Imperial vs. Metric

{27 Comments}

To convert from mile to feet, remember "5 tomatoes". It sounds like 5-2-8-0, the amount of feet in a mile. Cool, huh? To convert from kilometers to meters, you remember 1000 because it wasn't invented by a drunken lobster.

27 Comments…

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  1. Rest of the World February 20, 2021

    True story.

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  2. Metrics FTW!
    Other weird measurements just doesn’t count!

  3. When Americans build something it is mostly fractured from the beginning.

  4. Hey, we say “kilo” instead of “thousand”. What a brilliant system. I don’t see the big deal about making up Latin or Greek synonyms for numbers and then acting all clever about it.

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  5. Yes, not like those amazing Canadian cars and trucks and commercial airliners. Or their space program or their world famous Universities and medical facilities. And don’t even get me started on their list of Nobel prizes because it’s…. oh wait, wrong country. Sorry.

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    • They build good trains and aircrafts. Not like American “Boing” and their sitting duck 737. Today “Boing” lost parts during flight in two different events. Commercial airliner or flying coffin?
      All in all Canada is doing quite equal to the US. in economics and much better in society. Don’t forget Canada has a tenth of the US population. So, a Canadian is doing much better than you do, Slug. Spare us your pathetic, ignorant American brag. People like you are the reason no one respects Americans.

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    • Another Boeing lost parts during flight today.

  6. The old woodshop worker. February 20, 2021

    In Denmark tomme (danish inch) is still frequently used amongst carpenters and woodworkers. A danish tomme = 2,62cm as opposed to imperial inch at 2,54cm

    • For Denmark the metric system is in use since 1907 though. Unsurprising old measurements are used worldwide for arts and restorations. But not for modern industrial goods. Imperial measurements produce more errors and more clippings, more waste. And they cost money. Remember that Mars probe that got lost because NASA calculated in freedom miles instead of the intended kilometers. A lot of money burned up in the Mars atmosphere that day… The culprit: The imperial system.

  7. CPT, knowitall February 21, 2021

    we went to the moon, you didnt. We win

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    • Your money brought you there. Money from slave work and stolen resources. The Russians were first in space. They could have done it too. But they had no money. And probably American sabouteurs. Everybody knows both Americans and Russians fight dirty.
      And the technology was stolen from the Nazis. They were the first to launch an object into space. A German build your moon rocket.

    • SillyKiwiMan February 21, 2021

      Hate to break it to you, but NASA engineers, like proper engineers and scientists all over the world, use metric.

      Even way back then.

      Yet another American fail

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    • Look up the Mars Climate Orbiter aka Mars Surveyor ’98 Orbiter. Even though Lockheed Martin build in the probe with the wrong specifications NASA themselves took the blame for not testing and checking for the error. American fail.
      You may crawl away.

  8. also, you’re pronouncing tomato wrong

  9. SillyKiwiMan is right – any scientific, medical, engineering work etc, to be taken seriously worldwide is done in metric. If you listen to the latest audio from the NASA control room they use metric “… 20 metres off the surface”.
    “If God wanted us to use the metric system, He would have given us ten fingers and ten toes.”

    • NASA are smart people. They adapt to the space age. And the space age is metric.

  10. Reminds me of a book of a British naturalist I read. He sails X MILES into the sea, under Y YARDS high cliffs, then launches the sounding line with gives a depth of Z FATHOMS. All of them space measures which are possibly related by “easy” mnenonic rules as the pictured above.

    Very quaint, but hardly practical.

  11. Justine Pierre James Trudeau. America for the win.

  12. KamalaToe Harris February 22, 2021

    So? Metric system is for dumb people who cant do hard math in their head…..got it.

  13. Danny boi May 13, 2021

    To change a system like measurement in a country is just to hard, one may be better than the other but if it ain’t broken why fix it! 😂

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