Actual poster from 1917 that made me laugh. A lot.
Also, those motherfuckers are measuring the weight of those balls in kilograms, aren't they?
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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There's a popular argument against religion that essentially says that if any trace of a specific religion were wiped off the face of the Earth, it would never come back. As in there'd probably be something in its place, but there'd be no way that the specific beliefs practiced by that religion would ever return. Whereas if a piece of scientific knowledge were similarly wiped from human knowledge, it would eventually be rediscovered.
A similar argument can be made with the metric system: I think that if standardized measurement systems disappeared from the face of the Earth today, something extremely similar would eventually be invented and adopted. It's just too internally consistent and human mental math too grounded in decimal for it not to be. You'd probably even end up with a prefix-based (probably even Greek) naming scheme.
Now consider USC: the units fail to fit together in basically any meaningful way. They try but fail to be base-2, so you can't even come at it from the already-tenuous angle of base-2 being better than base-10 (e.g. volume skips what two quarts would be, weight is more like base-16 (???), and distance just does something so insane that probably 95% of American adults couldn't tell you how many feet there are in a mile). There are dozens of completely arbitrary, unintuitive, antiquated-sounding names (e.g. "horsepower"). Although the bases for metric measurements are rather arbitrary, they are extraordinarily precise, so much so that USC bases its own measurements off of insane but precise multiples of metric units. That's not to say that humans would jump straight to metric or anything, but moreso that whatever would fill USC's role as an intermediary between nothing and the metric-like system would likey be unrecognizable from current USC.
The "intuitiveness" of imperial measurements is that they're sorta human-scaled, at least for human-sized measurements. An inch is about the same length as the tip of my thumb, a foot is about as big as my foot, a yard is a single pace if I stretch a bit, etc. which makes it easier for a person to picture it.
Once you get out of that scale it really starts to break down though.
Yeah, the thing is that I actually don't terribly mind feet, cups, etc. as individual measurements. Taken alone, they feel intuitive. The first of two main issues is, as you mentioned, scale. And you could make the argument that you could just take the base units like feet, cups, etc. and decimalize them with prefixes. And that does alleviate a ton of problems with USC, but you also then run back into the issue of unit intercompatibility.
Metric units have quite an elegant and intuitive interplay that USC simply lacks. What's a liter? Why it's a cubic meter. But now if I try to relate USC volumes to cubic USC distance measures, things quickly fall apart. A gallon is 231 cubic inches exactly, which is a whole number, sure, but that's terrible for intution and for scaling. What's a kilogram? Why it's the mass of a liter of water. If you try relating pounds to units of volume, you might settle on one pound per pint, but that isn't true, as it's actually 1.041 pounds. So while it works at that scale, it quickly begins to fall apart and becomes completely inintuitive.
So unfortunately, even if we introduced intra-unit scaling by choosing one base unit and scaling that, working with USC would still be a nightmare when trying to intuit between different units. And this is, of course, not including things like horsepower that may have been intuitive 150 years ago but now are almost exclusively used 1) at minimum in the hundreds and 2) by people who have literally no concept of how much a horse can turn a mill wheel.
And it's sucks if you want any kind of precision. What's half of 15 5/8? Fuck it, I'll just use centimeters.
I would agree with you that something similar to metric would eventually arise, but I would consider duodecimal to make more sense than decimal, as 12 is a superior highly composite number and the terminating representation is much shorter for more commonly used fractions (e.g. 1⁄4 would be represented as 0.3, 1⁄3 as 0.4, 1⁄2 as 0.6, etc). I would also argue that groupings in powers of 12² make more sense than 10³.
I would also argue that it would make more sense for measurements to be based on natural units (such as Planck length) for all the basic measurements (second, metre, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela), such that the anthropic unit (the one you'd most commonly refer to without prefixes) would be some multiple of 12 away from the natural unit.