This, right here, is the hill I will die on. Imperial/US customary unit divisions are superior to metric decimalization.
Comment on Converting numbers is easy
lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
People are focusing on the Excel part, I’ll focus on the maths.
I wish our societies picked base-12 instead of base-10. Divisions in base-12 give you repeating digits less often, and being able to split exactly by 3, 6, 9 and 12₁₀=10₁₂ is far more useful than doing it for 5 and 10₁₀=A₁₂.
user_name@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Metric “dozenalisation” would be perfectly viable, and metric-dozenal units would still look nothing like USA units.
I’ll use length for the example. All of them in base 10, just for clarity. (Also the name of the units would be different, but I’m not changing them for this example.)
- metric-decimal: 10⁻³ km = 10⁻² hm = 10⁻¹ dam = 10⁰m = 10¹dm = 10²cm = 10³mm
- metric-dozenal: 12⁻³ km = 12⁻²hm = 12⁻¹ dam = 12⁰m = 12¹dm = 12²cm = 12³mm
- USA units: 1/1760mi = 1yd = 3ft = 3*12 in = 3*12*6 P = 3*12*6*12 p
Are you noticing what the USA units do? They don’t stick to a base.
glitchdx@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
your argument could be enhanced with the inclusion of survey units.
12 inches to a foot
3 feet in a yard
22 yards in a chain
10 chains in a furlong
8 furlongs in a mile
3 miles in a league
lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
22 yards in a chain
What. I had to websearch this because it sounds too silly, but apparently it’s true.
But, really, even if it used saner numbers (like 12:3:24:8:3), it still feels nothing like a “metric dozenal” would look like. It’s missing the two things the metric system did right:
- All prefixes are unit-agnostic, like they were numbers. For example you can plop “kilo” = 10³ on weight (kilogram), length (kilometre), volume (kilolitre), energy, (kilojoule), etc.
- All prefixes must be an integer power of the base. For example you could make a 10⁸ prefix, even if there’s none, and it would be OK; but you can’t make, say, a 10^(2.447) = 300 one.
Siegfried@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Oh, I see you picked a pretty small hill to die in…
patrick@lemmy.bestiver.se 3 weeks ago
Me too! jackson.dev/post/base-10-was-a-mistake/