Nah it’s more relatable to humans regarding electricity consumption, the consumer would be confused and scared seeing 3.6 megajoules on a bill and not actually understand how power usage of watts of appliances would convert into Joule energy units. That’s why electric cars motor powers are still rated in Watts and the bill shows a relatable term.
To add to that, that’s why so many metric countries (not USA) still use imperial units colloquially because they are more relatable in real life like lbs and inches and feet. But then would use Km and grams in other contexts quite normally. And knots still always make more sense to pilots and sailors.
People are just used to kWh. There’s nothing about it that’s more intuitive, it’s just more familiar. But measuring things in hogsheads and barleycorns used to be familiar too. Sometimes being familiar isn’t as important as following standards. Eventually the standard units will become familiar, and since they’re standard units, they’re much easier to work with.
not actually understand how power usage of watts of appliances would convert into Joule energy units
1 joule per watt each second. It’s dead easy. That’s why Joules should be used.
That’s why electric cars motor powers are still rated in Watts
Yes, power should be measured in Watts, that’s the standard unit for power, just like Joules are the standard unit for energy.
To add to that, that’s why so many metric countries (not USA) still use imperial units colloquially because they are more relatable in real life like
No they’re not, it’s just that people are used to them. The people whose minds are the hardest to change are the old people who have used some random unit for all their lives and don’t want to have to get used to some newfangled standard (a standard that’s actually hundreds of years old at this point). Because the old people refuse to change, the country gets stuck using that old unit, even if it’s informally, and so that’s what the kids learn, then they become old people and are also inflexible.
There’s nothing about an inch or a pound that’s naturally more intuitive than a centimetre or a kilogram. It’s just what you’re used to. Go somewhere where people grew up with metric and for them using anything other than metric feels strange and awkward. Pilots and sailors are used to knots, they never had to switch, but when they do complex calculations they mostly avoid using knots because doing conversions with non-SI units is such a massive pain in the ass.
People are just used to kWh. There’s nothing about it that’s more intuitive, it’s just more familiar.
No, you’re arguing for a second-based unit in a context where the hour-based unit dominates common use. The reason why we use hours is because hours is much more familiar across the contexts where electrical usage is metered: monthly bills, daily production/consumption cycles. Everyone knows that 3 days is 72 hours but pretty much nobody can come up with the answer in seconds without actually applying a conversion factor and making the calculation.
Energy is especially prone to the problem of how it’s calculated, simply because it’s such an important quantity to measure or calculate. Sometimes we use calories or electron volts because those make for easier conversions to other quantities in the context of temperature/heat or particle physics, respectively.
How is half a kg more relatable than one kg? Or how are 2½ cm more relatable than 1 cm? Or how are 30 cm more relatable than 10 cm or 100 cm?
I keep seeing your argument here and there, but I just cannot fathom what is meant by it. For me there’s nothing relatable at all in “foot”. It falls awkwardly between 10 cm and 100 cm and I cannot really make heads or tails about it. Except if I divide it by three, which gives me an approximate number in metres. But then the number could have been in metres in the first place.
Relatable I don’t think is the right word. Intuitive in its use and measurement, in specific scenarios.
Measurements always have a scaling and a precision problem. Humans are bad at math and scale, and really struggle mentally with numbers more than a few digits. If the number is too big, someone will either just accept it or ignore it. We like our nice round numbers, and funnily enough like our small prime numbers (1, 2, 3, and 5) and first few multiples of primes (4, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20) and numbers that just shift the decimal point around (10, 100, 1000)
Reference frames are also incredibly useful to us, especially when communicating.
The metric system jumps straight to moving the decimal place around, where imperial let’s you play around with other divisors. Let’s say I have a single digit of some unit and I want to half it. Generally in metric this is fine, doesn’t really add to the mental cognitive load. Half it again, or divide by one of the other primes, and the number of digits starts to explode (or is infinitely repeating). For the scalers within the imperial system, they naturally let you divide down and even re-express the same measurement in a different unit with fewer integer numbers and no precision loss
Edit:
Another example. Computer scientist don’t use metric, we bastardized parts of it and then invented extra units that fit the need and intuitiveness of working with them. We don’t use deci/deca or centi/centa, we bastardized kilo into 2^10 since 1024 is close to a thousand keeping it a nice power of two, a byte is 8 bits for the same reason and a nibble is 4 bits because halving bytes occasionally is useful. A word typically is 16 except when it is 32 bits, in which case 16 is a half word. Then we have dwords and qwords being twice and four times the size of a words, and then a page historically has been 4096 bytes since 1024 is kinda small, but newer systems sometime say a page is 64KB since 2^16 = 65536
While I think the metric system should be used more, I’ll also defend frantional measurements when precision matters. Decimal measurements only increase by a factor of 10. So if your precision is 1/8 of a meter, you have to either round to the nearest meter, overstate your precision (0.125 implies precision to 1mm), or essentially write a sentence (“125mm plus or minus 62.5mm”).
