So apparently (I discovered this today while playing with a calculator with unit conversions, in the past I thought that they weren't whole number multiples of each other), a foot is 12 inches, a yard is 3 feet and a mile is 1760 yard.

My question is, why is a different multiplier factor used for each? And, are people in the United States really good at dividing through 3, 12 and 1760 in their head?

I'm Canadian, so I'm familiar with both systems, and to be perfectly honest I've rarely needed to convert on the fly, except for going from inches to feet.

I'm an American. I've always treated the mile as 5280 feet, and generally speaking you very rarely have to precisely convert these units. In fact I cannot remember doing so, ever, except for trivia purposes.

In special cases, like in an aircraft, one often just decides on a unit of measure for a purpose (like feet for altitude, knots for speed, nautical miles for distance) and uses it strictly for its purpose, never converting. (For special purposes, metric units are also a perfectly valid choice.)

I have, however, converted for kilometers and while I know the 1.609 conversion factor, if strict accuracy isn't necessary it's typical to treat a kilometer as 2/3 of a mile.

I also know that some organizations like NASA avoid shifting to metric if it's a pain in the rear; they have a mountain of tooling and schematics and so on built assuming English units...

I think the USAF might use metric, but I can't remember.

Its usually not a big deal. You dont measure football fields in inches. Or car speeds in yards per hour. Or the length of your hair in miles.

Generally, you use the unit applicable to what you're discussing. You'd also say something like half a yard vs 1.5 feet or 18 inches.

When there's a conversion involved, you break out google or the conversion tool on most phones.

This is what calculators are for Also, I hardly ever hear anyone actually using yards. Whenever yards are mentioned anywhere in fact, my default in my mind is to think feet. Then I realize what I just did and triple the number. Its always wierd when someone says 100yards, or something

I second Zacaj's post; I just plain don't use yards.

There's also something called "stone" (for weight) that I think the English use but I've not heard it used in Oregon, Georgia or Florida.

I second Zacaj's post; I just plain don't use yards.

There's also something called "stone" (for weight) that I think the English use but I've not heard it used in Oregon, Georgia or Florida.

So, you don't measure physical force in stone furlong per fortnight squared in those parts? Man youse bubbas are sooo backwards.

I'm actually switching to the post-quantified-unitary scale.

A truck, for example weighs roughly 15 to 25 fridge-mass.

But you can't know both if the fridges are filled or unfilled and their capacity at the same time, because knowledge is merely a social construct.

But I understand if it doesn't fly with y'all; it's only for intellectuals.

Don't think too much about it. I was born in a country where SI is used (wait, that's pretty much everywhere else..) and then moved to US. I had this mental image of how far/wide/long things are when somebody said 10km or 100m. Then I moved to the US, and people start saying gibberish like "100 feet" and "5 yards" which messes with my head. Then I got used to the Imperial units and now the SI confuses me.

My professional career revolves around measuring things, so I'm fairly comfortable using either imperial and metric. However, I hate inches, also referred to as "architectural units." Inches and fractions thereof tend to hide precision (or lack thereof), and I find things much simpler using decimal feet.

To add a bit more confusion, there are actually 2 different kinds of feet - the International Foot and US Survey Foot, and they differ in length.