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> The problem with these versions is that they don’t explain why this collision between furlong and mile occurred around 1600, and not centuries before. It impl

• Flockster 6y ago
  Sorry, but I fail to see the brocken system here.. Isn't the calculation true?
  • rnestler 6y ago
    They probably meant that the whole imperial system is still broken compared to the metric, but is still in use nevertheless.
    • shuntress 6y ago
      I wouldn't call imperial measures "broken". I typically prefer imperial measures in simple projects because they tend do feel more practical. In things like woodwork, carpentry, papercraft, etc and inch, a foot, or a quarter inch tend to "fit" very well and are easily divided. Specifically with papercraft, I prefer working in inches over centimeters because inch, half inch, and quarter inch all essentially function as "full" units and are very easily divided/combined and tend to "fit" better with most projects. A half.inch tends to usually feel like a good margin. A few inches tends to work well for a card. A quarter inch generally seems right for a small spacing. That is significantly more useful to me than base-10 conversions because (for example) 1 inch and 1 half inch feels easier to keep in mind than 1 centimeter and 5 millimeters (or 1 centimeter and 1.5 centimeters).
      • benhurmarcel 6y ago
        To me it sounds mostly that you like it because you're used to it. For me doing DIY projects in mm feels very natural (basically every measure is an integer), much more so than seeing videos of Americans juggling fractions.
        • OJFord 6y ago
          I recently started watching some metalworking videos, and Americans in those use 'thou' (more confusingly aka 'mil') - thousandths of an inch. That seems mostly fine to me, it's a different scale, but whatever, it's just as sane if you don't need it to interact with volumetric measurements etc. Woodworkers obviously don't need or want the accuracy of the 'thou' digit, but it seems to me that similarly normalising on decimal fractions and using 'huns' or 'around 12x thou' would be an improvement. But then, they're used to it and happy with it, it's only viewers like me who aren't that are thinking about it! (I'm British, so use Imperial in some contexts, including casually sizing small things in inches, but probably never fractional other than 1/2".)
          • C1sc0cat 6y ago
            A thou was in very common use in the uk in engineering before the switch to metric.
            • OJFord 6y ago
              Oh I don't doubt it, I'm not saying it's some weird or wonderful exclusively American thing, I'm just too young to be aware of it from anywhere else, and suggesting that it or similar (tenths, hundredths) would be an improvement on 2^x denominated fractions even in applications that don't need such accuracy. Put another way, I think if everyone (not just precision applications) used decimalised inches, it would just be a different scale and ~nobody would care to say 'omg why don't you use metric'.
              • bluGill 6y ago
  • JdeBP 6y ago
    I believe that jedd was characterizing both non-metric systems, Elizabethan and before, as broken. That's true, but not for the reason that people usually think. The common misunderstanding of the history here is that the world went straight from measuring things with bodyparts to metric. It did not. Even if we count Charlemagne as having done that (which he didn't; he having received physical standards from Harun al-Rashid), there were nine centuries of mucking about between that and the invention of the metric system, during which time physical standards were used, lost, stolen, forged, damaged, cunningly altered, eroded, deformed, and replaced. Furthermore, people did various gymnastics to account for the results, such as changing the number of onces to the livre or to the marc. England was one part of a wider world, and that world was a Hell of a mess. Metric was not just decimalization, it was consolidation on a single standard, which was particularly pressing in 18th century France, by which time the Carolingian system had shattered into hundreds of thousands of different systems in France alone. (Lookup tables of the time also included conversion factors for towns in France's neighbours. The mess wasn't limited to France by any means.) Modern stuff like the last few official users of the pint in the world not agreeing on how big it is, is in fact peanuts compared to the mess that the metric system replaced.