With fractional, the precision is built into the denominator. If your measurement of half a meter is precise to half a meter, you record it as “1/2”. If it’s precise to an pitch of a meter, you record it as “4/8”.
Sorry you totally lost me on the second paragraph. What you describe there is basically a British thing. On the continent people use m, kg and such for daily life things.
Knots are used because of historic influences and inertia. Imperial units in some special cases are exclusively used because of the influence of the US and again inertia.
Oh ok just a British thing so the ENTIRE BRITISH EMPIRE. Cool. Oh knots are used for historic influences like… Places that use imperial units colloquially but are official metric? Ohhh cool as well. Thanks for repeating just what I said and agreeing.
If you head actually read what I wrote instead of just making stuff up, you’d know that I was talking about the European contintent, on which, the tiny peninsula of Gibraltar aside, the British Empire had zero possessions after metrication. People there don’t use “inches” or “pounds” colloqually. Where I life they also don’t use some local old customary units for that, they simply use SI units for weight and dimensions. You are 176 cm tall and weigh 73kg …
And that does contradict your claim that generally people prefer those old customary units in daily life. They only do if they were raised that way.
The reason why customary units are still more widely used in daily life in regions formerly part of the British Empire is because there metrication was much more delayed, ie happened for real a lot later. The old ways take time to wither away, like they have in regions that had it all a lot earlier. It is ridiculous to suggest that those customary units are more useful to people in daily life but only if transition to metric for real wasn’t too long ago.
Nah it’s more relatable to humans regarding electricity consumption, the consumer would be confused and scared seeing 3.6 megajoules on a bill and not actually understand how power usage of watts of appliances would convert into Joule energy units. That’s why electric cars motor powers are still rated in Watts and the bill shows a relatable term.
To add to that, that’s why so many metric countries (not USA) still use imperial units colloquially because they are more relatable in real life like lbs and inches and feet. But then would use Km and grams in other contexts quite normally. And knots still always make more sense to pilots and sailors.
Just use joules per second :P
Way more intuitive than watts and watt hours
People are just used to kWh. There’s nothing about it that’s more intuitive, it’s just more familiar. But measuring things in hogsheads and barleycorns used to be familiar too. Sometimes being familiar isn’t as important as following standards. Eventually the standard units will become familiar, and since they’re standard units, they’re much easier to work with.
1 joule per watt each second. It’s dead easy. That’s why Joules should be used.
Yes, power should be measured in Watts, that’s the standard unit for power, just like Joules are the standard unit for energy.
No they’re not, it’s just that people are used to them. The people whose minds are the hardest to change are the old people who have used some random unit for all their lives and don’t want to have to get used to some newfangled standard (a standard that’s actually hundreds of years old at this point). Because the old people refuse to change, the country gets stuck using that old unit, even if it’s informally, and so that’s what the kids learn, then they become old people and are also inflexible.
There’s nothing about an inch or a pound that’s naturally more intuitive than a centimetre or a kilogram. It’s just what you’re used to. Go somewhere where people grew up with metric and for them using anything other than metric feels strange and awkward. Pilots and sailors are used to knots, they never had to switch, but when they do complex calculations they mostly avoid using knots because doing conversions with non-SI units is such a massive pain in the ass.
No, you’re arguing for a second-based unit in a context where the hour-based unit dominates common use. The reason why we use hours is because hours is much more familiar across the contexts where electrical usage is metered: monthly bills, daily production/consumption cycles. Everyone knows that 3 days is 72 hours but pretty much nobody can come up with the answer in seconds without actually applying a conversion factor and making the calculation.
