13 ms·

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
        The primary advantage of metric is that everyone else uses it. The decimal is useful, but fractions have their place as well, so there isn't a clear win.
      - bluGill 6y ago
        It turns out that the thou is a great division for metal working. The even metric are just a little too course, or a little too fine for most metal work. Either way though machinists do great work in either system, to the same fine standards.
  - Jedd 6y ago
    > I typically prefer imperial measures in simple projects because they tend do feel more practical. I posit that you almost definitely prefer imperial measurements because that's what you grew up with, and consequently have the most familiarity, experience, and comfort with. And that's okay. But it doesn't speak to objective practicality. Papercraft - somewhat aside, have you looked at how ISO A series paper sizes [0] are determined? Now that's an exercise in gorgeous and thoughtful standards design. I'll point out that I do a fair bit of woodwork too, and my equipment - rules, squares, drop and band saws, router table markings, screws, bolts, drill bits, etc - are all metric. I have a tiny number of imperial items (eg a dovetail jig from a company in North America) but they tend to not have to interact with any metric gear, and finding metric versions of these tools is difficult/expensive. All of us metric-only people (let's say ~95% of the world) are just fine using what they grew up with to make & build stuff -- so it's going to be hard to demonstrate that imperial is 'more practical'. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#A_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#A_series
    - Jedd 6y ago
      I feel I should share this -- it's an explanation provided in the Leigh dovetail jig manual for why two things share the same scale. Leigh's based in Canada, which appears to be nominally metric, but I gather most of their market is the other part of North America (which obviously isn't). I bought the metric version of this jig - and I'm ecstatic they make this. The metric measurements are just different scales & translations - they didn't redesign the device at all. Decimals don't slow me down, but comparing fractions with different denominators does. Most of the manual they mention metric values in parenthesis, but in some sections it seems the authors just, understandably, gave up. I'm perversely envious of people who can effortlessly make sense of this: """ Section 8-23 : Why are the 1⁄2" and 11⁄16" [12,7 & 17,5mm] pin widths on the same scale line? 1⁄2" through dovetails are routed using a 7⁄16" guidebush. 11⁄16" through dovetails are routed with a 5⁄8" guidebush. That's a 3⁄16" difference in size between the two bits ... and between the two guidebushes. The 5⁄8" diameter guidebush for 11⁄16" joints requires that the guide fingers be opened up by 3⁄16". This automatically makes the pins 3⁄16" wider but on the same scale setting. """ (From https://leightools.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/D4R-Pro-User-Guide-Complete.pdf https://leightools.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/D4R-Pro-Us... )
  - ajuc 6y ago
    Traditional unit in metric crafts is cm and the smallest traditional distance is 0.5 cm (pronounced "half" not "O point 5"). Notebook grid is 0.5 cm for example and you write and draw everything at shool on that grid so you get used to it (and get intuitive feel for how long a cm (2 grids) is in the process). The dimensions you're mostly using are 0.5 cm, 1 cm, 1.5 cm, 2 cm, 2.5 cm, 5 cm, 10 cm. > A quarter inch generally seems right for a small spacing. A quarter inch is 6.35 mm compared to 5 mm (0.5 cm) which is basically the same for estetic purposes, any preference will be caused by familiarity more than any objective criteria. > 1 inch and 1 half inch feels easier to keep in mind than 1 centimeter and 5 millimeters Nobody says or thinks "1 centimeter and 5 millimeters" just like nobody says "I'm 1 meter and 80 centimeters tall". You're "180 centimeters tall" or (less often) "1.8 m tall". There's even a word in my language "półtora" which means "one and a half", so 1.5 cm is just "półtora centymetra". But even with languages without this word people think "one and a half cm" not "one cm and five mm". You almost never mix units in metric in the same expression, it just makes everything difficult for no reason. I think Americans don't understand that decimals are second nature to people using metric. When you write 1/2 we write 0.5 but we think the same - "half".
    - xxs 6y ago
      >Nobody says or thinks "1 centimeter and 5 millimeters" just like nobody says "I'm 1 meter and 80 centimeters tall". You're "180 centimeters tall" or (less often) "1.8 m tall". one-eighty is quite common. That might depend on the country and language.
      - ajuc 6y ago
        I guess. "One" is shorter than "hundred" in English while it's the other way in Polish (jeden vs sto). I was very surprised that English people say "fifteen hundred" for 1500, I never thought about that number this way before, it was always "tysiąc pięćset" (one thousand five hundred).