    • saalweachter 6y ago
      It's also worth noting the French-English angle here. The meter was basically the Parisian yard; the crazy definition of 1/10,000th the length of a quarter-circle running from the north pole to the equator through France was picked because (a) it gave something very close to the Parisian yard and (b) it gave an agreed upon standard for all of the hundreds of disjoint local variants of the yard, as you mention. So now that everyone has already adopted the meter, it's the standard, but if you're back in 18th-19th century England, which already had a well-standardized national system of measure, and here comes your long-time rival France with a new standard system of measure, derived from first principles, they say, perfectly rational, and it just coincidentally is the same as their old unit of measure, you're going to be a bit skeptical that you should abandon your units in favor of theirs.
      • JdeBP 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
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• ajuc 6y ago
  Very bad analogy, the calculation in metric is correct unlike the calculation with furlongs, that's the whole point. 660 ft/furlong * 8 furlongs/mile = 5280 feet/mile != 5000 feet/mile 1 mm * 1 hectare = 0.001 m * 100 m * 100 m = 10 m^3 = 10 000 dm^3 = 10 000 l
• dmoy 6y ago
  Some replies here are missing that the mile used to be 5000 feet, hence the parent's statements. (It's also the whole article?)
  • Jedd 6y ago
    Oh, I totally got that the math was bonkers, and it's weird that it took so long to fix it. My point is that even in contemporary times there's sometimes significant inertia against finally fixing other objectively bonkers measurement systems in outlier communities.
    • dmoy 6y ago
      Ah fair enough, I should have assumed better :)
• dylan604 6y ago
  Someone here sometime back tried to say that dividing by 2 or doubling a value is easier than X10 or /10 (pro imperial argument). To me, metrics is so much easier. It's literally as easy as moving the decimal point 1 place left or right. No math is involved at all. Just moving a dot. How that is supposed to be harder than doubling/halving eludes me.
  • corty 6y ago
    Doubling and halving is easier in binary, just add or remove a digit ;)
  • smitty1e 6y ago
    Now do it with a dozen eggs. Integer factors have a hard practicality about them that eludes the elegant abstraction of SI.
    • boudin 6y ago
      I've seen this example of egg dozens everywhere but i don't get it, egg dozens aren't related to inches. It's just a random number of eggs that happens to be common in packing. Let's say there's any practical reason to have a measurement system bases on 12 egg packs, it falls flat with a 100 nails one...
      • smitty1e 6y ago
        12 has while number factors of 1,2,3,4 and 6 and 12. That handiness is why the usage of the dozen and the foot persists.
        • boudin 6y ago
          Sorry but i fail to see how it's handy. To stay with thr egg pack unit, it's much easier to say i want 7 eggs rather than a 0.58 of pack (not even sure it's right in egg/inches). Even this i find it much more convenient in 10s. A pack of 10 eggs? You can easily express any content (0.1, 0.2, 0.3...) Move to the lower unit (move the coma). A quarter of an egg in egg packs? 0.025 Want to move in the egg unit? 0.25 Please prove me wrong but i fail to see how it's easier in 12th, when using a decimal number system.
• Theodores 6y ago
  I have no idea how big a hectare or an acre is. Now I know the 100m by 100m bit. But why don't I know? No skin in the game. If I owned land then I suspect that I would know exactly how big a hectare or an acre was. If acres were the discussed measurement unit then those would be the units I would use for my understanding, much like how that in the fairly metric UK we still use feet and inches for comparing height. In the UK people know their height in feet and inches. If you are a guy that is all to do with 6 ft. If you are 5ft something tall you are not 'tall', if you are over 6 foot tall then you are 'tall'. Nobody has the foggiest what that means in centimetres or metres. There are also practicalities. I am okay measuring things in the garden with a stick. Then measuring that against paving slabs which are two foot or 60cm across. For me the paving slab is the unit. None of this metre nonsense. Miles are also variable. Due to weather, traffic and foliage you can walk one mile between markers and it be different each time. But that doesn't make the measurement any less useful. With all these legacy measurements they work great for casual use. Horses height? That will be hands, please. Building height? Storeys. Mountain height? Feet. 100 metres? Well that is 100 yards. None of it is logical, we are not comparing apples and oranges with these vernacular units, the trick is to use them up to the point where proper SI units are needed. See them as like the words we use for temperature. It is going to be hot/cold/warm/freezing today is fine, 'today could get to 23.2 degrees!' is just confusing even if well meaning.
