And I just understood why that’s the case. Most of the old units used highly composite numbers as factors, which have an incredibly high number of divisors. We still widely use such factors for time and angles.
- 4: 1, 2, 4
- 5: 1, 5
- 6: 1, 2, 3, 6
- 10: 1, 2, 5, 10
- 12: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12
- 20: 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20
- 24: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24
- 50: 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50
- 60: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60
- 100: 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, 100
- 120: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 24, 30, 40, 60, 120
- 360: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180, 360
- 840: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 20, 21, 24, 28, 30, 35, 40, 42, 56, 60, 70, 84, 105, 120, 140, 168, 210, 280, 420, 840
- 1000: 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 20, 25, 40, 50, 100, 125, 200, 250, 500, 1000
dankm@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
I like to measure the area of rooms in foot-metres. Square foot-metres is a great unit for volume.
Today I unironically described the length of something as “about 1 centimetre less than a foot”.