Benchmark tables for BL, Damage, Damage Resistance?

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Doesn't that have a cost, in monetary terms, efficiency and in terms of calculation errors, that wouldn't occur if it were metric only?

No more (and probably less) than doing business with partners in different time zones, using different currencies, and under different regulatory systems.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by RyanW

No more (and probably less) than doing business with partners in different time zones, using different currencies, and under different regulatory systems.

For me as a consumer and an entrepreneur, rarely. When I decide how to dress, my phone tells me the temperature outside in °F. When I want to measure space in a room, I have a yardstick, or a tape measure that uses inches. When I buy food, the package gives the weight in pounds. When we drive somewhere, the distance is given in miles and the speedometer shows miles per hour. I encounter those units all the time, and I can use them without having to think about them. If I were told a distance in kilometers, or a weight in kilograms, I'd have to do mental arithmetic to figure out what it meant in familiar terms. These are contexts that I encounter every day or every week, and that reinforce the customary units, whereas I virtually never encounter metric units there. So the cost of using customary units is essentially negligible.

[Anders]

What bugs me most about imperial units are the volume ones. In metric, you can go easily from a volume to the dimensions of the container, since 1 liter equals 1 dm^3. There's not an easy formula to go from pints to cubic inches - instead you need a conversion factor. It's a minor inconvenience but it bugs the hell out of me.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Anders

There's not an easy formula to go from pints to cubic inches - instead you need a conversion factor.

Never once in my entire American life have I needed to convert from pints to cubic inches.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Never once in my entire American life have I needed to convert from pints to cubic inches.

Only in school. Never once in my "adult" life. It's never been relevant.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Never once in my entire American life have I needed to convert from pints to cubic inches.

My conversion point for those two has always been cubic feet to gallons (and thus to pints). That comes up in weird what-if scenarios that tend to hover around RPG's, or (most commonly), when I'm trying to figure out the weight of something from its measurement in cubic feet.


I look it up each time. Or try to find an alternate way to get what I want, because usually pints is an intermediate step on the weigh to mass.

[Keampe]

I worked construction up here in Canada for about 10 years. Funny thing is everything is in metric - except construction materials. We would often get architectural blueprints in millimeters and have to convert them into inches/feet. As long as you got to within 1/16th of an inch it was considered OK.

But knowing both systems - I was born when Canada still used Imperial and was in grade school when they changed - I do think that Metric is the far superior system. Even in the US the military uses metric, IIRC. Probably to mesh with NATO troops.

People who think that Imperial is better just know the system and are used to it. To be fair for them it is better because of that.

Just my 2c
- Shane

[Rupert]

New Zealand's been officially metric since the 70s, but people of my generation (who grew up during and shortly after the changeover) still use Imperial units for some things. One of the odder ones to me is for people's heights - in day to day speech people's heights are still often given in feet and inches, yet their weight is almost invariably given in kilos.

There are still quite a few things that, while their size is given in metric, are Imperial in actual size. For example, the standard large soft drink bottle is 2.25L, which is just about half a gallon (Imperial).

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Rupert

There are still quite a few things that, while their size is given in metric, are Imperial in actual size. For example, the standard large soft drink bottle is 2.25L, which is just about half a gallon (Imperial).

Humorously, that's about the one place where metric is actually used in the US. Soft drinks are sold in 2L, and occasionally 1L, bottles when it's meant to be poured, while it's sold in ounces (generally 8 for cans and 16 for bottles, although there are smaller and larger cans as well as 20 oz and 24 oz bottles) when it's meant to be consumed straight from the container. Occasionally you'll come across half-liter bottles in convenience stores and the like, similarly meant for straight consumption. IIRC, in all cases the "serving size*" listed on the container is in ounces.

*I guess this is another place where metric is used in the US - the nutritional labels usually have things like carbohydrates, fats, sodium, etc listed in mg or g. That doesn't really give an intuitive grasp of amount, other than knowing something with 500 mg sodium per serving is a Bad Idea (particularly if on a low sodium diet, like me) or the like.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Varyon

*I guess this is another place where metric is used in the US - the nutritional labels usually have things like carbohydrates, fats, sodium, etc listed in mg or g. That doesn't really give an intuitive grasp of amount, other than knowing something with 500 mg sodium per serving is a Bad Idea (particularly if on a low sodium diet, like me) or the like.

The US uses calories for nutrition, which is more or less metric*, and I don't know that customary units even have a real competitor for it. Calories and grams are very related, because a gram of carbohydrates, protein, fat, or alchohol have 4, 4, 9, or 7 calories in them respectively.

*its not the primary measure of energy, which is joules, and the conversion of ~4184 joules per calorie is awkward, but doesn't come up that much.

I suppose getting the feel for the "amount" of anything is mostly just experience using it. I use a measurement called the "Pixel" in my daily life, which is hardly metric, yet not really customary either. It just kind of is a measurement I need. Which I suppose applies to DR as well.