  • fyfy18 6y ago
    > which are two foot or 60cm across That's not exact though. 1ft = 30.48cm. If you are working in your own garden that's probably close enough, but for anything else the errors will quickly add up. Tiles are often made to have sides that are 30cm or 60cm, if you try and tile a bathroom that is 12ft across assuming tiles are 1ft each, you'll get to the other side and end up with an odd piece. I was born and raised in the UK, and honestly I think we have it worse than the US. At least the US consistently uses the same units (although the wet vs dry weights are confusing). When I learnt to drive I suddendly had to learn what feet mean, even though I'd never used them before in my life.
    • jaclaz 6y ago
• AniseAbyss 6y ago
  To be fair the metric system was introduced by a military dictatorship. Science enforced by the sword.
  • oblio 6y ago
    Most of the countries that adopted later didn't adopt it at gunpoint. They were just... humble :-)
    • rob74 6y ago
      or sensible?
  • ngold 6y ago
    Well it was Frances first revolution. It took a couple to get right...ish.
  • Jedd 6y ago
    Introduced ... where? The distance components were created (arguably) about a hundred years before bits of Europe adopted it. When I was in Greenwich (the real one) years ago, our guide told the story, which may be apocryphal, that the Brits negotiated with the French way back about the meridian. The Brits got to keep the prime meridian by agreeing to adopt metric. Which they then failed do to do for a couple of centuries (and even then ...). Unfortunately I can't find anything to substantiate this story just now.
    • fanf2 6y ago
      Greenwich became the standard meridian at the International Meridian Conference in Washington DC in 1884 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Confere... It was at the instigation of the USA and it was partly to do with the establishment of the time zone system, and partly to do with marine navigation charts. Britain had the best charts at the time so there was a significant practical reason to bless Greenwich (with 180° being the second choice). The French obviously did not like the result, but there wasn’t any quid pro quo about adopting the metric system.
• dalbasal 6y ago
  A Bernard Cornwell novel about king arthur introduced me to all sorts of defunct, proto-english & welsh counting systems. Shepards used one system. Sailors used another. Soldiers another. It was part of a society that was deeply dialectic in all things, especially language. This resonated with me, because my grandfather had sheep. Sheep were weighed in kgs. People were weighed in stones. Feed in pounds. Sheep were sold in dozen and half-dozen dividable lots. Land in acres. In his region, one acre could feed one cow and one sheep so they had an intuitive serendipity. 100 acres made a viable farm. Measurement systems tend to leave even more vestiges than other elements of language. Most of the world uses metrics, but almost no one advocates for metric time or angular units. Square kms never became an agricultural measure of land because one is bigger than most farms. Instead, metric hectares and metric dunams were adapted to be metric. They were close enough. Acres weren't, so there is no metric acre. There are sixty minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle because sumerians used a base 60 numerical system 5 thousand years ago. I have never even heard of a metric angular unit. I totally accept the fact that metric systems are better. Engineering anything in inches seems impossible. OTOH, the richness and embedded history of language is valuable too. There's a reason esperanto never caught on, even though it's arguably the right tool for the job.
  • emteycz 6y ago
    Esperanto didn't catch on because a lot of people feel like it's not the right tool for the job - there are forks and whole different projects that try to mitigate the issues.
    • yellowstuff 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better Esperanto would probably have to be 10X better than existing languages in some sense to be a viable replacement.
      • dalbasal 6y ago
        It's not far from that, in terms of the original purpose. Esperanto is very easy to learn, compared to a natural language. English is the right one to compare with, since that became the international lingua franca esperanto wanted to be. There are even some studies suggesting that the quickest way to teach english is to teach esperanto first, and the language learning skills acquired shorten the path to fluency enough to be worth it. I think 10X is true in certain situations, but displacing incumbents can be more about path dependence than degrees of improvement.
