this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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There recently was a discussion on lemmy where several US citizens (one of them allegedly an engineer…) tried to explain to me that metric might be „more precise“ (? 😂) but the imperial system more practical, because „everybody knows what a foot is“. When I asked them to add feet to miles I got shouted at (in CAPS) that noone (ever) does that. 🤷♀️
I saw that too, and many of them claimed they learn both Metric and Imperial British systems and convert between them all the time. So this stood out now:
I mean, it's true. Ask an American to visualize an ounce of anything other than drugs, and they probably won't be able to. Ask how many ounces in a gallon, and they'll Google it. Even cups aren't well understood. We can eyeball a mile on the interstate, or tell you how tall someone is, or lift a box and guess it's weight to within 5 pounds. But honestly, that's about it. We just aren't really taught to visualize our weights and measures, it's why newscasters keep saying shit like "8 Olympic swimming pools!" Or "the size of three football fields" because we just don't have a coherent system ingrained in us. That's also, I think, why we're so against metrification. Because weights and measures feel hard, because we're basically only semi-literate in our own mother tongue, so a "foreign language" feels like it'd be this huge undertaking.
This really isn't an American thing - it's just human, we can't really visualize dimensions accurately unless we have a good reference. Some may measure the Olympic swimming pool in feet others in meters, but the effect is the same.
Really? ... Am I super weird then? Because I can visualize volume and distance really well. I just assumed that was being, like, literate in both systems of measure.