this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
2879 points (97.0% liked)
Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle
7124 readers
1 users here now
A community dedicated to Strange Planet comics by Nathan W. Pyle.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The amount of downvotes for a thoroughly explained opinion tells me this is Reddit now.
Yeah it's disappointing. Several weeks ago, it would've been upvoted not because people agreed with it, but because it contributed to a thoughtful discussion. I'm an engineer. I've probably had to explicitly consider and think about units more in a year than most people here have in their lifetimes.
I just can't wrap my head around this thread. You'd think Americans were math geniuses by age 12 with how hard they're making this out to be.
It's baffling that someone would spend so long on a critique while completely missing the point. My argument has never been that imperial is better than metric. I regularly use both, and there are advantages and disadvantages to both. The advantages of metric here have been covered ad nauseum, so there was no need for me to mention them again. And since engineering is a field that intimately deals with both unit systems, I thought it would be good to offer that perspective
I was clearly right to offer that perspective, because the majority of your argument focuses on ideality and exactness. Engineering doesn't deal with ideality or absolute precision. A scientist uses just the right amount of tape to patch a hole. An engineer eyeballs it, adds more tape as needed, and calls it good enough. I don't need my feet to exactly be 1 imperial foot or for my knuckle to be exactly 1 imperial inch. As long as it's within 75-125% of it, I've got the right ballpark. And if it's closer to 50% or 150%? I can do simple math to scale it.
Thank you for illustrating my point on how this thread is an emulation of Reddit, complete with arrogant arguments which miss the OP's point and also fundamentally misunderstanding their perspective. Plus, not even understanding parts of their argument apparently -- I didn't label 0 or 100 when talking about temperature because I was talking about the abstract number itself. That should have been obvious from me talking about the simplicity of using 0 for very cold and 100 for very hot.
You have a good one as well.
It also just occurred to me that I was thinking only of American engineers. You're completely right that in other countries, for most applications, engineers wouldn't need to know the imperial system. Constantly working between the two would mostly be unique to American counterparts.
This certainly explains the difference in opinion and experiences.