• thechao 6y ago
  Base-2, like the US Customary volumes, has all the same scaling-made-easy properties, is strictly easier to work with as a maker (dividing/multiplying by two is waaay easier than 10, for, e.g., cutting wood), and plays nicely with computers. This makes it strictly superior on all of your metrics to the SI system. I suspect you want the US to switch to metric because it’s what you use, not because it’s actually better.
• brianwawok 6y ago
  I would say it's not always as cut and dry for the benefits of Metric over Standard. When doing math? Yes please, sign me up. For measurements around the room? Inches is a pretty good unit. CM is too small, DM is too big. There is a reason 90% of tabletop wargames (even those made in the UK by Games Workshop) still use inches for movement. It doesn't matter in a wargame how many inches are in a foot, or how many feet in a mile. You stay 100% in inches, and it just works. Another interesting place is in carpentry. You can divide 12 by 2, 3, 4, 6... it just works well. There is a reason the bootstrap CSS framework uses 12 divisions and not 10. Again, the number of feet in a mile don't matter when framing a house. Are the studs 18" on center, or 24"?
  • billti 6y ago
    Interesting to note that decimal fractions (e.g. 0.3) are awkward to represent with floats in computers, whereas fractions based on 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc. that are often used in the non-metric system are a very natural fit for the float representation.
    • gspr 6y ago
      Nothing stops you for using fractions with metric.
      • war1025 6y ago
        Nothing stops you from using decimal in Imperial :)
        • gspr 6y ago
          True, but: If you use decimal with metric, the units and prefixes play along with you very well (huge advantage). If you use other fractions with metric, you get no special bonus or burden (neutral). If you use decimal with US customary ("imperial"), you get no special bonus or burden (netural). If you use other fractions with US customary, you get no special bonus or burden (neutral). In summary, there is absolutely no rational reason to stick with US customary, besides legacy compatibility (technical debt).
• nine_k 6y ago
  Metric system? In 1600? Would be great; sadly, about 200 years off.
• rtkwe 6y ago
  I think another reason it lasted so long is that the inconsistency doesn't matter until you reach a certain level of centralization, are trying to do large projects and measurements and require a given level of precision. Before that you just measure everything for a particular project using a particular measurement conversion and then when the project is done you're done. Also in a more command driven economy precise planning and estimation doesn't matter as much because it doesn't matter if you underestimated the length of the road by 6% because of inconsistent conversions there was more waste in the system than that and people will work on it till it's done anyways. Another reason is probably the difficulty in actually getting accurate enough measurements in the first place. When you're measurements come from a group of people walking across a plan measuring paces or carrying a metal chain there's enough slop in any measurement and if you're measuring large areas of land you'll be using furlong so you'll convert to furlong-miles. If everyone is doing that the inconsistency doesn't pop up.
