Oh, really? You use your foot or your girlfriend’s? Because I wager those are somewhat different.
What body part is a quart based on? Because I don’t think it’s any of them, and you could probably still eyeball a quart of water. That’s to say, just shy of a litre.
How about one yard? Think you can do that? Great, just add a bit and you have a metre.
It’s crazy how Americans actually be complaining about how they’re unable to estimate or perceive things if they’re not actually measuring it against the bottom of their feet. Don’t you believe you have the ability to learn? I can see why you wouldn’t, but…
how are you attempting to disparage americans and talking like one at the same time. it’s just the name of a unit, who cares, a yard’s not the size of the boundary of their average house and barrels of oil don’t come in individual barrels
Because if I don’t assume their language, they won’t understand me, as my native language is Finnish. When talking to or about Americans, I might add a bit of American flare. It’s not grammatically correct, I know. Just double negatives.
Also criticism and disparagement are two different things.
It’s hard to realise the difference between what it’s origin is and definition. I think it’s wise to look into the definition of the foot instead of assuming you know.
Once finished, tell me why you still use the British unit?
It just needed to be able to be reconstructed without having an object standard. What is the actual length of a meter based on? A size that’s not only useful in scale, but that is both 1000x a useful measurement size and 1/1000th of a useful measurement size. It becomes intuitive when you start thinking in metric. It only took me like a month or two of mild effort to intuit a meter.
Since 2019, the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second, where the second is defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium.
It’s not that bad once you accept that there is no correct answer for what should be considered “1 length” unless you want to use Planck units, which are absurdly uselessly large or small.
The metre was originally defined in 1791 by the French National Assembly as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris, setting 10000 km as that quarter of the Earth’s polar circumference.
There was the navigation rationale for setting the meter/metre at the length that it is, but the original and subsequent definitions proved to be inconsistent and difficult to measure precisely.
Remind me — what’s the definition of a meter?
The length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second.
Why?
Just trying to wrap my feeble American brain around these extremely intuitive measurements.
As opposed to the foot, a body part notorious for its consistency in size across all people /s
It’s good enough for an estimate of the size of a room, which is what it’s commonly used for.
Oh, really? You use your foot or your girlfriend’s? Because I wager those are somewhat different.
What body part is a quart based on? Because I don’t think it’s any of them, and you could probably still eyeball a quart of water. That’s to say, just shy of a litre.
How about one yard? Think you can do that? Great, just add a bit and you have a metre.
It’s crazy how Americans actually be complaining about how they’re unable to estimate or perceive things if they’re not actually measuring it against the bottom of their feet. Don’t you believe you have the ability to learn? I can see why you wouldn’t, but…
how are you attempting to disparage americans and talking like one at the same time. it’s just the name of a unit, who cares, a yard’s not the size of the boundary of their average house and barrels of oil don’t come in individual barrels
Because if I don’t assume their language, they won’t understand me, as my native language is Finnish. When talking to or about Americans, I might add a bit of American flare. It’s not grammatically correct, I know. Just double negatives.
Also criticism and disparagement are two different things.
international outreach is very important work so i’ll leave you to your methods
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The sheer ignorance in this comment really makes the condescension even funnier.
It’s hard to realise the difference between what it’s origin is and definition. I think it’s wise to look into the definition of the foot instead of assuming you know.
Once finished, tell me why you still use the British unit?
Because they forced us to and it’s too expensive to change it now relative to the benefits.
It just needed to be able to be reconstructed without having an object standard. What is the actual length of a meter based on? A size that’s not only useful in scale, but that is both 1000x a useful measurement size and 1/1000th of a useful measurement size. It becomes intuitive when you start thinking in metric. It only took me like a month or two of mild effort to intuit a meter.
What is the definition of 1 foot imperial?
Oh yeah, 0.9144 meters.
Wikipedia says:
Of course. It’s so obvious.
It’s not that bad once you accept that there is no correct answer for what should be considered “1 length” unless you want to use Planck units, which are absurdly uselessly large or small.
There was the navigation rationale for setting the meter/metre at the length that it is, but the original and subsequent definitions proved to be inconsistent and difficult to measure precisely.
It’s also not accurate because one of the people who measured that distance made a small mistake in their calculations.
Half of yo mama’s waistline measurement.