I count a flat 8.

The only positive thing I see about imperial is that things are easily divisible by 3 and 6, but that's about it. Then again, if doing the same with metric, you're usually fine rounding to the nearest millimetre, and if that isn't accurate enough, it's probably not supposed to be done by hand anyway.

Metric is used all around the world, but comes from a quarter of it.

I use both in my wood shop. Sometimes it's easier to lay things out in metric or divide numbers, but other times it's easier to remember an imperial number to go make a cut.

All units of measure are abstract.

I like metric because it's structured around an abstract amount. Even something like Celsius is pretty abstract, because the freezing and boiling point of water changes depending on the atmospheric pressure. The measure of a second? Why is a second, 1 second long? Why is it 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of a day? There's other stuff based on seconds too, like Hertz, which is literally "cycles per second"

I like to think about how abstract these things are, because if we were to ever try to communicate with a truly alien race, we couldn't really use numbers, because their base numbering system would be different than ours, their symbols for numbers would be different, their entire understanding of math and how to calculate stuff could be wildly different, possibly because they understand things we do not. We couldn't even say to them to communicate on a specific frequency of EM, because that frequency is based on Hertz, which is based on seconds, which is based on ????? IDFK (neither would they). We base everything we know on the world around us, and that's entirely unique to earth. We make so many assumptions about how things are because we've only ever experienced life on this planet.

The only thing that kind of makes sense is how many days of the year there are, because it's based on solid science about our solar system. It's still unique to earth, but at least it makes sense on a larger scale. Everything else? Who the hell knows. Why is a meter as long as it is? Who defined this? Why? What abstract Earth-based thing was this based on that other societies of individuals would have no point of reference to relate to?

It's wild we've made it this far, to be honest.

Anyways, I kind of got sidetracked... I guess all I'm really trying to say is that metric makes more sense than whatever the USA is doing. Even if it's just as abstract in its conception.

The only metric to imperial conversion I remember is kilometers to miles since it's pretty close to the golden ratio.

Even if you don't remember that the golden ratio is 1.6 and a bit, you can approximate it by using successive terms of the Fibonacci sequence.

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 ...

So 8 miles is about 13km (actually 12.87)

What about a nautical mile?

Just remember God giving you a single grain of sand. "One thou sand".

Not a easy to remember as 5 tomatoes.

Me watching a BBC TV show: "The suspect's home is five miles away."

shocked pikachu

Imperial actually makes sense if there system was invented by someone who only had polyhedral dice to count with.

Fair, but I lived in Denver for 26 years. I will never forget the number of feet in a mile. 😂

If Americans don't stop the foot thing soon I will bring back the havoc and destruction of using local measure!!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_units_of_measurement

No I will not define it. I will just tell you I ran 2/3 mile and that I am prussian, now you have to look it up, convert it to meters, convert that back to your mile and then you know what I am talking about.

Btw this mile is way easier to remember because a mile is 24000 feet.

Not in defense of the imperial system, but if you're curious why it's so arbitrary, it's a crazy story about untangling a ton of proprietary guild measurements. The mile itself isn't quite proprietary (it was defined as 8 furlongs, and you can blame the English for ruining a perfectly good roman measurement) but they needed to make it a certain number of chains, rods, yards, and feet, plus a few other obscure measurements I forget about. Naturally that results in a stupid conversation rate (mostly vs yards and feet since it was basically a different system).

Why we still use it, dunno. I can see an argument for keeping feet and inches for things like carpentry (in the similar way I like hexadecimal in programming) but miles is not that. It's about as logical as this point as fahrenheit, which is to say it's outdated nonsense.