The most annoying nuisance of the system is, by far, wire gauges. For example: A big wire is, say, .5 AWG (american wire gauge) whereas a small wire is maybe 36 AWG. Does it seem completely ridiculous to anyone else that thicker wires have smaller numbers? Yes? good. Now lets say I want to go REALLY big. Like, you know, bigger than zero… guess what bigger than 0 is. Nope, wrong. It’s 00. Going bigger than 00 is 000, then 0000 (see where this madness is going?). To make things easier, you write 00 as 2/0,  000 as 3/0, etc. and pronounce these as “two aught”, “three aught”, etc. After 4/0 it switches completely to a different system. Yeah. You heard me.

From Wikipedia: (shut up, it’s a valid source)

In the North American electrical industry, conductors larger than 4/0 AWG are generally identified by the area in thousands of circular mils (kcmil), where 1 kcmil = 0.5067 mm². A circular mil is the area of a wire one mil in diameter. One million circular mils is the area of a cylinder with 1000 mil = 1 inch diameter. An older abbreviation for one thousand circular mils is MCM.

Well, gosh.

Wait. Lets say I need a very specific diameter of wire. If I’m a brilliant American, I’d just go to my handy equation for AWG using diameter…

Simple!

.. wait.. what? Log base 92. Are you kidding me? Who the hell thought this crap up? Someone had better have lost their job over this.

However, If I go to the magical land of Metric, I’m sure they have a similar system… I mean.. it doesn’t get much more simple than AWG. There really can’t be that much room for improvement. Logarithms just seem so…. intuitive..

The Metric System

In metric-land, the gauge of wire is just given in cross sectional area (mm²). You know, so you could say things like “I need a 1 mm² wire”. Wow! simple! You could even use an equation you learned how to do in grade school, A = πr², to figure out this humdinger.

So what’s the catch? You have to be a terrorist, or look like this guy to use it.

Metric System User

Can we please just switch already? Who’s on board with me?