:
| 210x297 offers a better approximation than 212x300.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| A4 is so ubiquitous around me (Europe) that, no matter its merits
| or not, it's really a major PITA when you get documents that are
| not A4. They don't line up nicely with the A4 stuff. They don't
| go gently in the A4 folders / sleeves / pockets / ring binders
| (files) / etc.
|
| Typical offenders in my case are medical bills printed on dot-
| matrix printers.
|
| I don't even know if there's perforated continuous
| stationery/form paper with tractor holes that, once you strip the
| holes, is A4 sized? I guess it's really uncommon if it exists for
| I don't ever recall seeing any actually used.
|
| Now don't get me wrong: hearing the song of a dot-matrix printer
| makes me happy (brings back lots of memories as my first printer
| was a dot-matrix one) and it's nice that that tech is still in
| use here and there. I just wish the dot-matrix printers in Europe
| would use A4 continuous paper (which may or may not even exist).
|
| And don't get me started on oversized continuous paper that is
| _not perforated_ : this is the kind of stuff that can trigger
| obsessive-compulsive disorder!
|
| I guess all this rant to say that even in Europe, where A4 is
| ubiquitous, you still have places using other sizes than A3/A4/A5
| etc.
| samstave wrote:
| Back in my day, I had a CTO that required I | the messages log
| to the line printer....
|
| Each day I would have to review the log for any security
| breaches with a highlighter and investigate any attempts to
| break our system...
|
| Yeah, that sucked. (we were one of the first VOIP people...)
| ((Quicknet))
| twic wrote:
| > I don't even know if there's perforated continuous
| stationery/form paper with tractor holes that, once you strip
| the holes, is A4 sized?
|
| There is. We had an ImageWriter in the 1980s which printed on
| exactly that. Until i read your comment, i assumed that was the
| standard!
|
| This format still exists, for example:
|
| https://www.paperstone.co.uk/paper/listing-paper-computer/5-...
| gertrunde wrote:
| That paper does make me irrationally angry for one reason:
|
| "Sheet size is A4 - 11.66inch deep x 235mm wide (edge to edge
| including sprockets)"
|
| (Edit: Although it does make a sort of sense, in that dot
| matrix line height is in inches - but still aggravating).
| bonzini wrote:
| Technically it's 0.66 millimeter shorter than A4. A bigger
| problem is width, it does not fit the "standard" 80 columns.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I am sure someone has already pointed this out, but there is
| indeed A4 sized tractor paper. Old person irrelevant anecdote,
| in the days before affordable high resolution inkjets laser
| printers, 9-pin dot matrix, 24-pin dot matrix and
| daisywheel/golfball printers ruled the world.
|
| Submitting coursework in college was required to be on A4
| paper, and if you used a dot matrix printer you lost marks too.
| Some of my college professors, even on my computer science
| undergrad were so stuck in their ways that they demanded you
| type everything up on a manual typewriter and would penalize
| you if they thought you had done it on a computer.
|
| College students were lazy, so everybody would use the
| college's 9-pin dot matrix printer (losing points) and then mad
| dash for the single guillotine cutter in the adminstration's
| office like they were French royalty in 1789. I special ordered
| very expensive A4 tractor feed paper, and bought a second-hand
| daisy wheel printer that nobody wanted because daisy wheels
| didn't do graphics, and typed everything up on a computer. No
| lost points, no lining up to use the guillotine, no mad dash at
| the end.
|
| But yeah, places using sizes other than A4, screw those guys.
| bborud wrote:
| I would suspect the software was written for a non-A4 format,
| so if you were to put A4 paper in it you might get line wraps
| that would screw up multi-page prints.
|
| Oh my, I just remembered the pain of setting the perforation
| skip when using nonstandard paper. And then realizing that
| those problems were a luxury compared to the problems big
| professional office printers throw up today.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| That satisfying tearing of the perforated tractor feed
| edges. And the not so satisyfing tear when you tried to do
| too many at once because you were in a hurry.
|
| Wide format tractor fed music paper in green.
|
| I had tractor fed graph paper for a while. If you want to
| know frustration, try lining up your DnD game maps to
| that...
|
| And I had forgotten about the perforation
| skip/misalignment. Thanks for bringing that back.
| Triggered.
| analog31 wrote:
| That brings back the memories. I was one of the first
| students to submit a word processed paper at my college.
| "Just in case," I had bought a cheap and slow daisywheel
| printer. I cooked up this idea to prepare my pages with
| correction fluid before printing them, but never found it
| necessary.
|
| I ended up asking one professor if it was OK to use word
| processing. He said, just this once. The next week, there was
| an all-faculty meeting (small college), and they actually
| discussed whether word processing should be allowed. The
| profs who were already using word processing spoke up in its
| defense -- from the physics department. They reassured
| everybody that the computer was not doing the writing. The
| college came out with a statement saying it was OK, but that
| we were on our honor to not use a spell checker.
|
| By the time I graduated, every prof was using a word
| processor.
|
| What I don't think the profs figured out, for several more
| years, was how to grade a paper that's mechanically perfect.
| All of my papers got A's, and I chose courses where the grade
| was based solely on written work. I think in terms of
| efficiency and aesthetics, using a word processor bumped my
| GPA by easily half a point by graduation. I was already a
| good typist thanks to programming.
|
| Many years later, when my kids were in grade school, the
| writing assignments included formatting requirements,
| including margins in inches, for documents that would never
| be printed. These requirements came from the ironically named
| "Modern" Language Association. Today, teachers say, any
| format you want, just get it in by the deadline.
| samstave wrote:
| IDEA: Someone please make a "white noise" generator that play
| audio of old computer 'whirring' noises... like a dot matrix
| printer, a fax machine, a modem, etc... that plays low-key in
| the background...
|
| I actually miss the sound of a dot-matrix.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| The excellent MyNoise.net website has a couple that may
| match:
|
| "Vintage Office" [1] has a Dot Matrix printer.
|
| "Calm Office" [2] has a Printer/Scanner.
|
| [1] https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/vintageOfficeNoiseGen
| erato...
|
| [2] https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/openOfficeNoiseGenera
| tor.p...
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| Search for "old computer asmr" gave me this:
| https://youtu.be/tt3kYcHbbLg?t=160 (link right to the
| relevant part).
| blowski wrote:
| Not just white noise but whole songs
|
| https://youtu.be/VXbP7OkQ8LQ
| samstave wrote:
| HOLY SHIT!!!
|
| That was my first printer ~1986 or so.... gosh I wish I
| still had it.
|
| Make it play the Windows 95 sound...
|
| (the guy who wrote the win95 startup sound was paid $30K)
|
| --
|
| This is pretty amazing though:
|
| https://youtu.be/pX4tBIwhOqY
| Diesel555 wrote:
| >They don't line up nicely with the A4 stuff. They don't go
| gently in the A4 folders / sleeves / pockets / ring binders
| (files) / etc.
|
| This statement, and the rest of the post, simply reads "I don't
| like different". However, the article is about the mathematical
| benefits of A4, the failures of 8.5x11, and the true benefit of
| A4 from a paper-size agnostic society.
|
| This article convinced A4 is better (and the entire system) not
| because it doesn't fit in my folders, but because it makes
| practical sense.
| personalidea wrote:
| It has practical implications. I have a file cabinet which is
| made for A4 paper in landscape. Now, I have some official
| paperwork from another country that has more the form of a
| spell scroll and the only way to fit that into my cabinet or
| binder or wherever is to fold it.
|
| Which is something I would like to avoid on things like birth
| certificates and such.
| bonzini wrote:
| The line height of a dot matrix printer is 1/6", so A4
| continuous paper would be roughly 70 lines but not quite
| exactly 70. Breaks would be messed up after a few pages. It
| would also not fit 80 characters horizontally. That's why
| continuous paper is stuck with US letter or 14"x11" format.
| copperx wrote:
| I'm still waiting for the US to convert from letter size to A4.
| The change feels imminent, but for some reason it hasn't
| happened yet. Maybe we need to convert to the metric system
| first?
| ihuman wrote:
| Why does it feel imminent?
| saalweachter wrote:
| Honestly it's a lot easier to have bespoke paper sizes now,
| because (a) it's not like we're actually _using_ paper for
| much and (b) you can just set your computer to whatever.
| pessimizer wrote:
| And 90% of the time professional printers are going to be
| printing to huge sheets and cutting it down anyway.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| I'm one of those fountain pen oddballs to whom paper is
| _very_ important. A4 and A5 notebooks for me, please.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Most printers sold are letter size by default. Most can
| accommodate A4 but the defaults need to be changed, you need
| to arrange new suppliers of office supplies (A4 is less
| prevalent in the US than Letter size) etc.
|
| I'd imagine that printer sales are declining in the digital
| era, which slows down a transition, and most of the ones
| remaining are at institutions with a lot of inertia
| (government, medicine)
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The change feels imminent
|
| Really? I see zero chance of it. A4, while mathematically
| nice, offers very little benefit and is an awkward (just a
| little too large) size to handle. Consistent ratios are of
| extremely dubious value; if I'm reducing a text by 50%, I'm
| going to retypeset it anyway. A5 is even more awkward than
| A4. Too big.
| scoot wrote:
| Too big for what? A5 is half the size of A4. But
| regardless, A5 and A3 both have their uses.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Too long to handle comfortably. I've never liked it. I do
| make sure to typeset two versions of things I do so
| Europeans can have something they're familiar with (and
| their tooling prefers), but I just prefer things a little
| shorter and a little fatter.
|
| edit: about A5 specifically, I prefer 51/2 x 81/2, which
| tends to become 51/4 x 81/4 (even smaller) after trimming
| the bleeds.
| Ayesh wrote:
| I had this problem too, with majority of documents being A4,
| but a single bank/med bill ruins the rest of the stack.
|
| My solution was to just give up on keeping the documents unless
| I have to, for legal/tax purposes, and just digitally archive
| them. Modern scanner apps are super good, and the OCR/search
| features make the 20 seconds it takes to scan it and throw away
| the paper.
| jopsen wrote:
| I have box that papers I need to keep goes into.
|
| The theory is that it's highly unlikely that I'll ever need
| to produce/find the papers every again.
|
| So if I have to, I'll pay the cost of sorting and organizing
| the papers when that day comes.
|
| Kind of like lazy evaluation in Haskell :)
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Honest question: why do you archive things you don't have to
| archive?
| jdeibele wrote:
| My mother kept the first utility bill of the year for
| electricity, natural gas, water and sewer, etc. She lived
| in the same house for 42 years and liked to be able to see
| how much the amounts had changed over the years.
|
| I'm not sure it was tremendously useful but she could
| verify her feeling that water and sewer increased
| disproportionately to the others, for example.
| copperx wrote:
| How does she remember to do that every year? That's
| amazing.
| jxf wrote:
| For me it's a "you never know" situation. The cost of being
| wrong about this can be very high.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Not the parent but: because you often don't know with
| certainty whether a particular document will be needed at
| some point in the future.
|
| Edit:
|
| Concrete example: I'll probably never get audited by the
| IRS, but if I ever do, I really really want to have all the
| records I need to defend myself.
| ghaff wrote:
| I tend to throw things in a drawer or other container and
| throw most of it out every few years. I figure that was,
| if I need something, I can probably find it. But I don't
| have to go to the work of filing the 99% of things I'll
| never need up-front.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| That's what I do. All bills, statements, etc. go into a
| cardboard document box. I start a new box every calendar
| year. If I ever need to find anything, it's a bit of a
| search but not too bad as the papers will be in roughly
| chronological order.
|
| I almost never need to find anything.
|
| It's a decent compromise between separate files for
| everything (which would take too much effort) and not
| saving stuff at all. Even scanning stuff to save
| digitally is more work than this system.
|
| After 3 years the box gets burned.
|
| The exception is tax returns, they get saved separately.
| Symbiote wrote:
| 3 years is a bit short. In the last year or so, I've
| twice needed to find old documents -- ~5 and ~7 years
| old, respectively.
|
| I keep receipts for significant purchases (electronics
| etc) in one envelope per year. It's so little space I
| keep these indefinitely, so if I sell an 8 year old
| bicycle I should still have the receipt.
|
| Everything else is in an A4 (now this comment is on-
| topic) file, and with so much being electronic these days
| it takes a decade or more to fill one up.
| ghaff wrote:
| I do file some things away (e.g. stuff I know I'll need
| to do taxes) and certain other things (like insurance) go
| into a fireproof box. But, for the most part, I do _much_
| less organization of paper than I used to, especially of
| things that I can probably just find in an online
| account. I have file cabinets but I rarely open them
| these days. Most of the paper I systematically save is
| going into my travel destination boxes.
| bradknowles wrote:
| For the IRS, you only need to keep documents seven years
| back. Anything older than seven years can be shredded.
| copperx wrote:
| So everybody must keep 7 years of archives? Is that why
| houses in the US are so big? And does everybody have an
| archival room? Or does the IRS accept scans? So many
| questions.
| bradknowles wrote:
| In theory, yes. In practice, I think most people probably
| don't.
|
| I think scans would be acceptable, but you'd probably
| have to verify those claims with the bill sender.
|
| Houses in the US being so big has less to do with storage
| requirements for tax filing documents than everyone
| wanting to stay above average for everything, including
| house size, and home builders and real estate agents
| profiting greatly from the general FOMO.
| nicoburns wrote:
| How many documents do you have??? Surely one smallish box
| would do for most people?
| bradknowles wrote:
| Some people, yes. Others, no.
|
| As your finances get more complex, and you change
| employers more often, and you have more 401k plans that
| are distributed around various companies, and you have
| multiple credit cards, etc... then your storage
| requirements will necessarily increase.
| Ayesh wrote:
| For easier searching and sometimes nostalgic reasons.
|
| When I was in my early 20s, I used to save ticket stubs,
| boarding passes, train tickets, etc when I was traveling, I
| really liked keeping them. But when I saw myself becoming a
| borderline hoarder, I took photos of them and threw all of
| them away. Even today, I have the habit of taking a
| document image of ticket stubs and other new things,
| specially when I'm in a new city or a country.
|
| There is no practical use for them, just that they help me
| to not stack up physical papers.
|
| The other real documents I archive are mostly documents
| related to dividend notices, water/electricity bills that
| unfortunately come in snail mail, etc. I'd be fine if I
| don't keep them, but I have them in the very unlikely
| scenario that I just might need to make a paper trail.
| ghaff wrote:
| I have a bunch of stuff I wish I could easily digitize
| and throw away the originals. But, aside from doing a few
| selective things, the effort to en masse digitize and add
| enough metadata so I could actually find stuff isn't
| worth the return.
| ColinWright wrote:
| How do you know you don't need to archive it?
|
| Recently a colleague needed to provide 20 years of details
| of addresses lived and trips overseas made in order to
| complete various immigration forms.
|
| Governments can change their demands at their whim. If you
| don't have the documents, you're screwed.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| US legal is way better suited for reading. Or the comic-book
| format
| CHB0403085482 wrote:
| A4 is metric paper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI
| samwillis wrote:
| The article sadly misses the root of the An sizes. A0 has an area
| of 1m^2, setting its dimensions and defining the rest of the
| sizes. Quite genius!
|
| The B sizes start at B0 with a length on the short side of 1m,
| then follow the same pattern. The C sizes, often used for
| envelopes, are defined as the geometric mean between the
| equivalent A and B size.
|
| As a child of an architect, when I was a kid my dad would bring
| old A0 drawings home as paper we could draw and paint on the back
| of. Loved it.
|
| - Edit: it does mention it, I skimmed it too fast...
| tiagod wrote:
| > As a child of an architect, when I was a kid my dad would
| bring old A0 drawings home as paper we could draw and paint on
| the back of. Loved it.
|
| You brought me memories of being a very small kid drawing on A0
| roll scraps bigger than me on the floor of my parents' studio
| :)
| samwillis wrote:
| Those cardboard tubes the A0 drawings where stored in were
| brilliant for building stuff with, and even more fun as a
| later teenager having parties - stick one end in a fire pit
| and they become fire cannons, a good 4-5ft of flame out the
| top...
| gilleain wrote:
| Also, when it comes to envelopes:
|
| "This means that C4 is slightly larger than A4, and slightly
| smaller than B4. The practical usage of this is that a letter
| written on A4 paper fits inside a C4 envelope, and both A4
| paper and C4 envelope fits inside a B4 envelope."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#C_series
| jeff-davis wrote:
| To fit A4 into a C4 envelope, do you fold in in half or
| thirds or fourths?
| orthoxerox wrote:
| You don't. If you fold it in half you can fit it into a C5
| envelope.
| rocqua wrote:
| Within this entire system, its all about succesive
| halvings. So folding into thirds (which is horribly
| difficult to do) is never needed.
| woevdbz wrote:
| Not only difficult, but prone to being sliced when using
| a paper opener. Paper folded in four should be placed in
| the envelope with the fold at the bottom so that it
| doesn't get cut when slicing the paper at the top of the
| envelope.
