Are display sizes always measured in inches?
I've realized that the display size, in inches, is sometimes in the name or model number of electronics that are sold not just in the US. Do people outside the US also talk about buying 55-inch TVs, 14-inch laptops, and 27-inch monitors? Does it naturally roll off the tongue or does it seem strange to anyone?
If it's all inches, why didn't measuring screens in centimeters take off?
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When traveling in Japan, I do recall seeing TVs marked in inches. But in a world where globalization has made goods ever more accessible and affordable, this shouldn't be too surprising.
Another example of ostensibly American or British Imperial units, lots of plumbing around the world is sized in inches or fractions of inches. But even in the USA, there might not be any dimension which actually measures the same as the trade designation. For example, 1/2-inch Schedule 40 PVC pipe has an inner and outer diameter that is larger than 0.5 inch (12.7 mm). In the UK, I understand that they might round off these trade designations to centimeters, but I have no idea if that would then reflect their true outside diameter or if it's just a straight conversion of the trade destination.
Aviation also uses feet for altitude in most of the world, with even ardently metric countries like Russia changing in 2017-2020 from meters to feet. In all these cases, it's ultimately a matter of harmonization to reduce confusion and increase compatibility, either technically, procedurally, or economically.
TV's and plumbing are still measured in inches in the UK, the measuring system was already in place when we went metric and it was what people were used to. Plumbing fittings are as you said now rounded off to millimetres etc. but the actual physical size is still the same as the original imperial. For example what is referred to as a 25mm fitting is actually one inch (25.4 mm).
The airlines measuring things in feet gets under my skin so hard. >:(
It gets even more interesting when aviation uses:
The bizarre thing is that these are all conventions that stemmed from good rationale, at least initially. Using meters for horizontal distances means it's hard to confuse it with vertical distance, when speaking over rough radio comms. Statute miles is what the meteorological agency in the USA would report, and ATC provides that information to pilots. And nautical miles, as the name suggests, has a rich seafaring tradition, which aviation adopted wholesale.
It's why aircraft have the red (left) and green (right) navigational lights, same as ships do. It's also why the "rule of the road" for two intersecting aircraft is for the right-hand aircraft to go first, since their pilot sees the other's green light, while showing a red light to the halting aircraft.
TL;DR: everything boils down to: "it's how we've always done it"
Tho relationship of nautical miles and knots for speed is really good for navigating over a sphere. There are some handy shortcuts that make quick mental calculations fast and intuitive, specially with an e6b flight computer (not an electronic).
The alternative would've been to use euclidean planes, projections and radian transformations, which would've been harder to use for navigating.
meters for horizontal distances, such as
not really. distance is measured in (nautical) miles, speed in knots (1 knot is 1 nautical mile per hour)
why though?
It actually works pretty well by chance more than anything else. 1000 ft is a really good altitude separation between aircraft. 500 is a good offset for irregular traffic too. Multiples of 150/300 m are more annoying to work with and 500/1000 m would waste an excessively large amount of airspace.