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