| maxnoe wrote:
| That's not true, the most common envelope at least in
| Germany is DL for DIN Long [1], which requires folding A4
| in thirds and there is a corresponding DIN norm on how to
| print fold marks to aid the folding in thirds [2]
|
| [1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_lang
|
| [2] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falzmarke
| NeoTar wrote:
| Unfolded
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Your point about childhood really struck a warm note with me. I
| feel one of the most important and loving things my parents did
| for me as a child was ensuring a limitless supply of
| stationery.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| It mentions A0, the 1sqm area, then goes into paper weights.
| You might have accidentally skipped that section.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's pretty handy that 1 A4 sheet at 80gsm weighs 5 grams
|
| (A4 sheet area: 1/(2^4) = 1/16 of a square metre) * (standard
| paper weight of 80 grams per square metre) = (5 grams per A4
| 80gsm sheet).
|
| Would have been useful for calculating postage.
| Biganon wrote:
| I'm a teaching assistant, and I use this calculation every
| time I have to organize a written exam
|
| "so every students needs 11 sheets of paper... times 234
| students... times 5 grams... OK I need help to bring
| everything to the exam building"
| chrismorgan wrote:
| A few weeks ago my sister told me of a proposal for some
| contract that she'd been working on, and it ended up being
| 1600 pages, mostly double-sided A4, and printed in
| quadruplicate, and I rapidly worked out in my head, purely
| from the memory that A0 is 1m2, that each subsequent paper
| size halves the area, and that 80g/m2 is a common weight:
| that that was going to be something like 16kg of dead tree
| that was probably just going to clog up filing cabinets
| somewhere and mostly never actually be referred to. If I
| did this more often I'd remember 5g per sheet, but the mere
| fact that all this stuff is simple ratios and unit
| calculations means you can calculate it all from first
| principles quite easily. It's really handy.
| foobarian wrote:
| I grew up in Europe and I did love the A-n system for its
| mathematical elegance. But having moved to the US where they
| use a different size without the halving property I found that
| I don't really miss it at all in practice and the only benefit
| I really derived from it was a bit of smug intellectual
| superiority. I find that a lot of the value of these size
| systems comes from network effects of many other things in the
| environment being compatible, such as printers, paper cutters,
| rulers, etc. With Letter I like that the dimensions are almost
| whole imperial values (8.5 x 11), while TBH I always found it
| annoying that A4 had so many significant digits. It has a very
| technocratic vibe to it - user is not as important as having
| nice mathematical properties, damnit! :-)
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| Why would anyone care about "almost whole imperial values"?
| jahewson wrote:
| Yeah I'm struggling to understand the value of that too.
| egypturnash wrote:
| The US still uses imperial measurements.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| Actually, no. The US gallon (3.785L) is not the same as
| the imperial gallon (4.546L), a point which made me see
| red when Canadian opponents to metrication argued that we
| must keep the gallon because the US is our biggest
| trading partner.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| The real reason Canadians and Brits should have opposed
| metrification: the transition wasn't ever 100% completed
| leading to horrifying Frankensystems where Brits buy meat
| by the kilo but measure their own weight in stone. Or
| Canadians still measuring train rail distances in miles.
| wayvey wrote:
| Then just push for full adoption of the system and over
| time youll get there. Can be slow and sometimes painful
| but so are a lot of things; "no pain no gain" as they say
| vincent-manis wrote:
| You have it backwards. Metrication in Canada stopped
| halfway because the opponents created such a stink that
| the government of the time decided to back off, and
| nobody since has had the courage to seize the nettle.
| Perhaps in a generation today's schoolkids, educated in
| metric, will try again.
| Melkman wrote:
| To rephrase te question: why would somebody be annoyed
| with the fractional metric size of A-n sizes ?
| foobarian wrote:
| The answer is probably quite subjective. In my case, when
| I deal with materials such as wood, cardboard or paper I
| enjoy immensely to have dimensions that snap to a certain
| grid. Call it a mental defect if you will. To illustrate
| further, let me propose a strawman: would you have no
| preference between the A4 size being: (1) 210.32 x
| 297.912 or (2) 210x297? Does it not bug you that 210.25
| was rounded down to 210?
| kergonath wrote:
| The US does not use imperial units. Imperial units are
| those defined in the British Weights and Measures Act of
| 1824. What the US uses is the US customary system, where
| units have the same name as the Imperial ones, but not
| the same values. Now, the US customary units are defined
| in terms of SI units anyway, just with annoying, non-
| integer conversion factors.
| egypturnash wrote:
| EVEN BETTER
|
| (where "better" is actually "really annoying")
| blahedo wrote:
| Less the "imperial" part and more the "almost whole"---it
| would work just as well if the pages were say 20cm by 30cm
| ---but it is very convenient when doing layout (both
| electronic and physical) that both the content and the
| margin are "nice round numbers", and the natural divisions
| are also nice round numbers that you can easily measure
| with a standard ruler. 1/2" margins all round? Then the
| area is 71/2 by 10. Printing a 2-up booklet? Each page is
| 51/2 by 81/2, exactly. If I had to design the size from
| scratch to optimise this property I'd probably go with
| 8"x12" (or 20cmx30cm!) but I assume there's some older
| printshop standard we're inheriting from here.
|
| Not saying A4's not good. Just acknowledging that "nice
| round numbers" are convenient sometimes. Standards that use
| US-traditional measurements seem to do better at that for
| some reason.
| Symbiote wrote:
| This doesn't work at all, let alone just as well.
|
| Half a 20x30 sheet is 15x20, so the ratio has changed
| from 2:3 to 3:4.
|
| 1:sqrt(2) is used to maintain the ratio. The round number
| is at the start, with the area of A0 being 1m2.
| jahewson wrote:
| I too moved from Europe to the US and the paper sizes are the
| worst - have you tried folding it? It doesn't work.
|
| > almost a whole value
|
| But not a whole value.
| foobarian wrote:
| That's the thing, though, the folding was never helpful to
| me even while in Europe; it was a Nice Thing but I never
| used it in practice. Maybe if I was there now I could take
| advantage of it for proofing large format prints, like one
| of the sibling comments pointed out. But even the envelope
| thing was not helpful - the only envelopes we had were the
| blue communist ones, the international ones, and you ended
| up folding the letters at the edges to make it fit.
|
| > But not a whole value.
|
| Right, I said that because one of the dimensions is a half.
| However in practice those values behave as nice round
| numbers as well, because in the imperial measure context
| most things are sized to powers of two, i.e. 1/2, 1/4, 1/8
| etc.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I would have expected a communist (i.e. poor) country to
| have more use for some properties of the paper system:
|
| 1. You can easily calculate the weight of that letter
| without a scale, and stick exactly to the 20g limit (or
| whatever) for the cheapest postage rate. (I remember
| doing this in the 1990s for air mail letters to
| relatives.)
|
| 2. You can crush 2, 4 or even 8 normal A4 pages onto a
| single sheet while photocopying, and save paper/money.
| Although maybe by the time photocopiers were available in
| your country, the cost of paper was no longer an issue.
| (I would press the 2-on-1 or even 4-on-1 button when
| printing at university, to halve the cost at essentially
| no inconvenience.)
| jahewson wrote:
| I feel like you don't get to criticise the value of the
| system if you grow up in a communist country that lacked
| access to the different sizes of paper and envelopes that
| make the system useful. Clearly you missed out! Making an
| A5 booklet from A4 and mailing it is something any print
| shop I grew up near would do.
|
| No idea what the advantage of a whole unit is supposed to
| be; nobody is sat around with a ruler measuring A4 cuts.
| The tolerances for paper manufacturing need to be
| specified in tiny fractions of a mm either way. As for
| actual typographers, they don't use metric units, the
| size of the paper is not of great concern.
| foobarian wrote:
| Heh, that's probably a fair point.
|
| I added some more thoughts on the value of whole units in
| a sibling post. Like I mentioned it's mostly subjective,
| and has some utility to me when working with paper and
| measuring cuts. So yes indeed with a ruler, measuring
| cuts. :-)
| evil-olive wrote:
| a specific functional benefit, besides the network effects of
| standardization, is foldability
|
| you can fold A(n) paper in half to make a brochure or booklet
| of size A(n+1), for example. it will fit perfectly into any
| envelope or folder sized to fit A(n+1) pages.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| You don't miss it in practice because US society isn't built
| around it in practice.
|
| There's something great about being able to print something
| at home on A4, see how it looks, and know that it's going to
| be exactly the same (no stretching or cutting required) when
| you go to a print shop for an A1 or A0 print.
|
| And yes there is a lot of legacy network effects around
| Letter size, which is why the switching costs are very high
| to make switching impractical.
| rhapsodic wrote:
| mjevans wrote:
| A move _away_ from paper, to government signed crypto certs
| and witness logs is the answer.
|
| Then we just need to standardize on A5 as a standard for
| bills mailed out, since it'll fit inside of everyone's
| filing cabinets already. A5 for taxes would also be nicer
| too.
|
| Then get school supplies made in A5 size (easier for kids
| to carry), and finally after a silent transition period
| where there's less and less in the US Letter size, we can
| relegate PC Load Letter to the Office Space movie.
| n3t wrote:
| What are witness logs?
| mavu wrote:
| This is very cool.
| ktzar wrote:
| The metric system is such a beauty, that it's shocking that is
| not used everywhere. The fact that a liter of water has a
| relation with the size of the paper we use is just poetry.
| beefield wrote:
| > The metric system is such a beauty, that it's shocking that
| is not used everywhere.
|
| You can check with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I think he nails it.
| The imperial system is much more natural for people to grasp. A
| pound is roughly a fist sized rock, but there are no natural
| objects that weight around one kilogram. And one yard is
| roughly the length of a step, completely unlike a meter. And so
| forth. /s
|
| Seriously, I propose a compromise. Europeans give up decimal
| comma and US gives up imperial measurements. Everyone wins.
| t_mann wrote:
| > Seriously, I propose a compromise. Europeans give up
| decimal comma and US gives up imperial measurements. Everyone
| wins.
|
| +1
| bbarnett wrote:
| From a Canadian comedy group, in the 80s, when we were
| transitioning to metric....
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjFaKD9BuOc
|
| I can hardly wait for first contact, and the planet has to
| transition to some galactic standard...
| gs17 wrote:
| "Why would you humans use water in your unit system? Less
| than 0.01% of the universe is water! 1 elom of dark mater
| has a mass of 1 marg, your system is obviously not as
| logical as this!"
| krzyk wrote:
| > there are no natural objects that weight around one
| kilogram
|
| Yes there is: a liter of water (see the beauty?)
|
| > Europeans give up decimal comma and US gives up imperial
| measurements. Everyone wins.
|
| And US gives up strange day-in-the-middle date format as a
| bonus to make everyone there sane.
| beefield wrote:
| > Yes there is: a liter of water (see the beauty?)
|
| There was /s at the end of the sentence, meaning I was
| sarcastic:)
| prmoustache wrote:
| I am pretty sure in modern days most people have easier
| access to 1L of water or 1kg of flour than a fist sized rock.
| exodust wrote:
| > more natural for people to grasp
|
| You added sarcasm flag but sometimes it is more natural. I
| grew up with metric but can visualize "about an inch" better
| than "about 2.5cm".
|
| It's common for "metric people" to sometimes use inches and
| feet in casual reference to certain types of measurements.
| "She is almost 6 feet tall" is another example that will be
| used instead of "180 cm" or "1.8 metres".
| Ekaros wrote:
| No one where I live and use metric system even have clue
| what is the feet and inches mess... Like five foot what?
| Why not do it properly and say five point something feet
| like sane systems.
| cgeier wrote:
| At least here in Western (continental) Europe, it really
| isn't. I have never heard somebody say something like "She
| is almost 6 feet tall".
| dunefox wrote:
| > Europeans give up decimal comma
|
| Never!
| xxs wrote:
| c'mon it screws up the csv. I'd personally not use comma
| for decimals, even though I was taught at school
| dunefox wrote:
| Simple: dot separated values. ;)
| MayeulC wrote:
| Why not use the ASCII group separator? (0x1D)
| spullara wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: english units make sense to normal humans.
| metric units make it easier to do physics. (i'm a physicist)
| stephen_g wrote:
| If you grow up in a country that uses metric basically
| exclusively, it's not. I literally cannot visualise 10 feet
| but if you say three metres I instantly have a feel for how
| long that is (I even Googled the conversion because I
| couldn't be bothered working it out). I wouldn't have any
| idea what 100 degrees Fahrenheit felt like if I didn't know
| it's about 38 degrees C. And so on...
| midasuni wrote:
| English units like my 2 litre kettle which I use to fill my
| 300ml cup with tea? Yes they do make sense.
| akie wrote:
| Counter opinion: no one who grew up in a country with the
| metric system would know how to understand "I weigh 14
| stones". What stones? Small ones? Big ones? Who decides if
| it's a big one or a small one? Also, how would I know how
| much a stone weighs?
|
| It's just silly. It has no more bearing on reality than a
| kg does.
| nikanj wrote:
| That's just familiriaty bias
| Bakary wrote:
| This is not an unpopular opinion. Millions of anglophones
| seem to be unable to grasp or accept that metric measures
| make intuitive sense to people who use them.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I'll grant that words like inches, pounds and miles have
| more literary gravitas to them than centimetres, kilograms
| or kilometers, and it would be a shame to lose those former
| words completely, but arguing they make more "sense" is
| really pushing it. I literally have no "sense" of what a
| "stone" weighs, how deep a "fathom" or a "league" is, how
| much area a "rood" covers, or how much liquid makes up a
| fluid ounce, and I doubt I ever will. And they're just some
| of the more common units!
| mywacaday wrote:
| Also imperial units can be divided into quarters and thirds
| using whole numbers.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Where this property is useful, you can often choose a
| different starting 'unit'.
|
| For example, fitted kitchen cupboards are designed in
| multiples of 150mm, which has plenty of nice factors. A
| dishwasher might be 600mm wide, or a typical cupboard
| 450mm.
| xxs wrote:
| and 5/32s if you need a better precision?
| wizofaus wrote:
| Ignoring the /s ... a yard is still a fair bit longer than
| the average stride length - it's probably about right if
| you're close to 2m tall though. OTOH an average male adult's
| hip is around 1m from the ground. Pineapples and cabbages
| typically weigh close to 1kg. Fist-sized rocks can vary
| enormously in weight - anywhere from a few 100g (pumice etc)
| to over 1kg (pyrite, assuming a large hand size).
| Lio wrote:
| The US _doesn 't_ use Imperial units, it wasn't part of the
| British Empire at the time that system was standardised.
|
| It uses US Statute Units which are similar but not always the
| same as Imperial Units.
|
| There are some very important differences...
|
| Hence the reason that no Brit is ever impressed with a "pint"
| served in a US bar. It looks like the barman forgot to pour
| all of it. :P
|
| We should retire Imperial, US and Nautical units and switch
| everything to SI Metric.
|
| Having several definitions of mile, pint, gallon, foot, etc
| in use, at the same time, is just feckin' silly.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| A meter is one big step. Easy to count out 10 meters
| xxs wrote:
| >Europeans give up decimal comma
|
| consider it done
| bearmode wrote:
| As a Brit, I completely support the US giving up imperial
| measures for Europeans giving up decimal commas.
| martin_a wrote:
| > A pound is roughly a fist sized rock
|
| I've seen quite some fists and they all varied in size. This
| seems like a really bad idea to use as a reference.
| mellavora wrote:
| And I've seen many rocks with different densities. Also
| making it a really bad idea to use as a reference.
|
| Of course pre-metric units were defined by something
| convenient. A cubit is the length of the forearm.
|
| I don't think Taleb goes into the why.
|
| Metric is clearly superior if you have the social concept
| that units should be standardized and (as a corralary) that
| products are commoditized. The idea of a standard
| commodity, however, didn't really exist before the
| industrial revolution.
|
| So why would units be standardized before that? The only
| place units mattered was taxes, and then the unit was
| whatever the king said it was.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| > A cubit is the length of the forearm.
|
| > I don't think Taleb goes into the why.
|
| You can measure rope and cloth using cubits by wrapping
| them around the fist (which holds one end) and the elbow.
| Const-me wrote:
| > Europeans give up decimal comma and US gives up imperial
| measurements.
|
| I'm a European, and I hate decimal comma. When consuming data
| saved by MS Excel or similar, dealing with decimal commas is
| an ongoing source of annoyance and compatibility bugs, for
| all my 22 years in the software industry.
|
| Modern software has American roots. Many programming
| languages like C, C++ and Python are using dot when printing
| or parsing floats with their standard libraries. It's even in
| the name, these numbers are called "floating point" not
| "floating comma".
| jaclaz wrote:
| Also in Excel you can set (as per your language used) the
| comma as decimal separator, but internally it remains dot,
| an example is the VBA Evaluate function.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Luckily we have 1l milk boxes. I always compare weight to
| what 1l of milk would weight.
| MayeulC wrote:
| I looked up the density just in case. 1.035 kg/L. Close
| enough.
