> Note: all units are in inches.

Not so universal as I'd hoped, but I love the concept and the organization behind it, Free Art and Technology Lab.

▲ qwerpy 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is this complaint just for the sake of complaining? You print out the pieces, they connect various toys together. The units could be light-years for all it matters.

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reaperducer 5 hours ago | parent [-]

There's something about the internet that makes people want to moan in public about nothing.

Whenever I see someone in a current British television show use "inches" or "feet," I'm reminded of the HN metric mafia that insists that the United States is the only place in the world that uses imperial units.

Even Wikipedia will tell you that's false.

	▲	vscode-rest 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Every post/comment is selecting across 100,000+ people worldwide for the individuals most likely to complain about it. There’s no other place on earth I can invite 100,000 people to disagree with me. Exception is maybe a public office. (Which the vast majority of people shy away from, for just this reason)

▲ timcobb 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's this universal constant 2.54 you can use it to divide any value in inches and badabing you get the value in centimeters

▲ genewitch 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

up until very recently, the only units that made it even remotely "universal" was US customary units. Or, as Arduino Vs Everyone on youtube says: "units that have gone to the moon."

Now, i speak larger measurements in metric if i think the person i am talking to understands or doesn't care; but short measurements i still use "quarter inch" or "teenth" or "thou" pronounced like "wow", from the beginning of "thousandth".

I know km, liters - i drink at least 3 liters of liquid a day, if not 4, but i drink it 1 quart beverage receptacle at a time, odd how that fits!

is it really so hard to have a ruler with both measurements? I have a ruler that lets you convert from font point to two other measurement units to inches, for page layout.

I'm american, from the '80s, and we never used metric day-to-day.

the US will be US customary units basically forever. because we're an absolutely massive geography, and there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of mile markers, speed limit signs, "distance to" signs, speed warning signs, gas stations, etc.

So 2026 is the year where i finally say: Please, please, shut up about this. No one cares.

	▲	aleph_minus_one 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> is it really so hard to have a ruler with both measurements? I have a ruler that lets you convert from font point to two other measurement units to inches, for page layout. The problem with the imperial unit system rather is that it does not form something "to build more complicated units out of". For example: if you want inch (in) as a unit, why not have "in^2" as a corresponding small area unit and "in^3" as corresponding volume unit? Additionally, there should be constant/regular conversion factors between the various subunits of a measure, i.e. `10^-3 km = 1 m = 10 dm = 100 cm = 1000 mm = 10^6 µm = 10^9 nm = ...` vs `1 lea = 3 mi = 24 fur = 240 ch = 5280 yd = 15840 ft = ...`
	▲	soopypoos 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I can't take seriously anyone who measures butter by volume