Comment on Halp.
fallingcats@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months agoOkay I’ll bite. How do you take a third of an inch, and how is it better than in millimeters?
Comment on Halp.
fallingcats@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months agoOkay I’ll bite. How do you take a third of an inch, and how is it better than in millimeters?
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Same way you’d take a third of a centimeter: Get out a micrometer and set it to 0.3333, that’ll be pretty close.
The main benefit to the metric system is it’s all base ten. One kilometer is 1000 meters, one kilogram is 1000 grams, you don’t have to memorize that there’s 16 cups in a gallon etc. For a lot of things that works well, the problem is with base ten itself. You run into the same problems with 1000 millimeters in a meter than you do trying to work in thousandths of an inch, it doesn’t divide by 3 particularly well and you get those weird repeating digits.
We kinda did have a base twelve system going, isn’t it weird how we have a special word for twelve in English? There’s 12 hours on a clock face and 12 inches in a foot. And from there, we work in powers of two.
Woodworkers don’t traditionally cut boards to 1 inch or 2 inches thick; they’re rough sawn to that thickness and then dried and milled to 3/4" or 1 1/2". Which are 1/16th or 1/8th of a foot, and both are divisible by 2 and 3 and expressed in a power-of-two fraction. a third of 3/4" is 1/4".
It works very well until someone who doesn’t actually understand it tries to contrive a way to make it not work in the same way their preferred system also doesn’t work.
For many other things, the metric system is easier to deal with, I would much rather do physics in metric than in Imperial (also I’m American, I actually use SAE) but woodworking in a dozenal system is a discipline that is millennia old, the bugs have been very thoroughly shaken out. I would rather build furniture in inches.
fallingcats@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Okay but then that third is more of a lucky coincidence than a function of the measurement system. That’s like saying millimeters are good for woodworking because boards are traditionally milled to 18mm and you can divide that by 2, 3, 4, 6 and 9.