| petepete wrote:
| Would recommend the documentary Precision: The Measure of All
| Things by Marcus du Sautoy. It's no longer on iPlayer but
| thankfully someone's uploaded it to YouTube.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g81opjVDAaA
| timbit42 wrote:
| It would be much more beautiful if it were based on 12 instead
| of 10. Of course, this would require humanity to switch to
| dozenal, which will never happen unless almost everyone dies
| and someone enforces it on the few that remain to repopulate
| the planet.
| andruby wrote:
| Could you expand why base-12 is more beautiful than base-10?
| Is it because it has more divisors? If so, why not base-2?
| bmitc wrote:
| Beauty doesn't necessarily mean practical in all cases. In all
| honesty, people who grew up with the metric system don't
| usually understand how practical Fahrenheit and other non-
| metric units often are (not always are). Are they hard to
| calculate with? Yes, sometimes. But they usually directly map
| to average human experience. For example, humans experience
| temperatures in the range of 0 - 100 degrees F most of the
| time. That's -17.8 - 37.78 degrees C. The Celsius range doesn't
| really make sense in the context of daily experience and is
| less fine-grained at that. Yes, 0-100 degrees C is freezing to
| boiling, but humans don't live in that range.
|
| The metric system is great for symmetry and calculations but
| that doesn't always map to practical quantities in those units,
| in my personal opinion. It's kind of funny when foreign friends
| will explain to me metric units, when I already know them, but
| they don't understand anything about non-metric units or their
| practicality.
|
| Edit: I should have known to make this comment, because it's
| going to get bikeshedded to death (already is). The summary of
| my point was to say that the metric system is perfect for
| calculations and representations, but the non-metric systems
| can often serve more practical purposes. Not always but often.
| In other words, for daily, non-engineering uses, there's really
| not much of a strong winner aside from people's country of
| origin. Even for paper, it's a toss-up for me. I find for
| notebooks, the A<x> sizes are nice and preferred by me, but US
| letter size is sometimes more preferred over A4 paper. A4 paper
| is nice for mathematical notes but can often get in the way of
| diagramming due to the narrowness.
|
| There just seems to be a superiority complex of those that use
| the metric system, but I don't really get it. Note the use of
| the word "shocking" in the comment I replied to.
|
| Edit 2: Commenting on scales really seems to grind some gears
| and gets people going. I'm okay with stating that the scales
| used for various measurements are fairly arbitrary in daily
| life and that there's pros and cons to both, but still disagree
| that it's shocking various places don't use the metric system.
| They certainly cause issues in engineering systems though.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| U.S. Letter size could behave like A4 (root 2) if it were
| 8.5" x 12" ... not a huge stretch.
|
| (Or 7.75" x 11", approximately, if you prefer.)
| talideon wrote:
| But then it wouldn't be US Letter.
|
| There are other paper sizes based around the A series that
| fit relate back to it as part of a geometric progression,
| which means stuff fits neatly together. For instance, the C
| and DL series, which are used for envelopes, with a C4
| envelope being exactly the right size for a sheet of A4
| paper.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| To be sure, but the point I was questioning was that A4
| is too skinny for most use cases, that U.S. Letter was
| preferred in that regard. Adding 9% to the length of U.S.
| Letter doesn't seem to make it suddenly overly skinny.
|
| Bad for origami though. Ditto with regard to A4. :-)
| talideon wrote:
| Preferred by whom? I've never encountered a use case
| where A4 was too skinny. And it certainly never stopped
| anyone from making paper airplanes from whole sheets at
| school. A4 folds neatly to sheets of the same ratio,
| which is its party trick and why the DL and C series of
| envelopes are a thing.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Pretty much the only reason I like the Fahrenheit scale,
| miles, inches and ounces seems to be that it's something no
| one else uses. On the other hand, computers make calculations
| with these non-metric units just as easy, and precision-wise
| computers have no advantage to be taken from the base 10
| anyway. (The fact that US is stuck with base 10 for numbers
| doesn't mean much, as there always are 'dozens' and
| 'scores.')
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Your subjective experience of temperature has three digits of
| precision? Because mine sure doesn't.
| happymellon wrote:
| My daily experience absolutely fits into the 0-50 range.
|
| 0C outside means the ground is hard to work with. 32F is such
| an arbitrary number when dealing is concrete reality outside.
| bmitc wrote:
| Well mine and most everyone's is almost exactly 0-100
| degrees F, and 50 degrees C is on the extreme.
|
| Yes, 32 degrees F is arbitrary, but so are several of the
| milestones in Celsius.
|
| I think my argument is that Fahrenheit is more natural
| _most_ of the time, but both scales have their sweet spots
| (which makes sense given their relative nature). But I can
| 't see any clear argument that says Celsius is superior all
| the time.
| bhaak wrote:
| > Well mine and most everyone's is almost exactly 0-100
| degrees F, and 50 degrees C is on the extreme.
|
| You don't cook?
| wartijn_ wrote:
| Their point was related to outside temperatures, which is
| what most people use temperatures for. And although I've
| never used Fahrenheit for anything, I don't think the
| 100c = boiling water is useful in day-to-day life.
|
| I've used temperatures in the 60 something to 80
| something range to measure the inside of food, my oven
| goes anywhere from 160 to 220 degrees, but water boils
| when it goes all bubbly. I know that that's at 100
| degrees, but I don't do anything with that info.
|
| I don't agree with bmitc's point that Fahrenheit feels
| more natural. But it seems like that anytime someone has
| something positive to say about Fahrenheit or imperial
| measurement, 10 different people need to tell them how
| wrong they are, and how there can't be anything positive
| about those systems of measurement. That doesn't seem
| necessary to me. Especially with temperatures where
| everyone just remembers a couple of numbers and
| associates them to a certain feeling or application, and
| whatever you've used your entire life will feel better or
| more natural.
| kuboble wrote:
| I use the knowledge of the temperature of boiling water
| to calculate "how much boiling water I need to add to a
| water in room temperature to have my prefect tea brewing
| temperature".
| bhaak wrote:
| Likewise anytime anybody says that Celsius feels natural
| as well, you also have 10 people tell them that they are
| wrong and Fahrenheit is a much better fit for human
| beings.
|
| Now I think these discussions often go about cherry
| picking examples and just limit the discussion to outside
| temperatures is such a cherry picking.
|
| The real power of the metric system comes from going all-
| in. You can't use everything but the temperature scale.
| If you would do that it would be even more obvious how
| disconnected the temperature scale is to the whole
| system.
| cauefcr wrote:
| Yeah, having metric everything makes it easy to do
| conversions and correlating with different properties of
| matter, you're using the language of science (and most of
| the world), with proper definitions in terms of reality:
| atoms (for kg), distance in terms of c*some_time, volume
| related to mass (1ml of water => 1g of water, you can get
| very precise with temperature as an input). Having a
| standard for orders of magnitude that's consistent
| (micro, milli, kilo, mega, giga) is just the cherry on
| top.
| happymellon wrote:
| Considering that 100F is almost 40C just put your scale
| from 0-40. It's completely subjective.
|
| 0C wear a woolly hat
|
| 10C wear a jacket or sweater
|
| 20C Teeshirt and jeans weather
|
| 30C Teeshirt and shorts weather
|
| 40C Get in the shade and keep hydrated
|
| 50C You want to avoid this end of the scale
|
| It's almost all defending against the pro-Fahrenheit
| folks making strange arguments promoting it, like somehow
| you can't measure your life unless it's in F.
| bmitc wrote:
| > It's almost all defending against the pro-Fahrenheit
| folks making strange arguments promoting it, like somehow
| you can't measure your life unless it's in F.
|
| I didn't make that argument. Fahrenheit is more natural
| in a lot of cases because of the range and delineation
| between whole number temperatures. Celsius is slightly
| less so but not all the time.
|
| My entire point, which was lost in the bikeshedding is
| that it is not "shocking" that the metric system isn't
| used everywhere in daily experience because non-metric
| systems were literally invented to be useful and
| practical. Are they perfect? No. Neither is the metric
| system for daily human use.
|
| The U.S. is a big place and thus has wide-ranging
| temperatures, and that probably contributes to resistance
| to getting rid of Fahrenheit, amongst other things and
| other measurement systems. The U.S. built a huge amount
| of modern infrastructure before anyone else and has never
| experienced a "rebuild" period. For non-engineering
| purposes, there's no downside to using non-metric units,
| and a lot of downsides in converting. As the back and
| forth here shows, there's probably a strong argument to
| be made that the measuring systems don't matter at all in
| an ideal world where it's free to convert entire
| countries back and forth between them. But for some
| reason, a lot of the world feels very superior for using
| the metric system.
|
| Again. Not "shocking" as the original comment I replied
| to mentioned.
| talideon wrote:
| Fahrenheit was defined the way it was not because it was
| "invented to be useful and practical", but because a
| mixture of brine to set 0 was easy to concoct reliably.
| That's as close as it got to being "practical".
|
| Every other argument seems to boil down to "I'm not
| familiar with it, so it's hard", "dealing with 10s is
| easier than 5s", and "Fahrenheit has more resolution
| because I've forgotten decimal numbers exist".
|
| The actual superpower of metric is that all the units
| relate to each other in simple ways. For instance most
| liquids you and I deal with on a daily basis have a
| similar density to water, so if you've got 100g of it,
| it's going to be ~100ml. You don't need to deal with
| arbitrary artifacts of the measuring system beyond the
| unit prefixes.
| happymellon wrote:
| > Fahrenheit is more natural in a lot of cases because of
| the range and delineation between whole number
| temperatures. Celsius is slightly less so but not all the
| time.
|
| You mean "I'm already used to something and I dislike
| other things."
| l9k wrote:
| "The US is a big place" , but the world outside the US
| using Celsius is even bigger, more populated, and with
| more temperature differences.
|
| Fahrenheit being more natural is purely subjective,
| there's no good reason at all for it.
|
| Keeping the imperial system is just a matter of
| convinience because Americans are used to it and changing
| everything is difficult. Also some people think producers
| of food and any objects to sell might lose some margin by
| converting and rounding to the next round number of the
| new unit
| ygra wrote:
| It comes down to familiarity, but -20 to 40 degrees Celsius
| isn't that weird a scale, either. You're going to remember
| more or less arbitrary values for certain things anyway (too
| hot to be comfortably outside, cold enough to need a jacket,
| cold enough to need gloves, cold enough to need multiple
| layers, etc.). In that sense, yeah, Kelvin would be
| impractical, as would be a theoretical temperature scale that
| compressed most human-relevant temperatures between 0 and 2
| or so. But that's not the case and degrees Celsius is
| perfectly viable for everyday use, as is (I imagine and you
| say) degrees Fahrenheit.
| reacweb wrote:
| Temperature near 0degC is very important when we travel
| (meteo, ...). Temperature near 100degC is important when we
| cook (eggs, pasta, rice).
|
| We can leave hands in water at 50degC. Above, it slightly
| start to cause burns.
|
| This is a range that make a lot of sense IMHO.
| bmitc wrote:
| 0 degrees C is certainly nice for freezing, but Celsius
| loses its usefulness, in my opinion, at the upper ranges.
| Fahrenheit is okay though, because 32 isn't that hard of a
| number and 0 degrees F is a big milestone because it's a
| big (i.e., dangerous) milestone in outside temperatures.
|
| > Temperature near 100degC is important when we cook (eggs,
| pasta, rice).
|
| When does that matter on the scale being used? Someone else
| mentioned this, but I've never known anyone to be taking
| direct measurements of these things when cooking aside from
| baking. It's pretty clear when water is boiling.
|
| > We can leave hands in water at 50degC. Above, it slightly
| start to cause burns.
|
| When has that been useful and dependent upon a temperature
| measurement (and thus a temperature scale)?
| Symbiote wrote:
| You are putting far too much weight in arbitrary numbers,
| probably due to personal familiarity.
|
| 0degF is a big milestone? I'll claim 1degF should be the
| milestone instead, or -5.4degF, or 2.33333degF.
|
| 15degC or 12degC or something is an important temperature
| if you live in the tropics without a heating system.
| wartijn_ wrote:
| > You are putting far too much weight in arbitrary
| numbers, probably due to personal familiarity
|
| bmitc reacted to the comment that said "Temperature near
| 100degC is important when we cook (eggs, pasta, rice)."
| By asking when that info is important. They are not the
| one here that put weight in arbitrary numbers, at least
| in that last comment.
| reacweb wrote:
| For the tea preparation, we shall use hot water below
| 100degC. french site:
| https://www.fauchon.com/fr/mag/conseils/quelle-
| temperature-d...
| pluijzer wrote:
| Or just; don't use boiling water.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I don't feel like either Celsius or Fahrenheit are any
| more natural than the other in most contexts. It just
| comes down to what you're used to. They're both
| relatively arbitrary.
|
| I'm not sure why 0f is a big dangerous milestone in
| outdoor temperature. Is -18c/-1f really that different to
| -17c/1f? If anything, there's a much stronger argument
| that 0c is the dangerous milestone because that's when
| you get ice.
|
| Really the only temperatures I care about on a day to day
| basis are like, freezing temperature (0c/32f), room
| temperature (20c/70f-ish) and various benchmark outdoor
| temperatures, like 30c/90f being hot and 40c/100f being
| potentially dangerous. You can +- a few C either way on
| any of those (except freezing) and it doesn't really make
| a difference. Cooking, even baking, is usually fine
| within around 10c. Sous vide is apparently a lot more
| sensitive but I've never done that.
|
| Very occasionally I deal with something something like a
| kettle thermostat or boiler thermostat, where I might
| choose something like 100c/212f or 50c/120f respectively.
| I also use an IR thermometer for cooking pancakes, pizza
| and monitoring my wood stove - but neither Farenheit or
| Celcius are any more useful in that context.
| bmitc wrote:
| I agree with all that for the most part. Having used
| Celsius at various times, I still feel Fahrenheit is
| better for outdoor temperatures because of the range, but
| yea, there's undeniably a bias there no matter how much I
| think I reason about it.
|
| I think the idea that it is indeed relatively arbitrary
| probably summarizes a more accurate reaction to the
| comment I originally replied to.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Nope. Have you _ever_ used a thermometer to measure the
| temperature of water for boiling pasta and rice? Ask
| yourself why.
| lewisflude wrote:
| Can you give an example of a non-metric unit that is more
| practical than it's metric counterpart outside of
| familiarity?
| citrin_ru wrote:
| Freezing point being 0degC is handy because it is important
| to know when outdoor temperature crosses this point for
| multiple reasons - water is too common and important
| substance to ignore its properties. In Fahrenheit freezing
| point is a hard to remember value (for someone who used to
| Celsius).
|
| I see nothing special about -17.8degC +37.78degC range except
| that 37.78degC is very hot. But why 37.78 and not some other
| value? It is arbitrary. And -17.8degC is even more arbitrary
| - it is not the coldest weather in many northern regions.
| tuyiown wrote:
| > But they usually directly map to average human experience.
| > they don't understand anything about non-metric units or
| their practicality.
|
| They don't see it the same way that you don't see that the
| units are totally irrelevant, the brain just have to form
| habits around the relation between the numbers and the world,
| but as soon as there are consistant and predictable, the
| extra effort or lack of doesn't change much about their
| practicality. The habits are formed early, and doesn't
| require any extra work once set.
|
| Having physical relationships between units without having to
| remembering ratios can be handy time to times, and for your
| entire life.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Not this crap again.
|
| Fahrenheit maps to your human experience because it's what
| you grew up with.
|
| To me, Celsius maps to my human experience, because it's what
| I grew up with.
|
| That's it. That's all it is, and that's the only reason you
| think it maps better.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| No. Fahrenheit really is better than Celsius regardless of
| your reluctance to admit it.
|
| 1. 0 Fahrenheit is close to the typical minimum
| temperature, and 100 close to the typical maximum
| temperature, which can be tolerated by humans. Celsius 0
| and 100 aren't even remotely close to this: it's
| surprisingly awful.
|
| 2. Fahrenheit has nearly twice the integer resolution of
| Celsius. This is particularly helpful in describing body
| temperature.
|
| 3. Celsius seems like it'd be useful in cooking but it is
| not really. Sure, 0 and 100 describe the boiling point and
| freezing points of water -- in Paris only -- but these are
| phase changes in water. Nobody says "now hold the
| temperature at 100C", because water naturally fixes to 100C
| the entire time it is undergoing its phase change. You
| don't need to measure it. And Fahrenheit's higher
| resolution is again very helpful.
|
| 4. Scientists don't use Celsius or Fahrenheit. They use
| Kelvin. Both Celsius and Fahrenheit convert to Kelvin with
| a linear transformation.
| Bakary wrote:
| I have no problem believing that Americans find the
| Fahrenheit system intuitive, but you are failing to see
| that for metric users, Celsius is 100% intuitive. I know
| exactly what sort of clothes to wear for each gradation
| (assuming it's not something insane like -60C in which
| case I'm staying home anyway), whereas I genuinely cannot
| do the same calculus with just Fahrenheit, even taking
| into account the 0-100 concept of Fahrenheit, which is in
| itself busted in various regions from Canada to Saudi
| Arabia. I have to constantly remind myself of what
| Fahrenheit means, because I never grew up with it.
