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>The imperial system has shortcomings for small units Don't forget the medium and large units! I guess miles on their own work fine, but it'd be nice if someo
by wlesieutre 7y ago
>The imperial system has shortcomings for small units
Don't forget the medium and large units!
I guess miles on their own work fine, but it'd be nice if someone could say "2000 feet" and I didn't have to think about how many miles that means.
And our two speed measures of feet per second and miles per hour are close to equivalent (1 fps is about 0.7 mph) but nobody knows that to convert it in their heads. It just happens that 3600 seconds is the same order of magnitude as 5280 feet.
Not that metric is totally better in that regard since they're stuck with minutes and seconds too. There's 86,400 seconds in a day, maybe when we're making this big calendar change we can switch it over to 100,000 seconds at the same time.
Or we could change miles to be 3600 feet so that feet per seconds and miles per hour are equivalent. Added bonus, that's not too far off a kilometer.
- mlok 7y agoFor time, I think the equivalent would be the "Internet Time" created 20 years ago : one day is 1000 beats. 1 beat = 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
- asavadatti 7y ago0.7 and 1 are not close to equivalent even when speaking informally. The difference is the same as driving normal highway speed vs license suspension (or jail) speed
- wlesieutre 7y agoI don't mean they're close enough to be interchangeable, just that they're close enough that it's dumb to have separate scales. They're useful for having people understand speeds at different scales, but only because the different scales of units line up stupidly. Of course the effort to change it isn't worth it, it just makes you wish we'd got it right the first time around.
- maxlybbert 7y agoOne thing I learned from a Disney movie of Goofy driving is that multiplying a speed in miles per hour by 1.5 gives a surprisingly close approximation to feet per second.
- saalweachter 7y agoWe could also just declare a metric foot to be 1/3 of a meter, and a metric mile to be 1600 meters or 4800 metric feet.