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brown567@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

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Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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.

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

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- Octavio@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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  - Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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!
    
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  - cute_noker@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    How would you convert to e.g nautical miles?
    
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Twelve20two@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
You can also count on your finger joints (excluding thumbs) for base 12, too

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- LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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
  
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Zwiebel@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

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