|
| This is a theory of mind issue.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > for metric users, Celsius is 100% intuitive.
|
| For metric users, Celsius is 100% _familiar_. _Intuitive_
| means that there are a bunch of hints that can give you
| an idea of values that you don 't know. The fact that
| 0deg Fahrenheit is about as cold as you can easily stand
| and 100deg Fahrenheit is about as hot as you can easily
| stand is something that gives you an intuition: if it's
| as hot as I can stand, it's about 100deg, if it's as cold
| as I can possibly stand, it's about 0deg. I can figure
| out intermediate values through converting my _feelings_
| into a percentage.
|
| You can of course do that with Celsius too, but Celsius
| hasn't been built around a range of human feeling, it's
| been built around the phase changes of water. You just
| have to remember the human comfort range in Celsius, do
| all the same calculations as above, multiply the result
| by the difference between your low human range and your
| high human range, then add that to your low human range
| to get an answer. There's no help, and it might as well
| be arbitrary.
| ithinkso wrote:
| > 4. Scientists don't use Celsius or Fahrenheit. They use
| Kelvin. Both Celsius and Fahrenheit convert to Kelvin
| with a linear transformation.
|
| But the slope of the Celsius<->Kelvin is 1.
| ajuc wrote:
| Celcius is more useful in weather forecasting, because
| for a lot of people it's important to know whether the
| water outdoors will be frozen or liquid. Example - it's
| useful to know if there will be ice on road and it's
| useful to know if the plants outside will die due to
| ground freeze at night. Giving the temperature in C
| answers both questions automatically.
|
| "Typical" maximum and minimum temperature as limits are
| meaningless, different places have significantly
| different minimum and maximum temperatures.
|
| The resolution might be better for body temperature (I
| have my doubts, we measure to decimal point in C), but
| certainly not for cooking. Nobody needs to know the
| difference between 200 and 201 F in cooking.
|
| > Both Celsius and Fahrenheit convert to Kelvin with a
| linear transformation.
|
| C doesn't need multiplication tho.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| You just proved my point by missing it, I'm impressed.
|
| > Fahrenheit has nearly twice the integer resolution of
| Celsius. This is particularly helpful in describing body
| temperature.
|
| Yet medical practitioners insist on using Celsius in the
| most of the world, what fools!
|
| > 0 Fahrenheit is close to the typical minimum
| temperature, and 100 close to the typical maximum
| temperature, which can be tolerated by humans. Celsius 0
| and 100 aren't even remotely close to this: it's
| surprisingly awful.
|
| I am very rarely exposed to 0 F, in fact, I actively go
| out of my way to avoid it by seeking shelter during
| blizzards while on mountain tops.
|
| You're more likely to encounter 0 F in a continental
| country, but in my temperate maritime climate country, a
| populated locale hitting -10 C / 14 F is big news, and
| only rarely would it get to -4 C / 25 F where I live. In
| other words, I have very little use case for 0 - 32 F.
|
| So its intuitiveness to you, is opaqueness to me. Because
| you grew up with Fahrenheit, and I grew up with Celsius.
|
| Scientists do use Celsius and Fahrenheit sometimes,
| unless your definition of scientist excludes everyone who
| isn't a chemist or physicist.
|
| TL;DR - you prefer Fahrenheit because you think in it. I
| prefer Celsius because I think in it.
| wizofaus wrote:
| What on earth is "the typical minimum temperature that
| can be tolerated by humans" though? There are people who
| seem fine living in parts of the world where it's
| regularly -30C (somewhat less than 0F), and many of us
| that would find anything much less than 0C (32F!)
| regularly to be pretty much intolerable. Resolution is an
| issue for measuring fever, so we use a single decimal
| point (36.8 is normal, 37.1 is elevated etc.). Other than
| that it just never comes up. Agreed that 100C being the
| boiling point of water isn't that useful for setting oven
| temperature etc., but at least you know something that's
| 100C is going to be as hot to touch as putting your hand
| under scolding water (and likewise 0C is going to be as
| cold as ice. You're willing to sacrifice that?). Kelvin
| is far easier to mentally convert to Celsius than
| Fahrenheit, and at any rate Celsius is still used
| extensively by biologists, behavioral scientists etc.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > many of us that would find anything much less than 0C
| (32F!) regularly to be pretty much intolerable.
|
| Really? Barely long sleeve weather.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Celsius is better for cooking, the Fahrenheit scale is better
| for hot weather, for colder weather, I prefer Celsius, around
| 0degC means water is freezing, so, snow, ice, etc...
|
| Feet or inches are, I think, a bit more human friendly than
| meters, but only when used by themselves, that factor of 12
| is just weird in a base 10 system. I know that the argument
| is that you can divide by 3 and 4 easily, but when it
| matters, metric countries simply make standard sizes a
| multiple of 12 (ex:120mm).
|
| For volumes and weights, I find absolutely no redeeming
| feature to the imperial / US customary system. The kilogram
| is a perfectly fine unit, so is the liter, and that both are
| the same when we are weighing water is a very useful
| property. Because many things are around the density of
| water, you know that most things that fits in a 1L bottle
| weight around a kg, and you can often measure volumes with a
| scale without conversion.
|
| Metric is not the most practical for every single situation,
| but it is more practical when used as a whole, that is, when
| you need to deal with with several quantities at the same
| time (ex: masses and lengths). And there are everyday
| situation where it is simply better in my opinion, like
| cooking.
| bmitc wrote:
| About as reasonable a take as you can get.
|
| Can you elaborate on the cooking though? I've seen that
| mentioned here a couple of times, and I'm not sure I
| follow. I'm from a Fahrenheit country and my wife from a
| Celsius country, and it's never caused any issues or
| confusion in the kitchen. But maybe you mean also for the
| volumetric measurements as well (or primarily)?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| It is not about confusion, it is about convenience. I
| like the idea that water boils at 100degC since it is
| maybe the most important temperature in cooking. I like
| the fact that I can measure 500mL of water on a scale as
| 500g (and other liquids with a small error). Small
| details that make it more convenient in metric.
|
| But there is something else, and I am asking you the
| question. Since you and your wife live in countries with
| different unit systems, isn't problem when doing each
| others recipes?
|
| I mean I live in Europe, and if the recipe calls for 4
| ounces of butter, I don't have a 4 ounces stick of
| butter, I have a 125g stick, which is not exactly that. A
| quart of milk is not exactly the liter I have. And my
| oven doesn't do 350degF, it does 180degC which is not
| exactly the same. In the end, I will have to adjust the
| recipe to my standards, and things may be lost (or
| gained) in translation, but it won't be the same.
| Symbiote wrote:
| For what it's worth, if looking for an English recipe I
| just add "UK" to my search to avoid American
| measurements. I find British recipes are also less likely
| to require some processed American ingredient unavailable
| in the EU. ("Add the miracle whip," what?)
| gs17 wrote:
| > Celsius is better for cooking
|
| As far as I'm aware, there's no winner for cooking. I've
| never seen a recipe that required temperature more than as
| a value that could be provided in any units as long as you
| have equipment in those units (i.e. I'm not doing math with
| them). Putting "400degF" or "200degC" or "475 K" or some
| arbitrary "oven level 5" into my oven shouldn't really
| change how it comes out.
|
| On the stovetop, I've never had an instruction with a
| temperature attached besides "interior temperature must
| reach X" or keeping something at a near-boiling
| temperature, which I've never needed a thermometer for, and
| 90% of the time I'm improvising without caring what the
| temperature is outside of "hot enough to cook the way I
| want but not too hot".
|
| Sous-vide? It needs the temperature within a tight range,
| but the scale attached to the numbers doesn't matter as
| long as it's the one my thermometer uses. Double boiler?
| Doesn't even need you to use a thermometer to keep the
| temperature right. Give me a kitchen with everything in
| unpronouncible alien temperature units and I'd do just
| fine.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > Celsius is better for cooking
|
| Not really. Celsius maps to the boiling and freezing points
| of water in Paris. Live in Denver and you're screwed. And
| -- this is important -- nobody measures the freezing points
| and boiling points of water, because during its phase
| changes water holds to that temperature automatically.
|
| Fahrenheit is also twice the resolution of Celsius. This is
| highly advantageoous for body temperature, medicine,
| cooking, and other functions. Celsius's integer resolution
| is horrible.
| ajuc wrote:
| You give temperatures for cooking with 5 C resolution
| anyway, why would you need more than 0.5 C resolution?
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Okay, highly advantageous for body temperature and
| medicine, only marginally advantageous for cooking.
| ajuc wrote:
| Unnecessary precision is a disadvantage. That's why speed
| limits are 60 mph not 316800 feet per hour.
| Bakary wrote:
| I think this is a theory of mind issue. You are used to
| Fahrenheit intuition and living in the US, so people arguing
| against your perception seem to be bikeshedding or being
| willfully obtuse/superior.
|
| I can perhaps relate my subjective experience to better
| explain what's going on. I grew up with Celsius temperatures,
| so temperatures like 27C or -5C tell me exactly what I should
| wear when going outside. For Fahrenheit, even though we are
| told that it maps to human experience, I have to consciously
| try to remember what these 10F, 20F temperatures mean and
| often forget. The intuition just isn't there at all.
|
| For height, I'm used to the metric system, but I can also
| understand the imperial system in that specific area because
| of seeing so many discussions about it over the years.
|
| I actually learned to cook while in an Imperial zone, and now
| I am more used to certain temperatures in F.
|
| The reason people find it shocking, is that we are
| essentially forced to deal against our will with Imperial
| measurements, because the US is a powerful country. The
| annoyance has more to do with the sensation of being trapped
| by another culture and having to adapt to their way of life
| rather than the reverse.
| BucketsMcG wrote:
| Maybe _your_ experience maps to the 0-100 Fahrenheit scale,
| but mine certainly doesn 't. Temperatures where I'm from are
| typically 5-25C, 0-30C at the extremes. So 41-77, or 32-86.
| So how's Fahrenheit a more useful scale there? And what if
| you're from, I don't know, Bangkok? The temperature range
| there is, generously, 80-95F.
|
| There are _endless_ examples of where this argument doesn 't
| stand up because the "averafe==ge human experience" is
| nothing like yours. But of course, it's more or less
| applicable in most of the US, so you imagine it's universal.
| Whereas, for the rest of us, 0 is cold, 10 is cool, 20 is
| warm, 30 is hot, and extrapolate from there. That's simple
| and relatable enough for me.
| mojuba wrote:
| Another fun fact: meter was originally defined as a length of a
| pendulum whose half-period is one second.
|
| But wait for it. If you look at the pendulum formula [1] you
| will realize that g [?] p^2 (i.e. 3.14^2 roughly equals 9.8) is
| not a coincidence, it's a consequence of the original
| definition of the meter!
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=pendulum+formula
| talideon wrote:
| That isn't correct. The pendulum definition was actually
| something called a "universal toise". Burattini suggested
| defining a unit called the metre based off of this, but it
| was found to be unworkable because it's not the same
| everywhere. A toise is ~1.949m.
|
| The metre was _actually_ originally defined in 1793 as one
| ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North
| Pole. Obviously, that ended up having its own issues, hence
| the subsequent refinements until we settled on using the
| speed of light in a vacuum as the basis for it.
| mojuba wrote:
| Nothing in what I said is incorrect. The original
| scientific definition of the meter is via a pendulum
| (1645), then it was refined via toises multiple times, and
| today it's defined via speed of light.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metre
| irishsultan wrote:
| No, that's not correct, that unit while intended to be a
| universal measure of distance never was called a meter
| (the "inventor" wanted to call it "toise universalle"),
| all that comes from the wikipedia page you linked to, so
| the only remaining question is whether you can call it
| the "original definition".
|
| I don't think you can call it the original definition,
| because (a) that definition never got any universal
| acceptance (not even among scientists), (b) didn't work
| (as it gave different results on different locations) and
| (c) wasn't particularly close in value to the current
| definition.
| mojuba wrote:
| I understand, but the fun fact I mentioned, that the
| relation between pi and g is not accidental, stems from
| the earlier attempt to define the meter via a pendulum.
| Yes it was refined later many times, and it's why the
| relation between pi and g is not precise.
| talideon wrote:
| Except it has little to do with the metre other than
| being an earlier attempt at an objective measurement.
| irrational wrote:
| Not worth getting worked up over. We will all be dead long
| before the USA widely uses the metric system.
| PostOnce wrote:
| Is it shocking that the number of hours in a day or months in a
| year is not divisible by 10?
|
| Doesn't it make sense for some things to divide by 3 and 4,
| like a year, so that a season is 3 months long, instead of 2.5
| months long (as in the old 10-month year system, ending in
| _Dec_ ember)?
|
| Does it not make sense to use a human scale for certain things,
| like outdoor weather (as opposed to say, temperatures inside of
| machinery):
|
| In Fahrenheit: 0: very cold to people; 100: very hot to people.
|
| In Celsius: 0: not that cold; 100: I died 50 degrees ago.
|
| The metric system seems to me to be forced onto things where it
| does not fit, when in fact it's fine to use more than one
| system when contextually appropriate.
|
| After all, none of us think it weird to use bases 2, 10, or 16
| for different things on our computers.
| gbin wrote:
| Oh but that was part of the original plan!!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
|
| 10 months per year, 10 days per week.
| gjulianm wrote:
| I've seen the temperature argument and it never has made
| sense to me. What does "very cold" and "very hot" mean? For
| me living in Spain, 40o is "very hot", but I've seen people
| living in northern countries complaining about 30o. Viceversa
| with "cold".
|
| The only reason Fahrenheit looks like "a human scale" is
| because you're used to it. At least Celsius has clear
| reference points (everybody knows how cold is "freezing
| water" and how hot is "boiling water").
|
| > Doesn't it make sense for some things to divide by 3 and 4,
| like a year, so that a season is 3 months long, instead of
| 2.5 months long (as in the old 10-month year system, ending
| in December)?
|
| Programmers all around the world would first hate you for
| changing things, and then love you for making a consistent
| dating system.
|
| But, seriously now, dates are a bit of a difficult system to
| change. You want to be able to refer to past dates without
| too much confusion, and also there are outside restrictions
| such as the length of a year compared to a day (not many
| integer divisors of 365 days).
| tsm wrote:
| I moved from a Fahrenheit country to a Celsius country, and
| let me tell you that knowing 0deg was freezing and 100deg
| was boiling did not help me decided whether I should put on
| a jacket when it's 17deg outside.
|
| (I now know how to interpret Celsius, but it involved
| memorising certain fixed points. The "30 is hot, 20 is
| nice, 10 is cold, 0 is ice" rhyme is a good one.)
| gjulianm wrote:
| And if I moved to a Fahrenheit country I wouldn't know
| what to wear when it's 60 degrees. That's the point, that
| both scales need some "getting used to". Fahrenheit is no
| more natural than Celsius in that regard, and also has
| the issue of not having reference points.
| xxs wrote:
| 0F is the brine freezing point. The 100 is better -
| originally thought as human body temperature, now it's a
| mild fever.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Then again 17 is pretty close to temperature you are
| entirely unsure if you use jacket or not. On other hand
| it is pretty pleasant summer temperature. On other if it
| is windy it might not be so nice.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| As opposed to what? I put on a jacket at 19degC. That's
| 66.2 Fahrenheit. How does it help?
| tsm wrote:
| My point is that everyone saying "Celsius is so easy,
| look at how logical it is!" are missing the point that
| you still have to memorize a bunch of temperatures.
| Nobody in their right mind is going to say "Well, it's
| 20% of the way between water freezing and boiling, so
| I'll wear long sleeves but no jacket today".
| bearmode wrote:
| Both celsius and fahrenheit are completely arbitrary,
| just use whichever one everyone around you is using and
| you'll be alright. You'll internalise the scale
| eventually.
|
| It's the one part of the metric system that isn't
| innately superior to imperial/customary
| happymellon wrote:
| > I now know how to interpret Celsius, but it involved
| memorising certain fixed points
|
| But that's literally the argument given for Fahrenheit.
| bmitc wrote:
| No really. The "comfortability" points are basically
| separated by 10 degrees F, with only 32 degrees F being
| the special one.
| tsm wrote:
| My point is that everyone saying "Celsius is so easy,
| look at how logical it is!" are missing the point that
| you _still_ have to memorize a bunch of temperatures.
| Nobody in their right mind is going to say "Well, it's
| 20% of the way between water freezing and boiling, so
| I'll wear long sleeves but no jacket today".
| happymellon wrote:
| So you agree that the argument for it "feeling more
| natural" is actually, "I've already memorised a number"?
| xxs wrote:
| Celsius does the same thing but with 5 cadence; what you
| explain is a habit - 70 Frankenstein being 21 science is
| just as helpful.