• robomartin 6y ago
  I have always contended that the imperial system of units could increase costs due to how engineers make design decisions. On either system you tend to reach for commonly available increments or standard steps between measurements. In other words, you might think in terms of increments of 1/6 of an inch in imperial and 1 mm or 0.5 mm in metric. This has consequences that, at a base level, could mean more or less material utilization and at higher levels of analysis affect how structures are designed. If designing objects with small features, how far apart will an engineer place features when working with each system? If you are designing bridge, in imperial, do you place diagonal truss elements in, say, 1 foot increments in imperial and 25 cm pitch in metric? Does metric allow for easier optimization in this regard? Then there's the question of construction standards for buildings. In home building quite a bit of the hardware used is based in the 16 inch stud pitch in standard wall construction, etc. Not sure if anyone has ever studied and compared standards from the perspective of common design practices for engineers, architects, civil engineers, etc. making design decisions in the context of the standard they are familiar with or decisions imposed by systems of standardization based on these standards. My solar panels are 2 m x 1 m, which means we had to design a ground mount structure based on that pitch and space rafters on a metric pitch rather than imperial. I can tell you this confused our local building permit office. The plans called for rafters spaced 19.685 inches apart, which, of course, is half a meter. It took a while to make them understand we could not go for 20 inches (which would have allowed them to use standard tables to estimate loads, span, etc.). Measuring half a meter in the context of construction, is, of course, easy, you just buy a metric tape measure and you are done. Using metric dimensions translated to imperial on a plan that requires governmental approval in a place where imperial is all they speak was in a range between comedy and tragedy. Here's a simple look at how much more or less material one would use when making decisions in metric vs. imperial. For example, an engineer working in metric would choose a 1.5 mm thickness, not 1.59 mm. Her imperial-standard counterpart would reach for 1/16 of an inch. When you compare these two decisions, the metric decision results in utilizing 5.5% less material. This translates into mass, costs, fuel used in transportation, etc. 1/64 = 0.01563 in = 0.40 mm ≈ 0.50 mm 126.0% 26.0% 1/32 = 0.03125 in = 0.79 mm ≈ 0.75 mm 94.5% -5.5% 1/16 = 0.06250 in = 1.59 mm ≈ 1.50 mm 94.5% -5.5% 1/8 = 0.12500 in = 3.18 mm ≈ 3.00 mm 94.5% -5.5% 3/16 = 0.18750 in = 4.76 mm ≈ 5.00 mm 105.0% 5.0% 1/4 = 0.25000 in = 6.35 mm ≈ 6.00 mm 94.5% -5.5% 5/16 = 0.31250 in = 7.94 mm ≈ 8.00 mm 100.8% 0.8% 3/8 = 0.37500 in = 9.53 mm ≈ 10.00 mm 105.0% 5.0% 7/16 = 0.43750 in = 11.11 mm ≈ 10.00 mm 90.0% -10.0% 1/2 = 0.50000 in = 12.70 mm ≈ 12.00 mm 94.5% -5.5% 9/16 = 0.56250 in = 14.29 mm ≈ 14.00 mm 98.0% -2.0% 5/8 = 0.62500 in = 15.88 mm ≈ 16.00 mm 100.8% 0.8% 11/16 = 0.68750 in = 17.46 mm ≈ 18.00 mm 103.1% 3.1% 3/4 = 0.75000 in = 19.05 mm ≈ 20.00 mm 105.0% 5.0% 13/16 = 0.81250 in = 20.64 mm ≈ 20.00 mm 96.9% -3.1% 7/8 = 0.87500 in = 22.23 mm ≈ 22.00 mm 99.0% -1.0% 15/16 = 0.93750 in = 23.81 mm ≈ 24.00 mm 100.8% 0.8% 1 = 1.00000 in = 25.40 mm ≈ 25.00 mm 98.4% -1.6% 1 = 1.00000 in = 25.40 mm ≈ 26.00 mm 102.4% 2.4% The consequences go beyond the obvious. Here's a real example: You have to machine a part out of Aluminum. The part is 0.375 inches thick. You would think you can just buy 0.375 in bar stock and go for it. You can't. Bar stock isn't flat. You have to be able to take off some material in order to make it flat. You go to Online Metals (no association at all) and see that the next size up is 0.5 inches thick. You are going to have to remove 0.125 inches in order to arrive at your desired thickness. That means you throw away a minimum of 25% of the metal every time you machine this part. 0.375 in is 9.525 mm. An engineer working in metric is likely to reach for 9 mm for this part at this scale. We are not talking about a situation where we tell someone to design a part that is 0.275 inches. The scenarios is one where two engineers are designing parts with similar functionality and each of them reaches for a size based on customary units in each system. This means the part will be made from 10 mm nominal stock and 1 mm (10 %) will be discarded in order to make a flat 9 mm thick starting blank. Sometimes the thinking goes the other way, with experience you might start with the available material sizes and design parts that fit within the available volume with consideration for manufacturing requirements. Once you get into large scale manufacturing the differences might not be as significant because with volume comes the opportunity to optimize raw materials, design, etc. My question or hypothesis is more about everything outside of corner cases.