Energy is especially prone to the problem of how it’s calculated, simply because it’s such an important quantity to measure or calculate. Sometimes we use calories or electron volts because those make for easier conversions to other quantities in the context of temperature/heat or particle physics, respectively.
Yes. Common use. You’re making my point for me. It’s what people are more familiar with.
Yes, it’s what people are more familiar with.
Who cares about 3 days? Do you run your hair dryer for 3 days or 60 seconds? Do you cook something on the stove for several minutes, or several days?
Again, it’s just what people are familiar with.
What makes lbs, inch and feet more relatable?
How is half a kg more relatable than one kg? Or how are 2½ cm more relatable than 1 cm? Or how are 30 cm more relatable than 10 cm or 100 cm?
I keep seeing your argument here and there, but I just cannot fathom what is meant by it. For me there’s nothing relatable at all in “foot”. It falls awkwardly between 10 cm and 100 cm and I cannot really make heads or tails about it. Except if I divide it by three, which gives me an approximate number in metres. But then the number could have been in metres in the first place.
Relatable I don’t think is the right word. Intuitive in its use and measurement, in specific scenarios.
Measurements always have a scaling and a precision problem. Humans are bad at math and scale, and really struggle mentally with numbers more than a few digits. If the number is too big, someone will either just accept it or ignore it. We like our nice round numbers, and funnily enough like our small prime numbers (1, 2, 3, and 5) and first few multiples of primes (4, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20) and numbers that just shift the decimal point around (10, 100, 1000)
Reference frames are also incredibly useful to us, especially when communicating.
The metric system jumps straight to moving the decimal place around, where imperial let’s you play around with other divisors. Let’s say I have a single digit of some unit and I want to half it. Generally in metric this is fine, doesn’t really add to the mental cognitive load. Half it again, or divide by one of the other primes, and the number of digits starts to explode (or is infinitely repeating). For the scalers within the imperial system, they naturally let you divide down and even re-express the same measurement in a different unit with fewer integer numbers and no precision loss
Edit: Another example. Computer scientist don’t use metric, we bastardized parts of it and then invented extra units that fit the need and intuitiveness of working with them. We don’t use deci/deca or centi/centa, we bastardized kilo into 2^10 since 1024 is close to a thousand keeping it a nice power of two, a byte is 8 bits for the same reason and a nibble is 4 bits because halving bytes occasionally is useful. A word typically is 16 except when it is 32 bits, in which case 16 is a half word. Then we have dwords and qwords being twice and four times the size of a words, and then a page historically has been 4096 bytes since 1024 is kinda small, but newer systems sometime say a page is 64KB since 2^16 = 65536
While I think the metric system should be used more, I’ll also defend frantional measurements when precision matters. Decimal measurements only increase by a factor of 10. So if your precision is 1/8 of a meter, you have to either round to the nearest meter, overstate your precision (0.125 implies precision to 1mm), or essentially write a sentence (“125mm plus or minus 62.5mm”).
With fractional, the precision is built into the denominator. If your measurement of half a meter is precise to half a meter, you record it as “1/2”. If it’s precise to an pitch of a meter, you record it as “4/8”.
Sorry you totally lost me on the second paragraph. What you describe there is basically a British thing. On the continent people use m, kg and such for daily life things.
Knots are used because of historic influences and inertia. Imperial units in some special cases are exclusively used because of the influence of the US and again inertia.
Oh ok just a British thing so the ENTIRE BRITISH EMPIRE. Cool. Oh knots are used for historic influences like… Places that use imperial units colloquially but are official metric? Ohhh cool as well. Thanks for repeating just what I said and agreeing.
If you head actually read what I wrote instead of just making stuff up, you’d know that I was talking about the European contintent, on which, the tiny peninsula of Gibraltar aside, the British Empire had zero possessions after metrication. People there don’t use “inches” or “pounds” colloqually. Where I life they also don’t use some local old customary units for that, they simply use SI units for weight and dimensions. You are 176 cm tall and weigh 73kg …
And that does contradict your claim that generally people prefer those old customary units in daily life. They only do if they were raised that way.
The reason why customary units are still more widely used in daily life in regions formerly part of the British Empire is because there metrication was much more delayed, ie happened for real a lot later. The old ways take time to wither away, like they have in regions that had it all a lot earlier. It is ridiculous to suggest that those customary units are more useful to people in daily life but only if transition to metric for real wasn’t too long ago.