Comment

Comment on You've Just Been Hit By The Metric System Boys

<- View Parent

floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

Ready to have your mind blown?

You can write 1/6m.

You can write π m.

source

Sort:hotnew top

Bluewing@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Now go cut me a board 1/6m without a measuring device. Do it by eye. With a fractional system 1/6 of a foot is far easier to do.

source
- MyRumIsVodka@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  Now go cut me a board 1/6m without a measuring device. Do it by eye. With a fractional system 1/6 of a foot is far easier to do.
  
  You probably could do it if you grew up measuring things in centimetres and metres, instead of inches, elbows and feet.
  
  In fact I’m often eyeballing ~10cm = 1/10m based on the size of my middle finger, and ~20cm = 1/5m based on the distance between the tips of my thumb and pinkie when my hand is fully spread out.
  
  You’re confusing “it’s more intuitive because I grew up with it” with “it’s intrinsically more intuitive”.
  
  source
  - Bluewing@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I’m perfectly happy and able to seamlessly shift between systems. You seem stuck at “Ugh, me sure me right and all else wrong!” attitude.
    
    And you, by your examples, are STILL using a device to measure things because the metric system isn’t that intuitive. You are using body parts that you have predetermined the approximate lengths of. I can tell a 4 year old child to cut a piece of paper in half and they intuitively understand about how much that is with no pre-measured body parts.
    
    source
- floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Are you saying that you can estimate fractional lengths by eye better in imperial than in metric, or that using a fractional measuring device is more precise than using no device at all? Neither option seems like a good point tbh.
  
  But let’s entertain that since imperial is a fractional system it makes cutting fractions of foot-long boards easier. For 1/6 that’s 2", very cool, mission accomplished, much superior than 16.7cm. But what if you need to cut 1/5 or 1/7? Now you need to work with 1/32" subdivisions while metric stays the same and allows you to keep working at however many decimal positions of accuracy the job requires. A 1/7m board can be 14.3cm if you’re going to use it as timber, or 142.86mm if it’s for aerospace applications. Unless I’m not allowed to use any measuring device, because reasons?
  
  Fractions and bases don’t relate to each other in the way you think they do
  
  source