You can also count on your finger joints (excluding thumbs) for base 12, too
Comment on 5 tomatoes
brown567@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
Oh, get off your high horse
Your basic unit for speed is m/s, but for most day-to-day purposes you use km/hr. The conversion between the two isn’t even an integer!
Not only that, but your system, by virtue of being decimal, inherits all the shortcomings of our quite flawed numbering system. You can’t divide something by the second smallest prime number without breaking out repeating decimals.
In my opinion, a good measuring system would make up for those shortcomings instead. It should be divisible by at least the numbers you can count on one hand. Decimal covers 2 and 5, so ideally the measurement unit would cover 3 and 4. So that would be a base 12 system. Technically 4, being 2², would be covered too, so 3 would do just fine. Ta-da! 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard.
Twelve20two@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Okay so to fuck us all over we can go to base 9.
We can divide evenly by 1,3,9. But actually remember:
1/9 - .11111
2/9 - .2222
…
8/9 - .8888
So easily divisable right? /s
Zwiebel@feddit.org 3 days ago
Ta-da! 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard
That is not the win you think it is since metric only has one unit, the meter, to begin with so no conversion needed at all. 12 meters in 12 meters, three meters in three meters.
Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
What’s more 0.203 cm or 0.291 cm? How about 3/8" or 19/64"?
How far is 1/3 of a mile? 1/3 km is 333m. How about 1/9? 1/9 km is 111m How long is 10 x 5/16"? 10 x 3.1cm is 31cm
Yeah, a foot breaks down easy in whole inches with many factors, but that’s about it
Octavio@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Most people who deal in imperial units know off the top of their head that 1/3 of a mile is 1760 feet. They don’t have to calculate it. After a while you see that number come up often enough and it’s committed to memory.
I’m not saying that metric isn’t better, it is, and I wish we would hurry up and switch to it. I’m just saying that the numbers involved aren’t a handicap once you have worked with the imperial system for a while. If you have a set of sockets that you work with every day, you know instantly that 3/8” is bigger than 19/64”. Hell, even 5/16” is bigger than 19/64”.
And, you must admit, 333 meters is not one third of a kilometer. It is one third of 999 meters. The number 5280, for all its awkwardness, is beautiful in the sense that it is evenly divisible by 12, Meaning that it can be exactly divided into quarters, thirds, or halves without a fractional part.
Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
I gotta say, you make some fair points.
It’s a lot of memorization that I simply haven’t done and won’t ever have to do.
The fraction reduction doesn’t help intuitive thought. If imperial operated on ‘significant digits’ and marked any set or document with a 64th always as 64ths, as in 16/64ths, I’d be more on board.
We just need to replace out base 10 system of counting with base 12 and we’d get the best of both worlds!
Octavio@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Yeah, absolutely, I’m not arguing in favor of making everyone do the memorization, I just think it’s interesting that it occurs after enough exposure.
I’ve often thought that if we’d have evolved to have 6 digits instead of 5, we might have adopted a base 12 system and made fractional calculations a lot easier.
cute_noker@feddit.dk 6 days ago
How would you convert to e.g nautical miles?
Octavio@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Oh, what’s interesting about a nautical mile is that it wasn’t originally even based on a number of feet or meters or whatever. It represented one minute of latitude (60 minutes in a degree type of minutes). Since the earth is an oblate spheroid instead of a perfect sphere, that meant that traditional nautical miles varied based on your position until they were standardized it in 1929.
I think it’s about 1.85 kilometers, but I wouldn’t have occasion to do the conversion because I’m a landlubber.