|
| For me how it works - 0 is freezing point, 36 is body
| temperature (you learn that around 4-5y of age), and it's
| imprinted heavily. Half your body temp is about to begin
| feeling cold (in general). Picked body temp as it is 100F
| (originally 100F was meant to be the body temperature)
| PostOnce wrote:
| Fahrenheit (the man) was himself a physicist... he
| invented the mercury thermometer. That's pretty
| scientific.
|
| So calling it "Frankenstein and Science" is a little
| silly, especially when we have an absolute scientific
| scale (Kelvin).
|
| Actually, nobody complains that we use both Celsius and
| Kelvin, so what problem is there with a third scale for
| people, if the former two are for industry and science
| respectively?
| xxs wrote:
| >So calling it "Frankenstein and Science" is a little
| silly, especially when we have an absolute scientific
| scale (Kelvin).
|
| That was unnecessary, an obvious joke about both, and how
| people feel about them, etc. C and K scale the same way,
| so C is just an offset K (or vise versa). Both C and F
| are arbitrary, of course - zero (as developer) being the
| phase change of the water does make more sense to me;
| again arbitrary.
| [deleted]
| xxs wrote:
| very hot - about 35.5C or so, when you cannot dissipate
| heat with sweating. 30C is just uncomfortable but totally
| fine.
|
| Also an year is not even 365days.
| gjulianm wrote:
| > very hot - about 35.5C or so, when you cannot dissipate
| heat with sweating. 30C is just uncomfortable but totally
| fine.
|
| That's not only subjective but also depends on humidity.
| 34o with high humidity can feel far hotter than 38o in
| dry weather.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Celcius 0 in weather is pretty handy. If it is at that or
| below I know that I should be aware that it might be slippery
| so drive more carefully and check where I put my foot. Much
| below that those things aren't that big issue but better wear
| more. And above that somewhat I can survive outside okay.
| PostOnce wrote:
| I will admit celsius 0 is useful for farming (will there be
| a bud-killing frost?), but I have no issue with the use of
| celsius in industry; there are merits for each system, and
| we don't need to eliminate one to get the benefit of the
| other. We can use each in their context, like we do with
| many other things.
| xxs wrote:
| 0C is mostly useful on the road, knowing when it becomes
| slippery - around 3-4C as ice can form above 0 as well
| prmoustache wrote:
| > In Fahrenheit: 0: very cold to people; 100: very hot to
| people. > > In Celsius: 0: not that cold; 100: I died 50
| degrees ago.
|
| Celsius 0 and below, warning there could be ice on the road.
|
| Hot/cold is too subjective. My relation to heat/cold was not
| the same when I was living in north of France, Swiss alps and
| now in south of Spain.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| September to December contain the numbers 7 to 10 not because
| the roman year was 10 months long, but because they started
| counting in March instead of January. That's also why
| February is a bit shorter: They ran out of days in the last
| month of the year.
| t_mann wrote:
| > Doesn't it make sense for some things to divide by 3 and 4,
| like a year, so that a season is 3 months long, instead of
| 2.5 months long (as in the old 10-month year system, ending
| in December)?
|
| The metric system also uses twelve months per year, so what
| is your point?
|
| > Does it not make sense to use a human scale for certain
| things, like outdoor weather (as opposed to say, temperatures
| inside of machinery):
|
| Yes, Fahrenheit works 'better' than Celsuis for describing
| weather temperatures. But it does arguably worse at pretty
| much everything else, including other everyday occurrences
| like cooking or washing clothes.
|
| As an aside, 12 would arguably be the better base for an
| everyday number system, but we are where we are (and contrary
| to what's commonly claimed, the imperial system isn't derived
| from base 12 either - 12 is used in a few places, but most
| proportions are historically grown and fairly random).
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| In Celcius, 0 water freezes, 100 water boils. Very convenient
| for weather and cooking. For the rest, what is hot weather or
| cold weather is very subjective, so I don't really see any
| use to define a scale on the base of that.
| bmitc wrote:
| Do people actually directly measure boiling water? I've
| never seen that. It's a self-apparent phenomenon. I've
| never heard of anyone measuring anything while cooking
| where it matters which temperature scale they're using.
| jenscow wrote:
| The metric system is based mostly on water. 1 kg = 1
| litre = 1000 cm3
| glandium wrote:
| For people serious about their tea, measuring 70, 80 or
| 90 Celsius is vital.
| mongol wrote:
| It is really useful for calibration. Stick a thermometer
| in there and you can tell how accurate it is.
| bmitc wrote:
| Calibration of what? The thermometer? When do you need to
| calibrate a thermometer at the temperature of boiling
| water and how does the temperature scale affect that in
| any way?
| Ekaros wrote:
| The fact that calibration points at sea level of celsius
| are very easy to produce. Just need some ice and then
| some boiling water. And I can't even get my hands on pure
| ammonium chloride. Just some mixed stuff.
| mongol wrote:
| Yes, calibration of the thermometer. For example with
| sous vide cooking, it can be useful to know how accurate
| your equipment is since recipes are often expressed in
| precise temperatures.
| bmitc wrote:
| Thanks for the example, but I'm still not sure what that
| has to do with the scale since you only care about a
| single number in that case.
|
| I need to look up sous vide cooking. I've never heard of
| it before. Seems pretty interesting.
| cauefcr wrote:
| You need at least two points to determine the slope of
| the thermometer, 0 and 100 as freezing and boiling point
| of water makes that reproducible.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Unless you live at altitude 0, I wouldn't do that if I
| were you.
|
| Celsius and Fahrenheit don't make much difference. That's
| the only part of the imperial system which is not
| incredibly inferior to metric.
| xxs wrote:
| well the boiling point depends on the elevation
| (pressure), so that tells you nothing at all.
| smusamashah wrote:
| How does this size have anything to do with the metric system,
| it could have been any units of length with same ratio.
| treffer wrote:
| From the article: A0 is designed to be as close to 1m2 as you
| can get with whole mm side lengths.
|
| As such A1 is 1/2 m2, A2 is 1/4 m2, A3 1/8 m2, A4 is 1/16 m2.
|
| I would call this tied to the metrics system. It never
| occurred to me that I could approximate odd 1m2 areas with 16
| sheets of A4... I found this enlightening from the original
| article. TIL.
| Someone wrote:
| > The fact that a liter of water has a relation with the size
| of the paper we use is just poetry.
|
| It's not that there is a relation, it's that it's simple. If
| you put 288/187 inch of water on a standard letter paper, you
| get exactly one cubic foot of water, but I wouldn't say "The
| fact that a cubic foot of water has a relation with the size of
| the paper we use is just poetry".
|
| It also is a happy coincidence that the idea "if we cut a page
| in half, the two parts should have the same proportions" leads
| to usable paper sizes. If it weren't, we wouldn't have this
| system.
|
| And has this ever been tried for 3D, say in storage boxes? The
| proportions of a box would be about 1 : 5/4 : 25/16. That's a
| bit cube-ish, but doesn't look unusable to me.
| poorlyknit wrote:
| There's these storage boxes whose size is defined by the
| dimensions of an EUR-pallet [1]:
| https://euronormbehaelter.com/faq/arten-euronormbehaelter/.
| Each smaller container divides some dimension by 2. However,
| I don't think they follow the golden ratio at all.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUR-pallet
| danielbln wrote:
| The three holdouts being the US, Myanmar and Liberia:
| https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/18300.jpeg
| defrost wrote:
| The irony there being that the US was in fact one of the
| first early adopters of the metric system, metric being _the_
| official weights and measure system within the USofA and the
| US foot being literally defined in terms of the underlying
| base metre.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| All imperial units have now been redefined in terms of
| metric.
| vidarh wrote:
| Not just adopter: The US was one of the original 17
| signatories of the Metre Convention in 1875.
| smcl wrote:
| It's worth remembering that the UK can almost be counted in
| that group to some extent - road distance and speed as well
| as human height and weight are normally defined in imperial
| measurements. Additionally the Conservatives have proposed
| return to imperial measurements (though just as a pretty
| transparent appeal to the "back in my day..." crowd)
| tsm wrote:
| I used letter-sized paper when I was a kid in Honduras, and
| if memory serves a number of people use US units.
| Nokinside wrote:
| According to US law SI has been the preferred system of
| weights and measures for US trade and commerce". The
| transition was not mandatory, so nothing happened.
| Semaphor wrote:
| It's like how they made yyyy-MM-dd the law in Germany for
| official communications. No one cared, so they changed it
| to make it optional when used within Germany or when there
| is no ambiguity a few years later :D
| Ma8ee wrote:
| We have been using it in Sweden as long as I can
| remember.
| ygra wrote:
| DIN 5008 should be required reading for anyone ;-)
|
| I do care, though, and use ISO 8601 almost exclusively in
| writing. And I do know a few others. Perhaps things will
| change eventually.
| Semaphor wrote:
| By "no one", I meant those that were supposed to use it:
| Government officials ;) I personally use it as well, and
| so does my workplace, surprisingly.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Nothing happened because the US decided to elect Reagan and
| the plan was effectively shelved.
| nikanj wrote:
| Don't pretend UK and Canada are metric.
| bearmode wrote:
| There are very few imperial holdovers left in the UK,
| outside of colloquial use.
|
| Distance on road signs, car speed, engine fuel efficiency,
| beer pints (though I don't mind this since it means our
| average drink is larger, easier to say than 568ml as well),
| and that's it as far as I can recall
| nikanj wrote:
| My UK friends never talk in metric. They weigh 16 stones
| and are 6 feet 4 inches. The next town over is about 25
| miles, etc.
| bearmode wrote:
| Yeah, I said outside of colloquial use. People still use
| it colloquially because it's what they know, but they'll
| also know metric.
| tankenmate wrote:
| The UK is far closer to metric and will be even more so
| shortly, for anyone unaware most kids in the UK aren't even
| taught imperial units at school any more. There really are
| only vestigial units left; feet / inches for human height
| (but not for buildings for example), pints for liquids that
| are drunk (but not for hot water tanks for example), stone
| for human weight (but not for boxed items), etc. And for
| places like N. Ireland it's even less so, milk is sold in
| litres, etc because of the proximity to (Ro) Ireland (which
| now has its speed limits in km/h for example).
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Milk is sold in litres in the UK, it's really only beer
| that's sold in pints.
| avvt4avaw wrote:
| The most common sizes for milk to be sold in are 1.136
| litres and 2.272 litres (i.e. 2 pints and 4 pints)
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Where is that sold? I've never seen anything other than
| 500ml, 1l, and 2l.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Normal supermarkets.
|
| If you only buy milk in multiples of 500mL, you're buying
| a luxury brand or from a corner shop -- both situations
| use the slightly smaller (vs 568mL) size to make the
| price seem lower.
|
| You can see at Tesco [1] that Yeo Valley, Arla,
| Cravendale, Finest, Tesco Filtered are all 1 or 2 litres.
| "Normal" milk is 2 or 4 pints.
|
| (The EU used to have regulations around this sort of
| thing, but I think they've unfortunately been repealed
| for most products. It's why bread was only sold in
| multiples of 400g -- it meant the merchant couldn't
| discreetly reduce the size of some/all products.)
|
| [1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/fresh-
| food/milk-b...
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Asda only has it in 500ml and 1l containers. I couldn't
| be arsed walking to Tesco, and the nearest Morrisons or
| Sainsburys is a 20-minute drive away.
|
| The dairy that delivers here does 500ml, 1l, and 2l, as
| does the one I bought milk from before I moved, and the
| one before I moved the time before that.
| Symbiote wrote:
| https://groceries.asda.com/aisle/chilled-food/milk-
| butter-cr...
|
| The normal milk is all in pints.
| joshcoleuk wrote:
| This is true, I have friends 10 years younger than me who
| were never taught imperial units at school. These people
| are in their early 20s now, give it another decade or so
| and they'll start to be the people making decisions.
| We'll finally be able to rid ourselves of the anachronism
| of imperial measurements.
| odiroot wrote:
| Unfortunately UK still regularly mixes both systems. Plus
| pints and stone.
| joshcoleuk wrote:
| At senior school in the early 2000s, I was taught both
| metric and imperial and how to convert between them. But I
| have some friends who are 10 years younger than me (I'm 32,
| they're 22) who were never taught imperial at school.
| Neither knew what a 'yard' was.. probably because neither
| of them drive. At least things are changing!
| geowwy wrote:
| Almost everywhere on earth mixes metric with some other
| system.
|
| Some places even mix metric, imperial, and some traditional
| pre-imperial system.
| [deleted]
| ktzar wrote:
| That's not the case in the European and Southamerican
| countries I've visited or have acquaintances in. What
| countries do you have in mind? I'm quite interested.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Beyond all edge cases mentioned by others (I add the
| bicycle frame size to the list) what is the most shocking
| for me having imperical units in international air
| traffic! Feets and pounds and gallons (as far as I know)
| mixed with SI units. One notable accident is the Gimli
| Glider where miscommunication occurred in fuel quantity
| calculations and the airplane took off with very little
| fuel running out mid air (excellent pilots and great
| story eventually).
|
| Also naval folks are stubborn too. Own miles, knots as
| speed, craaazy! : )
| FreeFull wrote:
| The only thing I can think of is that screen diagonals
| are still measured in inches. Ignoring that, a lot of
| countries are definitely fully metric with regards to the
| basic length/weight/time measures
| mung wrote:
| I'd like to know if any nation actually uses something
| other than dpi in printing.
| MayeulC wrote:
| DPI is one of my pet peeves, together with points. Why
| not use mm for font size?
|
| Instead of DPI, one could use um per px, or px per (c)m
| if you want something easier to work with at very high
| DPI.
|
| I know what DPI and points are, but just because I know a
| few values and can say "that one's large", "this one is
| small", with no idea how much they act iually measure.
| With other units I could approximate the viewing distance
| much better.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > DPI is one of my pet peeves, together with points. Why
| not use mm for font size?
|
| Easy halving, the same reason why A4 has been extolled.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Defining 1mpt = 0.1mm would be just as good.
|
| Normal text would be 40mpt = 4mm = 11.33pt.
|
| But there are already metric point definitions:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_(typography)
| coldtea wrote:
| Those things come with the prevailing manufacturing
| country, which was the US for printers and such. So
| people just keep it.
| Symbiote wrote:
| You can find occasional uses in many countries. TV
| screens are advertised in inches here in Denmark,
| although I noticed the last one I bought was "34 inch,
| 86.00cm" in the detailed specification -- the inches were
| just marketing. Old water pipes have some sort of pre-
| metric size.
|
| Several countries (e.g. France) use the word pound (
| _livre_ ) to mean 500g, which could confuse visitors into
| thinking something non-metric is being used. I noticed
| that in south America.
| giva wrote:
| Water piping is still specified in inches, at least in
| Italy.
|
| Also in Italy, when dealing with agricolture, forestry,
| and related services, non-SI surface units are still
| commonly used, at leat in the north:
|
| https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pertica_(unit%C3%A0_di_misu
| ra)...
|
| https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giornata_piemontese
|
| https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campo_(unit%C3%A0_di_misura
| )
| Svip wrote:
| No one really does it any more, but "half-pound" (halvt
| pund) in Danish means 250g, which was the common way of
| ordering butter before the supermarkets took over (and
| why butter used[0] to come in packages of 250g).
| Similarly, in Sweden, one mile is 10 km.
|
| [0] These days, and selling butter in 200g packages to
| keep the prices seemingly low.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| > [0] These days, and selling butter in 200g packages to
| keep the prices seemingly low.
|
| And that's why i do my shopping now based on EUR/kg.
| There are some very telling differences between even the
| same manufacturer: last thing i was looking at was gin
| [the drink] EUR per litre. Just a visually minor
| difference in bottle size was a substantial difference in
| a) cost and perceived value and b) cost and actual value.
| williamdclt wrote:
| > Several countries (e.g. France) use the word pound
| (livre) to mean 500g
|
| Note that nobody I know below the age of 70 uses the
| "livre" unit in France. It's something you see pretty
| much only in old recipes
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Cereal production is still expressed in "quintal/hectare"
| with quintal keeping its old meaning of 100 livres but
| using the metric ones so 100kg.
| usrusr wrote:
| Ask a German what their car's power is in kW. It's been
| more than forty years since PS (HP in German) has been
| relegated to merely tolerated, as long as the kW number
| is presented as the primary statement, but people still
| think in horse powers when talking about cars. Perhaps we
| are an outlier in the metrified countries, but I'm not
| convinced, I believe that gp is right.
|
| Other examples are screen sizes: I have no intuition at
| all about how big 5.5" actually are, but I know where in
| the current phone market 5.5" would fall (awesomely non-
| huge!), whereas to my mind, the metric equivalent would
| carry no information at all ("bigger than a stamp,
| smaller than a TV"). And for sensor sizes you even have
| the situation where the imperial number is a "size class"
| with very little relation to actual size, whereas the
| metric number usually describes actual size. Completely
| different numbers. All countries use a combination of
| metric and some other system.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Ask a German what their car's power is in kW.
|
| > Other examples are screen sizes
|
| that's common, but not as units of measure, but as
| marketing.
|
| Same as megapixels in photo cameras.
|
| Nobody measure power in HP, we say "that car has 85 HP"
| only in speech, but when it matters (for example on car
| papers) power is express in KW and screens are _measured_
| in cm that are also written on the package, they are only
| marketed in inches.
|
| You would be correct if people had an idea of how much
| power 1 HP is or the surface of 1 MP camera shot, but
| they don't know, they only know that 16 MP > 12 MP and
| 300 HP > 100 HP, they (we) ignore what it actually means.
|
| It is also perceived completely differently depending on
| context.
|
| A 120HP tractor is not the same thing than a 120HP car or
| a 120HP motorbike.
|
| According to US measures I'm 5'11, which means nothing to
| me, while it's obvious to them, because they actually use
| foot and inches all the time and do math using them.
|
| Also 90F means nothing to me.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Most countries still use inches for wheel sizes, for
| example.
|
| These are basically "sizes" that are imperial by
| tradition/accident more than people using them as
| _measurement_. If I wear size 32 waist jeans is that
| imperial? Maybe. I'm not _measuring_ I'm just using it as
| a known size. Might be inches.
|
| Same for wheels, rifle ammunition, ...
|
| I use inches for TVs/monitors and although I'm as metric
| as they get, I have a 55" TV and my car has 20" rims and
| so on. Everything has cm, kW instead of horsepower etc
| listed _as well_ for a TV of course.
|
| As far as I know only a few countries - presumably
| because of regulation - have switched for absolutely
| everything. Australia is an example of a country where
| you can get a 100cm TV.
| bloak wrote:
| > Same for wheels, rifle ammunition, ...
|
| "But being (as?) this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful
| handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off,
| you've got to ask yourself one question ..."
|
| (Which totally illustrates your point because it's not
| really 0.44 inches.)
|
| On the other hand:
|
| "Seven-six-two millimeter. Full metal jacket."
| alkonaut wrote:
| I doubt 32" jeans are 32 inches either. It's just "a size
| formerly related to inches, now denoted 32 or 32" but not
| really inches". I think imperial remains for a lot of
| these "sizes" which aren't quite the same as "measuring".
| I call my TV 55 in, but if you were to ask me to
| _measure_ it, I 'd call it something in centimeters.
| bloak wrote:
| Yes. An extreme example: "Shoe size in the United
| Kingdom, Ireland, India, Pakistan and South Africa is
| based on the length of the last used to make the shoes,
| measured in barleycorns (1/3 inch) starting from the
| smallest size deemed practical, which is called size
| zero." (Wikipedia)
| lagadu wrote:
| Tyre sizes in Europe are an ungodly mix: 295/30R20 for
| example measures as:
|
| 295mm tyre width, sidewall height is 30% of the width and
| the wheel it fits in is 20 inches (can't recall whether
| it's 20 inch radius or diameter).
| sib wrote:
| Diameter...
|
| (Is there anywhere that _doesn 't_ use this mix of
| measures for tire sizes [tyre syzes]?)
| EE84M3i wrote:
| In Japan, the floor area of _rooms_ are often measured in
| terms of Tatami mats (-Jo). You will see this on floor
| plans when looking at apartments, as well as when buying
| some items like lights or air purifiers that are
| advertised as being for certain sized rooms.
|
| It's actually a pretty convenient unit, as long as you're
| familiar with how large tatami mats are.
|
| Note that this unit isn't used for measuring an entire
| apartment's floor area though, that's done in meters.
|
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatami#Size
| 988747 wrote:
| Tatami mat size is basically a one-person bed - so you
| are measuring rooms in terms of how many people would be
| able to sleep on the floor if spaced evenly :)
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Many/most items that were designed many years ago in
| imperial - tyres etc - are still described in imperial
| units.
|
| But here in Finland (a completely metric country) things
| like televisions are still marketed/sold as 44" etc where
| the cm value could very easily be used.
| vidarh wrote:
| A key distinction tends to be whether a value is mostly
| used for internal comparison.
|
| E.g TV sizes are mainly compared with each other, and so
| the unit used doesn't really matter, and if you want to
| know the external dimensions it'll typically be given in
| metric in countries which uses it.
| N19PEDL2 wrote:
| Imperial units (specifically, feet) are dominant in
| aviation to measure flight altitude. Despite a
| recommendation of ICAO to use SI units since 1979, only
| China, Mongolia and a few former-USSR countries (not
| Russia) use metres to define flight levels. [0]
|
| This leads to two interesting consequences for aircraft
| that perform international flights from/to China: [1]
|
| - they need to be equipped with two altimetry systems;
|
| - they need to perform small climbs or descents when
| entering or leaving Chinese airspace, as metric flight
| levels do not usually match Imperial ones (flight levels
| are defined by round numbers).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_level#Metric_fli
| ght_lev...
|
| [1] https://skybrary.aero/articles/china-reduced-
| vertical-separa...
| azalemeth wrote:
| The main argument for imperial units in aviation I have
| seen relate to the fact that one nautical mile is almost
| exactly one minute of latitude on earth, and one knot is
| one nautical mile per hour, and therefore an aviator who
| may experience a total electrical failure and is left
| with his "six-pack" of unpowered, passive-only
| instruments could navigate with a wristwatch and paper
| chart relatively accurately.
|
| I'm not saying I agree with it, but it is at least
| understandable!
| filmor wrote:
| The nautical mile is a sensible unit for anyone trying to
| navigate with charts (which, in the worst case, could
| happen to pilots). Feet, on the other hand, are nonsense.
| bearmode wrote:
| Not sure what you mean by "plus pints and stone", when
| they're just normal imperial measures?
| azalemeth wrote:
| They are _imperial_ units. The trouble is that US
| Customary and _imperial_ units are often very similar but
| rarely the same. The US pint (and gallon) are different
| to the imperial one; the US pound mass (lb) and UK ones
| became the same after the 1950s, but the "hundredweight"
| or cwt is different between the two - the US 100 weight
| is 100 lb; and in the UK it is naturally...112 lb. Of
| course, both systems are in rare usage in both countries
| (in the US, I understand in some industrial contexts; in
| the UK on some road signs for weak bridges). It is for
| this reason that "ton" is different, because, naturally,
| in both systems there are 20 hundredweight in a ton.
|
| The whole thing is absolutely mad and most efforts to
| standardise the systems historically lead to the adoption
| of the SI unit system for "important" things, as well as
| a few good intentioned bits of legislation, like the
| International Yard and Pound agreement [1] which
| standardised those measures between the US and other
| former imperial users. Don't get me started on the survey
| foot, or the hell that arose when the units of classical
| mechanics, electromagnetism or similar scientific systems
| had to meet imperial or US customary units...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_yard_and_
| pound
| mcv wrote:
| And then there's the mile. Originally comes from the
| Latin for a thousand (mille) paces, and one pace being 5
| foot, so a mile used to be 5000 feet. But now it's a
| beautifully round 5280 feet. How come?
|
| Well, in the middle ages, the furlong was important,
| because it was the standard size for farmers' fields
| (based on how long a furrow an ox could plow without
| resting). But 8 furlongs didn't fit neatly into a mile,
| so to make things easier for everybody, the mile got
| expanded to a nice round 5280 feet, or exactly 8
| furlongs.
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| I always wondered how they got their oxes to need resting
| at exactly the same number of feet ;)
| sgjohnson wrote:
| Why does everyone forget the UK and Canada?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| You mean minimemerica and America's hat?
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| The UK has adopted the metric system for most purposes,
| except for a few high-profile holdouts (speed limits and
| beer measures).
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| Maybe officially but I don't know many people born in the
| UK who would give (when asked) their height in
| centimetres. Weight is a little more even split - using
| kilos is becoming more common but most conversations I
| have with people still use stone. The NHS's BMI
| calculator defaults to feet/inches and stones/pounds
| although you can switch to CM/KG.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| And area. It's not uncommon to see land sold by the acre
| or apartments by the square foot.
| midasuni wrote:
| Rare to see square foot only, but 108 square foot sounds
| bigger than 10 square meters, 2.7 acres sounds bigger
| than 1.1 hectares, so obviously salesmen are going to
| include those numbers.
| digestives wrote:
| Filling up on fuel in litres and then using miles per
| (Imperial) gallon to measure fuel efficiency is
| wonderfully convoluted.
| gmac wrote:
| Indeed. I suspect the driving and oil lobbies are keen to
| keep it that way, to help obscure the cost per unit
| distance and thus keep us all driving as far and burning
| as much gas/petrol/diesel as possible.
| midasuni wrote:
| Miles per litre would be fine, even km per litre, but the
| metric way of measuring flips it over so bigger is worse
| rather than better, so it doesn't catch on
|
| The numbers don't work out too, "litres per 100km". Why
| not millilitres per km (or litres per gigametre)
|
| I drive X miles (or X km), I then fill up with Y litres
| (or Y gallons)
|
| If I put 40 litres in my car and do 16 km per litre
| that's 640km of range, simple calculation of 40x16
|
| If I need to travel 260km at 20km/litre I need to but
| 260/20 litres or about 13 litres.
|
| If I put 40 litres in my 3.6 litre per 100 km my range is
| 40/3.6 = 11 x 100 = 1100km.
|
| If I need to do 260km at 3.6l/100km I need to do 260/100
| = 2.6, times 3.6 = 9 litres.
|
| With the "metric" way you need to do two calculations.
|
| if you insist on using volume per length, I'd personally
| prefer 36ml/km, then I know I need 36x260 ml of fuel to
| go 260km, or my 40,000ml tank will take me 40000/36 =
| 1100km.
| [deleted]
| doikor wrote:
| > The numbers don't work out too, "litres per 100km". Why
| not millilitres per km (or litres per gigametre)
|
| > I drive X miles (or X km), I then fill up with Y litres
| (or Y gallons)
|
| This isn't what most use the liters per 100km for though.
| People just fill up whenever the light on the car tells
| them to. Mainly the number is used to compare cars when
| buying a new one. Some keep track of the actual
| consumption to notice if something is wrong with their
| car (just write down the current number on the odometer
| and how many liters you put in on some
| paper/app/whatever. you can do the actual calculations
| later)
|
| At least this has been my experience here in Finland.
| manholio wrote:
| > If I need to travel 260km at 20km/litre I need to but
| 260/20 litres or about 13 litres.
|
| > With the "metric" way you need to do two calculations.
|
| That's really an absurd way of looking at it, because one
| of those calculations is a division or multiplication by
| 100, and 100km happens to be a typical distance someone
| might be interested into finding fuel efficiency.
|
| So the answer to me is an immediate mental computation,
| 2.6 x 5l = 13, you never ever need to compute consumption
| per km, express things in ml etc.
|
| Your own "easy" examples look to me very intuitive and
| convoluted, so I guess the systems are 100% comparable,
| the only difference is the power of habit.
| donedealomg wrote:
| williamdclt wrote:
| I dont think that's true. I see imperial much more than
| metric.
|
| Measures are much more common in inches, foot and miles
| than metric. Volumes are much more common in cups,
| gallons, pints than metric. Weights are more common in
| pounds and ounces than metric.
|
| That's in almost all domains, not just "a few high-
| profile holdouts" (even cooking, where it kills me that
| quantities of solids are in "cups" rather than grams...)
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| > Measures are much more common in inches, foot and miles
| than metric.
|
| I think this is partially true, particularly with the
| older generation. People often talk about their height in
| feet and inches, and their weight in stone and pounds.
|
| > Volumes are much more common in cups, gallons, pints
| than metric. Weights are more common in pounds and ounces
| than metric.
|
| Your experience seems to be very different to mine. To be
| honest I have no idea what a gallon even is, and no
| intuitive concept of an ounce. The only place I have ever
| seen measurements in "cups" is one chicken biryani recipe
| I found on an American website. (I agree it's bizarre:
| half a cup of mint leaves - wtf?!). Any recipe published
| in the UK in the last couple of decades tends to be in
| grams and millilitres. Example picked at random:
| https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/chocolate-courgette-
| cake
| barnabee wrote:
| Seems like this must vary a lot as my experience is very
| different.
|
| I rarely see/hear/use imperial outside pints and road
| signs, or for "sizes" like screen or clothing waist
| sizes, unless I'm talking to people a generation older
| than me (I'm 40).
|
| Every recipe site I use either has both or is entirely
| metric, and I only ever use metric. I'd probably look
| elsewhere if a search turned up a recipe in imperial
| only.
|
| Even distances are in KM outside of driving (because of
| the road signs).
|
| Pretty much everyone I know talks about their weight in
| KG. Heights do seem pretty split between cm and ft/inches
| but everyone understands both.
|
| Most liquids except beer and cider (including other
| alcohol like wine and spirits) are in litres and ml.
|
| It's very obvious to me how metric-first life is for me
| because visiting America involves constant conversion and
| thinking whereas everything in other European countries
| (which are generally entirely metric) comes easily.
| Milner08 wrote:
| Because they are a weird middle ground. UK uses metric
| paper, metric weights and measures for _most_ things,
| metric temperature. Where Imperial starts to slip in is
| distance when driving (but not when running...), volumes of
| Beer and Milk (mainly cause we want more beer than 500ml)
| and body weight (where we use Stones, which is weird).
| There are probably some other things as well, but metric is
| the dominant system (for people under 60) for sure.
| gadders wrote:
| Height is nearly always feet and inches.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| But so is the United States. In all industries where it
| matters (science, technology, military, medicine) metric
| is virtually the only measurement system that's used, not
| to mention that a lot of products are sold in round
| metric quantities, not imperial.
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| The difference is that in the UK nearly everything you
| interact with in your daily life is in metric. You won't
| find anything in a UK household in imperial measurements
| other than the bottle of milk in the fridge.
| timrichard wrote:
| For supermarket milk at least, I can only remember seeing
| both units for quite a while. I had a glance at the one
| in our fridge, and it says "2.272L 4 pints" on the label.
| Symbiote wrote:
| There is a huge difference.
|
| Ask an average American to give you the length of their
| car, size of their kitchen or weight of a brick in metric
| and they'll have no clue. The average British person can
| do this, because education has been metric for 50+ years
| and the least-technical industry (e.g. construction, DIY)
| is metric.
|
| (See e.g. https://www.diy.com/, the largest consumer-
| facing DIY shop in Britain. It's 20kg of 10mm gravel,
| doors in millimetres, paint in litres. I can't even see a
| button offering an imperial conversion.)
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| /u/sgjohnson said metric is used in "in all industries
| where it matters". Have you maybe considered that "the
| length of their car, size of their kitchen or weight of a
| brick" are all examples of where it _doesn't_ matter?
| Symbiote wrote:
| Exactly. That's the huge difference.
|
| The USA only uses metric in some important industries.
|
| Britain uses it for lots of "unimportant" things, like
| construction/DIY, medicine, health care, cooking,
| sport/fitness.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| Medicine and healthcare is metric in the US.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| > Exactly. That's the huge difference.
|
| I'm not really sure what your point is. If we take as a
| starting point that the US used the metric system where
| it matters, then why is it an issue that it isn't used
| ubiquitously? I'm not saying you need to agree with the
| claim "the US used the metric where it matters", but if
| we just take that on face value, then why isn't that
| enough? Why do you care if Americans talking amongst
| themselves speak in their own vernacular and system of
| measurements? What exactly is the problem?
| Symbiote wrote:
| The comment I first replied to said the US was in the
| same middle-ground as the UK.
|
| That is not true -- it's in a different middle ground,
| much further from a fully-metric country. That's all my
| point was.
|
| > Why do you care if Americans talking amongst themselves
| speak in their own vernacular and system of measurements?
|
| It's fine if they keep it to themselves. I'm never
| bothered by traditional Japanese floor area measurements,
| for example. But Americans attempt to use their own,
| private system when communicating to the rest of the
| world, in commerce, software and media. (Search "Weather
| Taipei" on Google while in Taiwan, with a browser set to
| not-US-English, and you end up with Fahrenheit etc. Set
| Windows to "English Ireland" and random bits of stuff
| will still be in miles/degF.)
|
| This even leaks to non-Americans (or maybe English
| translators). It's annoying to go to a museum in, say,
| Brazil and see the Portuguese text uses metric, but this
| has been translated to pounds and feet in the English
| text. Most of the tourists reading the English aren't
| even American!
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| > But Americans attempt to use their own, private system
| when communicating to the rest of the world, in commerce,
| software and media.
|
| What's the difference between that and when the rest of
| the world tries to communicate with Americans using
| metric? In my experience foreigners in the US complain
| significantly more about the US not using metric while in
| the US than Americans do while in countries using metric.
|
| > Search "Weather Taipei" on Google while in Taiwan, with
| a browser set to not-US-English, and you end up with
| Fahrenheit etc.
|
| Can you not set your choice of units as a preference? Or
| are you annoyed that Google chose a default that is
| different than the one you wish to see? Given there is no
| universal choice that pleases everyone, wouldn't their
| choice annoy some people no matter what? In any case,
| this is a complain to direct to Google and not Americans
| in general. Besides you're free to use another weather
| app that matches your defaults.
|
| > It's annoying to go to a museum in, say, Brazil and see
| the Portuguese text uses metric, but this has been
| translated to pounds and feet in the English text. Most
| of the tourists reading the English aren't even American!
|
| This is a complaint that should be directed at a certain
| Brazilian museum.
| frameset wrote:
| That's absurd to say. Of course people care about the
| sizes of their cars and kitchens. And they need to know
| the weight of bricks when thinking about weight
| tolerances in construction.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| It is your post that is absurd. And you seem quite
| confused. I never said people don't care about the sizes
| of their cars and the weights of their bricks. I said
| that maybe the use of the metric system doesn't matter
| for those things. You are aware that it is possible to
| speak of the sizes and weight of things in systems other
| than metric right?
| anjbe wrote:
| Any American can visualize the size of a two-liter
| bottle, thanks to our addiction to soda. Three-liter is
| also a commonly available size. I've never in my life
| seen anything sold in quantity of one liter here, though.
| kps wrote:
| And you buy a sheet of plywood that's 1220mm x 2440mm
| which is _totally_ metric and not just 4x8 wearing a fake
| moustache.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Or you plan to buy the "metric" one that is 1250mm x
| 2500mm, but your contractor messes up and buys the
| "American" size after the studs have been built 625mm
| apart.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Except engineering/architecture. Making design software
| for architects and civil engineers in Europe then (trying
| to) introduce it to the US market is a b**h!
| bearmode wrote:
| All kids in the UK learn metric, and possibly some imperial
| (but only as a side thing). There are still things
| colloquially said in imperial, such as weight and height,
| but if you go to a doctor it will be in cm and kg.
|
| We're still a bit of a mishmash, but it's not as bad as it
| might seem from outside.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| The picture acknowledges both
| sgjohnson wrote:
| Not Canada though, which is definitely more imperial than
| the UK.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| >In Canada, Australia, India and some other former
| Commonwealth countries vital statistics, living and
| commercial spaces, oven temperatures and recipe
| measurements might still be imperial.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| UK is also reversing in parts due to BREXIT.
| mickeyp wrote:
| Hardly. Britain's converting to metric -- one inch at a
| time.
| azatom wrote:
| Like USA will begin in 2023!? I could hardly believe it
| when I heard it, it is barely three centuries away!
| bearmode wrote:
| No, it's not. Any stories about doing so are just dead
| cats.
| xnorswap wrote:
| It isn't really.
|
| The government proposed a consultation on doing so, mostly
| as a distraction.
|
| I'd eat my hat if anything actually changes, the UK was
| (partially) metricated over 50 years ago, there's zero
| appetite for reversing it among people of working age and
| business concerns will dominate any serious consultation
| around changing legislation.
| midasuni wrote:
| There is zero appetite for brexit or for the government
| by working age people either, all the political choices
| for the last 10 years have matched the result of what the
| over 65s want, if nobody under 65 votrs there would have
| been no difference.
|
| On the other hand if nobody over 65 voted every vote
| would be different.
| oblio wrote:
| His point is that elections are cheap.
|
| Business interests align with hard cash. That's going to
| lean towards metric.
|
| Over 65s don't "vote" much in businesses, they're
| retired.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| There's also 0 appetite for completing the metrication
| process.
| xnorswap wrote:
| Sure, but that's little to do with brexit and it's only
| really Miles (Road Signage) and Pints (of beer) that
| aren't metricated. Even milk is (legally speaking) sold
| by the litre.
| bbarnett wrote:
| And 2x4s? (I hear you call them 4x2s over there...)
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| "two-by-four" is used colloquially in the UK for stuff
| with that approximate cross section, but wood is
| generally sold with millimetre measurements.
| simondotau wrote:
| It's not even approximate. A typical two by four is
| around 1.5 by 3.5 inches, which is a full third less
| material than lumber which literally measures 2 by 4.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| IIRC this is because "two by four" refers to the size of
| the rough-sawn stock, but you buy milled 2x4s, so the
| difference is simply what's removed in milling. You can
| get these odd formats (stuff like "78x34 mm") in hardware
| stores here, too, it's just that they're not used for
| construction, because construction lumber is "hard
| metric", i.e. nice round numbers like 40x60 mm etc.
| xnorswap wrote:
| While there's an equivalent size, those are (legally
| speaking) sold by the mm.
|
| For example: https://www.builderdepot.co.uk/timber-
| sheets/carcassing-timb...
|
| Note the listing is primarily in mm with the imperial
| measure along side.
|
| So of course the actual size is still equivalent to the
| old imperial size because of the history, from a legal
| perspective it's metric.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Right, the size cannot easily change I suppose, for how
| could you repair older houses/etc? Or use older building
| plans?
|
| We (Canada) partially transitioned too, but didn't
| complete the building supplies part of it.
|
| So food is all metric, roads, speed limits, distances,
| weights, yet wood is imperial, and tools are metric and
| imperial.
|
| This makes sense, because with the US so close, and the
| largest trading partner, imperial cannot fully vanish in
| some repects, until they get rid of it too.
| xxs wrote:
| 2x4 is a name of lumber that's not 2 by 4 inches at all.
| simondotau wrote:
| "Two by four" is a category descriptor, not a
| measurement. Such products do not have dimensions which
| equal 2 and 4 in either imperial or metric units.
| pansa2 wrote:
| Are a lot of things still sold as "454g / 1lb" or "568ml
| / 1 pint" (as I recall from a decade ago)? In most metric
| countries those would just be "500g" and "500ml".
| xnorswap wrote:
| That used to be the case but typically I'd say most meat
| now is sold in round number of grams, for example 500g
| mince:
|
| https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/250871426
|
| And 400g Chicken (these definitely used to be ~450g packs
| for a long time):
|
| https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/304404328
|
| I suspect shrink-flation has ended up rounding things to
| metric even when they were previously based off round
| imperial measures.
|
| Unlike inches, I can't remember the last time I saw
| something marked with lbs, I'm not sure I could even
| properly process how heavy "2lbs" is.
| bloak wrote:
| The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metr
| ication_in_the_United_King...) mentions three legal
| exceptions: road traffic signs; pints for draught beer
| and cider, and milk in returnable containers; and troy
| ounces for transactions in precious metals.
|
| It doesn't mention one product that is very much in the
| news at the moment: energy. I'm fairly sure they still
| sell it by the kWh rather than the MJ.
|
| Colloquially, people still talk about calories rather
| than kJ in food. (And they do that even in Germany, I
| think, one of the few places where they measure font
| sizes in mm rather than points, or so I've heard.)
|
| EDIT: Perhaps kWh counts as metric, even though it's not
| SI?
| kalleboo wrote:
| Everywhere I've lived people also discuss display sizes
| in inches despite everything else being metric.
| xxs wrote:
| display sizes are in inches everywhere (like in the
| world) indeed - mostly b/c they are produced in such a
| way...
| sgjohnson wrote:
| And air conditioners. Even on mainland Europe they are
| mostly advertised in BTUs.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| kWh is more metric than imperial, although Joules are of
| course the standard unit of energy.
|
| Watts are a metric unit, as are seconds. Hours are not
| formally an SI unit, but at least according to Wikipedia
| [0] are "officially accepted for use with the SI".
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
| SI_units_mentioned_in_th...
| midasuni wrote:
| A kilowatt hour is 1000 joules per second over 3600
| seconds, the amount of power a 1kW heater uses in 1 hour.
| Its as metric as the hectare
| HPsquared wrote:
| And 1 Joule is one Newton-metre (i.e. it takes 1 J to
| pull with a force of 1 N over a distance 1 m).
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| You are right. Is say it is metric, if not standard SI.
| N19PEDL2 wrote:
| I guess kWh counts as metric, as W is SI and h is
| accepted by SI (as, for example, in km/h). The Imperial
| unit is maybe the calorie (I'm not sure though).
|
| EDIT: According to Wikipedia [0], the Imperial unit of
| energy is ft[?]lbf.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-pound_(energy)
| HPsquared wrote:
| The calorie is also kind of metric: the energy needed to
| heat 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius.
|
| The kcal (kilocalorie) is what most people mean when they
| refer to calories in food, and that's just the energy
| needed to heat 1 kg of water by 1 deg C.
|
| Since a person is mostly water this means that, say if
| you weigh 100 kg, and eat 1000 kcal of food, that food
| contains (theoretically) enough energy to heat your body
| mass by 10 deg C. The units do give a kind of intuitive
| understanding of the energy in food, while also being
| based on metric quantities.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The non-metric energy measurement in current discussion
| in Britain is the therm, 100,000 BTU. It seems natural
| gas is sold in this measure at some of the London
| exchanges.
|
| It's sold in MWh in the rest of Europe.
| xxs wrote:
| >EDIT: Perhaps kWh counts as metric, even though it's not
| SI?
|
| No need for perhaps, unless it's btu (or some horse
| power/hour) it's metric.
| donedealomg wrote:
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Interestingly enough per wikipedia[1], Myanmar and Liberia
| uses the A4 format while not using the metric system.
|
| [1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4_(format)#/media/Fichier
| :Pre...
| mathieuh wrote:
| I was watching a guitar repair video on YouTube this morning
| and the luthier referred to the action of the guitar as being
| "five-and-a-half sixty-fourths". This blew my mind.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't know how easy halving is genius when it comes to A4
| paper, but somehow considered hopelessly convoluted when
| giving measurements in base 2.
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| Easier than saying "five sixty-fourths and one one-hundred-
| and-twenty-eighth"
| mkl wrote:
| But not easier than eleven one-hundred-and-twenty-eighths,
| and definitely not easier than 2.2mm.
| midasuni wrote:
| 1/64th of an inch is less than half a milimetre. Does the
| average DIYer have that type of accuracy and precision?
| mkl wrote:
| With calipers, sure. Even without precise measurements,
| we make size adjustments smaller than that when making a
| tight fit by sanding or whatever.
| lstodd wrote:
| Even a shitty chinese desktop planer can get you
| consistent 0.1mm precision if you perform requisite
| rituals.
| coldtea wrote:
| I could perhaps understand the use of fahrenheit for
| temperature - I'm not used to it, but people say the changes in
| different temperature degrees are more like how we perceive
| them (perhaps temperature is like some things like sound level
| that we perceive logarithmically, and ferenheit maps better to
| it [1]).
|
| Not sure if this is valid (celsius looks fine to me) but if it
| is, sure, fahrenheit makes sense.
|
| But for the rest, like distance and weight? What the fuck?!
|
| [1] I'm not claiming we do perceive temperature logarithmically
| - just making an analogy with another case (sound) in which we
| don't use a straight linear relationship because it doesn't
| match our intuitive perception (e.g. of volume "doubling").
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Fahrenheit is nice because the normal range of temps for most
| climates that humans generally prefer to inhabit is about 0
| to 100. Over 100 starts to be dangerous to humans without
| some form of cooling, evaporative or otherwise. 0 F (-18 C)
| is about as cold a temp as most (not all) people would want
| to live in. Ironically, viewed from that perspective,
| Fahrenheit gives typical temps a nice powers of ten
| framework, which is normally one of the great advantages of
| metric systems. Celsius fails in this regard, going from -18
| C to 28 C for the same range. Less precision and no intuitive
| decimal framework.
|
| On the other hand, I completely agree that the rest of the
| non-metric measurements are just a mess. However, the binary
| nature of cups, pints, quarts, half gallons, and gallons are
| kind of quaint I suppose.
| Aaronmacaron wrote:
| What do you mean? Fahrenheit is not logarithmic. The
| conversion function from Fahrenheit to Celsius is literallay
| a linear function: c(f) = f(5/9) - (160/9)
| coldtea wrote:
| > _What do you mean? Fahrenheit is not logarithmic._
|
| It's not like I didn't explicitly cover that:
|
| "I'm not claiming we do perceive temperature
| logarithmically - just making an analogy with another case
| (sound) in which we don't use a straight linear
| relationship because it doesn't match our intuitive
| perception (e.g. of volume "doubling")."
|
| So, no, I'm not saying temperature perception is
| logarithmic and Fahrenheit is logarithmic to match it.
|
| I'm just saying that similarly to how dB suits sound
| perception better (because it's logarithmic and more
| appropriate to our logarithmic perception of volume),
| fahrenheit might fit intuitive temperature perception
| better (because it's more appropriate to our perception of
| temperature).
|
| Actually, I'm not even saying this is the case. Just that
| I've read and heard people claim that, so it could be (I'm
| not from a fahrenheit using country, so can't speal for how
| it intuitively feels), for one example:
|
| https://thevane.gawker.com/fahrenheit-is-a-better-
| temperatur...
| almostdigital wrote:
| This standard isn't part of the metric system though
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| No, but the post mentions that A0 was chosen to have an area
| of one square metre. (Actually 0.999 square metres - you need
| a bit of fudge factor if you want sides in integer
| millimeters and a ratio of root 2)
| mkl wrote:
| I'd say it's part of it in the sense that it's based
| completely on it. It's not a unit or set of units though.
| samatman wrote:
| Shame this comment is floating to the top, for a few reasons.
|
| First: The DIN paper standards aren't a part of the metric
| system. They are a use of the metric system.
|
| Second, the important part: what makes A series paper cool
| (truly one of my favorite standards) is a ratio, these are by
| definition independent of metric.
|
| One can imagine a paper standard based on 36 inches, rather
| than 1 meter, which would have all of the good properties of A
| and B series paper.
|
| The third reason is that the imperial measurement system is
| also an application of the metric system. But others have
| covered that already.
|
| It's an ongoing source of amusement to me that people fluent in
| just one system of measurement look down on a continent of
| hundreds of millions whose educated class is fluent in both.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Also the metre is a weird unit to use as a base. It is based
| on an incorrect 17th C estimation of the circumfrence of the
| earth and is now standardised as some weird fraction of the
| distance light travels in a vacuum in a second (a second
| itself being based on a weird fraction of transitions in a
| stable form of Cesium atom)
|
| A foot is at least something very closely aligned across many
| cultures (from ancient Egypt to Japan) because of because of
| its clear and useful relationship to human scale and building
| products
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > A foot is at least something very closely aligned
|
| Hmm, the largest historic European foot listed on the
| corresponding Wikipedia page is almost 30 % larger than the
| smallest foot. So while they indeed all are somewhere
| roughly 30 cm-ish long, after a few feet those differences
| will still add up considerably...
| perilunar wrote:
| > based on an incorrect 17th C estimation of the
| circumfrence of the earth
|
| Incorrect? It's pretty bloody close for 1793 -- The error
| is less than 0.02% !
| Theodores wrote:
| I was a staunch advocate of the metric system, however, I am
| not the 'fanboy' I once was.
|
| It all makes sense and seems really clever when you are at
| school with your little ruler with those weird inch things on
| the unused side. I could bark at any adult daring to use an
| outlawed measurement unit, to put them in their place.
|
| To a certain extent we do that with Americans and their usage
| of 'weird' units that make no sense to people outside of the
| UK. However, as I have got older, I have learned to appreciate
| why these quaint measurements have survived the test of time.
| For example the 0.1 inch pitch spacing of integrated circuits
| is a gentle reminder that Americans pioneered and invented all
| of this stuff and that, despite the politics and sentiment of
| the time, some respect is deserved for the non-metric giant
| shoulders we stand on.
|
| Every British person knows what a metre is but most British
| people will give their height in feet and inches. Ask those
| people what their height is in metres and your guess is as good
| as mine.
|
| Weight has made a slow transition to kilograms in the UK. Stone
| is still a measurement. But when an American describes weight
| in pounds the average British person has not the foggiest.
|
| I find more beauty in the vernacular measurements and I can
| play devil's advocate - 'Metric is French Napoleon conquest
| bad'.
|
| Nowadays we have electronic gadgets to do the simplest
| arithmetic. Nobody does long division on paper these days. They
| don't even have a pen. The benefits of the decimal system are
| somewhat moot. I can see why base 12 measurements stick around
| but no idea why base 14 is a thing.
|
| Anyway, couldn't the A4 problem have been solved with non
| square pixels?
| kasperni wrote:
| A map of paper size usage throughout the world:
| https://vividmaps.com/paper-sizes-world-map/
| aeyes wrote:
| I wish it was like this. Some countries have two standardized
| sizes where certain documents are in "US letter" and others in
| "US legal" format depending on the institution.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Some countries have two standardized sizes where certain
| documents are in "US letter" and others in "US legal" format
| depending on the institution.
|
| To be fair it used to be even worse, as the fed used to use
| demitab (8x10.5).
| layer8 wrote:
| I wondered whether the fjords use US letter, at first. ;)
| davelondon wrote:
| The same size relationship is for Euro stacking containers:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_container
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| While I really appreciate the fact that you can split an A4 sheet
| and get two A5 sheets. Even as a European, I always felt like the
| American letter format feels 'nicer'. I feel like the letter
| format's ratio works better for taking notes in a notebook or
| browsing through printed pages -- less tall, but wider than A4.
|
| Anyone made a similar experience?
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I do think A4 is too wide for note taking, I almost always use
| two columns.
| xxs wrote:
| so A5?
| stephen_g wrote:
| Not necessarily, if they're talking about splitting it
| vertically, not horizontally.
| puzzledobserver wrote:
| I agree. The American reluctance to metric units is strange and
| I appreciate the mathematical elegance of ISO paper sizes, but
| letter paper just feels more pleasant on the eyes than A4.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > American reluctance to metric units
|
| Reluctance is too strong a word. In the US we use metric for
| quite a lot of measurements. Frequently things are labeled in
| both metric and imperial. What we have is ambivalence. Folks
| from countries with more metric adoption care way, way more
| about the US using imperial than anyone in the US does.
| chadlavi wrote:
| I dunno about ambivalent. Tell a US person it's 30deg
| outside in the summer and at best they'll give you a blank
| stare, at worst they'll say "well no it's gotta be warmer
| than that out." They don't learn it, so no one uses it. If
| schools taught it then it might catch on. The food labeling
| stuff is for regulatory reasons, the only metric units US
| people actually use are liters for beverages.
| hazn wrote:
| Beautiful (in an educational sense and in a visual sense) CGP
| Grey video on metric paper: https://youtu.be/pUF5esTscZI
| jcynix wrote:
| Cool animation, as almost always by CGP Grey. Reminds me of the
| book "Powers of Ten" by Philip and Phylis Morrison, published
| in 1982 ("Scientific American Books")
| anonymfus wrote:
| In the Director's Commentary
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lyN6Qg8VQ4 ) CGP Grey said
| that it was directly inspired by the video version of "Powers
| of Ten".
| mkl wrote:
| Powers of Ten was also a 1977 short film:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
|
| (Duplicating my own comment from a few months ago.)
| vxNsr wrote:
| That video kinda lost the thread of what it was supposed to be
| about, it went from a cool video about paper (which admittedly
| is no easy task) to a generic "things are small but also things
| are big"
| julianbuse wrote:
| I dont think the video is really about the paper, it's just a
| hook.
| [deleted]
| Orthanc wrote:
| Glad you liked it!
| jorl17 wrote:
| Just taking a second to appreciate you and your work. I have
| one of the first ever Theme System Journals. While I've grown
| older and now no longer watch your videos as religiously as
| before, I do still follow along Cortex.
|
| I was a patron for Hello Internet. Though I doubt it will, I
| hope you guys can one day bring it back. So many fond
| memories :)
|
| Thank you for your hard work and almost-always insightful
| remarks!
| leshenka wrote:
| What happened to HI though? They seemingly stopped doing it
| without any reason and I really liked it. Thankfully Cortex
| is a lot like HI and I enjoy it a lot.
| porkbrain wrote:
| I wish HN had a feature to follow or anotate users. Not the
| first time I meet someone interesting I know from another
| space here on HN. However, without such feature, I shall
| forget the username.
| scott_s wrote:
| Create a bookmark category for HN users you want to follow,
| and bookmark their comment pages.
| dskloet wrote:
| I figured since for Reddit this functionality is provided
| by RES, for HN it should be HNES so I searched "hacker news
| enhancement suite" and found this [1] which does list
| "Ability to tag users" among its features.
|
| [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
| enhanc...
| yoyojojofosho wrote:
| You can use Hacker News RSS [0] and subscribe to a user's
| feed [1] via https://hnrss.org/user?id=USERNAME
|
| [0]: https://hnrss.github.io/
|
| [1]: https://hnrss.github.io/#user-feeds
| user_7832 wrote:
| Are you really CGP Grey? If so, thank you for your high
| quality videos! (Science) educators like you make YouTube and
| the internet a better place :)
|
| (Ooh, I had a quick question if you don't mind - how did you
| get into animating the videos in the beginning? I'm also
| hoping to make sciencey/educational/technical videos on
| YouTube but I don't have any animation/software experience.
| Right now I'm just planning to draw static images/diagrams on
| my iPad and use that for the video, like a slideshow.)
| manholio wrote:
| He goes into it in an older comment in his history:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Orthanc
| Orthanc wrote:
| Yes it's really me -- I don't often comment on hacker news,
| but it was just funny to come across my own video here.
| burlesona wrote:
| That went a very different direction than I expected. Thanks
| for sharing :)
| cylinder714 wrote:
| I cannot believe no one has posted Markus Kuhn's excellent page
| on the subject, first appearing in 1996:
|
| https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html
| chadlavi wrote:
| It never occurred to me that these same sizes trickle all the
| way down to passports, IDs and business cards
| avnigo wrote:
| I can't not share this excellent video on the subject by CGP Grey
| on "metric paper":
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI
| jagrsw wrote:
| It's interesting that the human scale is (logarithmically) in
| the middle between the plank distance and the size of the
| observable universe.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I never realized this, but I'm glad I learned why this is.
|
| It's the kind of thing that you always wonder about but never
| seriously investigate.
|
| You could go a whole lifetime without knowing...
| pottertheotter wrote:
| If you moved from Europe to the US (or vice versa), I'm curious
| what your thoughts are on using A4 vs US letter? And I mean once
| you were settled and transitioned to using the other standard,
| did you find yourself thinking one was better than the other?
|
| Another way of asking this is, if you could magically make it so
| that everyone had been using and today used one of the two (A4 or
| US letter), would it matter to you?
| jahewson wrote:
| For modern typeset documents it's a close call but I'd say that
| A4 has a slight edge in that it's longer and the extra width of
| US Letter in practice just means wider margins.
|
| But it's when you start folding and mailing the paper that the
| A* system really shines, US system is maddeningly frustrating.
| [deleted]
| codethief wrote:
| > A4 vs US letter
|
| I (European) spent some time in the US in the past and, while I
| understand why many people prefer A4, I found one major
| advantage of the US letter format: It is, like so many things
| in America, bigger.
|
| Very useful if you have to write down equations!
| Beltalowda wrote:
| It's slightly wider (6mm) but shorter (18mm), not really
| "bigger". In terms of surface area it's a bit smaller.
| athenot wrote:
| It's only 6mm wider than A4, but 18mm _shorter_ (about 3 /4
| inch) A4 210mm x 297mm Letter
| 216mm x 279mm
| codethief wrote:
| You're absolutely right, it is shorter - for some reason my
| memories just skipped that part. Maybe because the width is
| the most relevant when writing down long equations. :)
| biztos wrote:
| I've done this both ways a few times, and still bounce between
| Europe and the US a lot. Once I got used to A4 et al I found it
| maddening that the _other_ sizes are missing in the US.
|
| A4 vs Letter is no big deal, IMO, with modern printer drivers
| and PDFs and so on.
|
| But once you start making regular use of A5 and A3, it's hard
| to adjust to their absence.
|
| However, the DIN sizes are not the only standard sizes in
| Europe! There are also (de facto?) sizes for art paper, canvas
| board, and stretched canvas.
|
| For example, 30x40cm is a standard size for painters, and A3
| (almost but not quite the same) is only really used for
| drawing... and sometimes for prints, depending on technology.
|
| On the US side, 9x12in is a standard size for both drawing and
| watercolor. And it fits exactly zero frames you can buy off the
| shelf in Europe. But at least 16x20in is almost 40x50cm! That's
| been a lifesaver.
|
| Just today I was pleased to realize that my "weird" sized
| Chinese watercolor paper -- Baohong, good stuff - is within a
| few mm of A5. Because I'll take any standard at this point.
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| Yeah, the other sizes are great -- I have small assortment of
| A* paper at home, now, sourced from various countries.
| prennert wrote:
| when I see text on US letter, I tend to struggle reading it
| fast. This is because I find it hard to find the next line
| after I read to the end of a line. I think there is an optimal
| line width that allows the eyes to flow from line to line, and
| documents in the US letter format does seem to regular exceed
| that.
|
| Of course this is not intrinsically the fault of the paper
| size. The lines could just be narrower. But then you get a
| massive margin, which is often not what you want for a
| /letter/. At least not one printed on 10pt or 12pt. Once you
| put notes in the margins, or double column layout, US letter
| might be superior. Maybe also for typed letters as the words
| tend to be wider in that case.
|
| I am curious if people experience the same, or potentially the
| other way around.
| vlmutolo wrote:
| I'm American and started using A4 because good fountain pen
| paper is usually A4, A5, etc.
|
| I eventually found that I like the A4 size better than US
| Letter. US Letter seems unnecessarily wide for most writing.
| deepspace wrote:
| I moved from a metric country to Canada 25 years ago. Although
| Canada is technically metric, pounds, and feet still abound. It
| sometimes feels like litres and km are the only metric units
| actually used here.
|
| Of all the European measurements, the one I miss most here is
| the paper size. I still struggle with the scaling mess that is
| US paper sizes, and long for the elegance of the A, B and C
| series.
| jcynix wrote:
| The international paper size standard is ISO 216. It is based on
| the German DIN 476 standard for paper sizes. This standard was
| designed by the German engineer and mathematician Walter
| Porstmann in 1922.
|
| Cf https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Porstmann
| impendia wrote:
| The ISO will charge you 58 CHF (equivalent to 59 USD) to _read_
| the standard.
|
| https://www.iso.org/standard/36631.html
|
| I can't help but feel a perverse pleasure that the US refuses
| to switch.
| layer8 wrote:
| And ANSI will charge you $68 [1] to read the US paper sizes
| standard [2].
|
| [1] https://webstore.ansi.org/Standards/ASME/ASMEY142020
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI/ASME_Y14.1
| magnio wrote:
| If only the US didn't use C because it costs 198 CHF to read
| the standard.
| zymhan wrote:
| I pity the fool still programming in ANSI C
| nautilius wrote:
| Pfft, have you tried accessing _any_ standard here? (ASME,
| IEEE, etc.)
|
| That perverse pleasure must be masochism.
| dbelford wrote:
| Are there fields (architects, engineers?) that take advantage of
| the the technical pen scaling? Or scanning software that is aware
| of the pen/paper ratios? This seems like a great way to have some
| consistency in analog/digital conversions. It would be nice to
| have 10 years of digitized notes that all have consistent sizing
| after scanning.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Architects and engineers certainly used to. Most engineering
| drawings are printed now, but presumably occasional
| modifications are still made by hand.
| dbelford wrote:
| In another comment you mentioned easy scaling in a
| photocopier. And cylinder714 linked to a description of iso-
| paper that mentions an ISO (ISO 9175-1) for pens.
|
| Is there a term or place to search for pens sets that scale
| with A*/B* paper? Using the ISO or "technical pen" doesn't
| return obvious matches (from my US based search at least).
| 2143 wrote:
| > 80 gsm (grams per square metre) paper at A0 size weighs
| precisely 80g. A4 paper at that density therefore weighs 5g since
| it's been halved 4 times
|
| So when they mark the gsm number onto a ream of A4 sheets, is 80
| the gsm of A0 or A4?
|
| Excellent article by the way. Thank you.
| [deleted]
| cafeinux wrote:
| Both. A 80 gsm ( = grams per square meter)A4 sheet has the same
| density as a 80 gsm A0 sheet (80 gsm= 80 gsm) but only 1/16th
| its weight (5g = 1/16x80g) since it only has 1/16th its area.
| masklinn wrote:
| > So when they mark the gsm number onto a ream of A4 sheets, is
| 80 the gsm of A0 or A4?
|
| It's the same thing, since it's the _g_ rams per _s_ quare _m_
| eter. A0 is 1sqm by definition, and if you tile A4s until you
| have 1sqm of it, you get A0 (at least if you double through the
| small side every time: A4 -> A3 -> A2 -> A1 -> A0)
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| I hope we will use the A* family of paper sizes in the USA more
| widely. Many excellent notebooks, notepads, &c are available from
| Germany, Japan, France and England in the A* family of sizes, and
| they all work with the corresponding envelopes. There is so much
| paper correspondence -- in the form of utility bills, government
| notices, packing lists, and many other things -- that could fit
| on A5, which is a handy size for many things; and now
| manufactured in great quantities all over the world.
| jbay808 wrote:
| When I lived in Japan and worked with ISO paper, it made me
| realize what we in North America are missing out on. I wish it
| were more widely available because I'd buy it.
| z3t4 wrote:
| I'm still waiting for a thin low weight A4 size eink reader
| jeff-davis wrote:
| The article never mentions why folding in half is a good thing.
| It is, of course, but why half, and not fifths?
|
| The reason is that two is a good factor to work with. Multiplying
| and dividing by two is more common than by five in a lot of
| domains. Three is pretty useful also.
|
| But the metric system is based on ten, which has factors two and
| five. Five is not such a great factor and often creates awkward
| numbers when dividing by two or three.
|
| The US measurement system, while inconsistent and arbitrary in
| many ways, but handles factors of two a lot better. Two cups in a
| pint, two pints in a quart, four quarts in a gallon.
|
| Better would be to have a consistent measurement system in base
| 12. Two twos and a three are a nice set of factors to work with.
| And twelve is still a nice "order of magnitude" that gives a good
| sense of scale.
|
| When it comes to distances, feet are actually pretty good in this
| regard. Degrees and time are base 60, which includes an extra
| five factor, so I guess it's combining all of them.
|
| The non-US world is smug about A4 and the metric system, but the
| very reasons that A4 is good shows why the metric system is not
| quite as brilliant as people like to think it is.
|
| (Obviously standardization and consistency have value, too. The
| metric system is good in that regard.)
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| It's a physical good. The reason is that it's easy to fold in
| half and it offers a good enough granularity of size.
|
| Also having a measuring system in base 10 when you use base 10
| for notation will always be more handy to calculate even it has
| less divisors. Your comment is the kind of comment which can
| only be made by someone who has never used metric.
| monopoliessuck wrote:
| I agree with you, but think 16 would be a better base than 12
| as it's binary reducible all the way down. It doesn't have a
| factor of three, which can be useful, but being able to
| natively understand and do math in a hex base would be such a
| boon, especially in the computer era.
|
| The Babylonians base 60 was quite a practical decision we
| partially inherited, but the metric 10 and Aztec 20 were
| probably just cavemen looking at their fingers (and toes).
|
| If you use your thumb to index the interphalangeal joints of
| your hand, you also get 16 which is super slick. A4 is a nice
| standard, but we really missed out on realizing base 16 metric.
| int_19h wrote:
| We're already long past the point where doing math in hex (or
| binary) is something that an average software engineer is
| likely to face. And outside of the industry, who ever cared?
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Can't divide 16 by 3 though; the nice thing about 12 is that
| you get nice natural numbers for many common divisors:
| >>> 12/2, 12/3, 12/4, 12/5, 12/6, 12/7, 12/8 (6.0, 4.0,
| 3.0, 2.4, 2.0, 1.7142857142857142, 1.5) >>> 16/2,
| 16/3, 16/4, 16/5, 16/6, 16/7, 16/8 (8.0,
| 5.333333333333333, 4.0, 3.2, 2.6666666666666665,
| 2.2857142857142856, 2.0)
|
| With base-12, only 7 is awkward (and that's probably okay as
| it's not that common) and the non-natural numbers of 2.4 and
| 1.5 when dividing by 5 and 8 are still fairly easy to deal
| with. Dividing by the common figures of 2, 3, and 4 gives
| nice numbers.
|
| Base-16 has the "infinite number problem" for 3 and 6 that
| base-10 has, and only 2, 4, and 8 give natural numbers.
|
| This is probably why there are 12 months and why people used
| "a dozen" for a long time.
| int_19h wrote:
| It would be great to have a consistent measurement system in
| base-12 on top of base-12 numbers. But without this latter
| part, you end up with base-12 units computed in base-10
| numbers, which creates more mess than having a few extra
| divisors remove.
|
| And, unfortunately, we're way too committed to base-10 to
| change it now. So metric it is.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| Sheets of paper are not used to measure or calculate things,
| unlike the metric system.
| katbyte wrote:
| all seems more complicated then just dropping down a unit in
| metric and doing whatever maths you need, without dealing won't
| fractions or weird units.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| I agree base-12 would be better (having 12 months is nice) in
| principle, but in practice I found it rarely to be an issue and
| I've paid special attention to it since I first heard this
| argument a few years ago because it sounded convincing at
| first.
|
| Stuff like easily using fractions (1.65m, and what's halfway
| between 6"4' and 6"5'?), division of things with fraction
| (what's half of 6"4'?), and converting from cm to m is much
| more common. So while metric does indeed make some things
| harder, it makes many common things easier. Overall, it seems
| like a fair trade-off.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| > Better would be to have a consistent measurement system in
| base 12.
|
| Or a system in base 60, where 12 and 5 are alternating:
|
| - 12 hairs = 1 graph square - 5 graph squares = 1 inch - 12
| inches = 1 foot - 5 feet = 1 manlet - 12 manlets = 1 stone's
| throw - 5 stone's throws = 1 dash
|
| And so on
| _HMCB_ wrote:
| As an American, I can say A4 feels just perfect to me. Not too
| large or small.
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