        Symbiote 6y ago
        Most English speakers say the year is "fifteen hundred", but it's mostly American people who say "fifteen hundred" in other cases. en-GB: Today is the thirty-first of August, twenty twenty. The USA has reported an additional one thousand, seven hundred and seventy one Covid-nineteen cases. I would normally leave work around five-thirty, since I can catch the seventeen forty-five train home and watch the end of the six o'clock news. If I miss the train, I might take the two thirty bus instead [i.e. bus 230], or else the one three five.
  - marosgrego 6y ago
    It's just about what you are used to. For people who've grown up with metric units, it's natural to work with them.
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      Not really, you can learn. I spent quite a bit of effort in my twenties to convert myself over to metric for heights, weighing food, measuring liquids and such (I'm from UK). UK had been officially metric my whole life and EU were at the time mandating pricing in metric. Supermarkets were very reticent to use metric - or at least flouted the regulation, presumably as prices seem lower in pounds (UK 'lb') than kilograms. Now I find they often don't show weights but hide behind pack sizes for fruit pricing; presumably to prevent customers comparing. They do still have scales but it's a PITA weighing half your produce. Getting comfortable so I could 'feel' what a particular mass (and £/kg) of apples was, say, took effort for me. Same with heights, and shifting to using kg for person-masses too.
      - ajuc 6y ago
        Do you use "deko" (dekagrams) for buying meat in UK?
        OJFord 6y ago
        No, grams & kg.
        ajuc 6y ago
        Makes much more sense, I never understood why everything is in g or kg and meat is in dg :) It's not like you buy 10 grams of pork :)
      - OJFord 6y ago
        > Now I find they often don't show weights but hide behind pack sizes Not legal, btw, unless you mean e.g. 'Lemons £1 (12p/ea.)? The usual complaint is that the denominators haven't been standardised, so you might get A selling lemons /ea. and B selling them /100g. But then, when they are literally sold as a number (or a rough number) in a net, as opposed to being weighed and stickered, even if there were a /100g (or whatever) price, it'd be +/- 10% or something. (That actually is standardised, that funny 'e' symbol for net weight, but the tolerances vary with nominal figure, so I'm not sure off-hand what it is at 100g.)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dep_b 6y ago
    I thought that there's a slight advantage because some imperial measures are 12-based instead of 10? So it's easier to get 1/6, 1/4, 1/3 or 1/2? Otherwise I observe that many things like fitness devices look way more bulky when they're from the US. I have the feeling that it's partially because of the system you use, since people tend to gravitate to whole numbers you might say "a 2" bar would be about right" and somebody from Germany would make it 4cm instead. Both whole numbers but the German fitness machine would be sleeker. In an ideal world we would count 12-based and use the metric system.
    - ajuc 6y ago
      Quarters and halfs are as easy (I'd even say easier) in metric: 0.5 and 0.25 and the nice thing is you don't need to convert fractions to add/substract them. 2.75 - 1.5 is much easier for me than 2 and 3/4 - 1 and 1/2 Another advantage is that half cm is roughly a quarter inch, so you usually don't need to go down to quarters, just use wholes and halves (or millimeters if you need precision). I'm not sure imperial is easier for thirds in practice. I have 2 by 4 inches (5x10 cm) board and want to drill 2 equally spaced holes at 2/3 inches and 4/3 inches into it - how would I do this? There's no 1/3rd inch on an imperial ruler? I google and I got this :) https://science.blurtit.com/1709608/where-is-13-of-a-inch-located-in-a-ruler https://science.blurtit.com/1709608/where-is-13-of-a-inch-lo... I agree base 12 or base 60 "decimals" would be the best of both worlds.
  - cyphar 6y ago
    As someone who grew up with metric measurements, I could easily use the exact same "practicality" arguments against the imperial system. To me, an inch is a weird measurement that is slightly longer than 2cm, a mile is a bit farther than 1.5km, a gallon is about 4 litres, and I always have to lookup up what ounces are (let alone fluid ounces -- which I have to constantly remind myself are not the same thing). But that isn't because the imperial system is "less practical" in any meaningful sense -- it's just that I didn't grow up with it and so I have to constantly convert back to the system I know (and since the conversions will never be nice integer ratios, of course your "native" measuring system will appear to work better). As for the whole "imperial fractions are easier to deal with" thing, I personally disagree but I suspect that's also because I'm not used to the idea. In everyday life I'm so used to seeing decimal quantities that from a young age I learned how to quickly deal with them. However, I must admit I struggle to handle fractions as quickly because it isn't as common as decimal division in my everyday life. I imagine the inverse is probably true for people who have dealt with fractional quantities their entire lives. I hasten to point out that most people wouldn't say nor think of 1.5cm as "1 centimetre and 5 millimetres", just as you wouldn't say nor think of 1⅝ inches as "1 inch and 5 eighths-of-an-inch". Honestly this whole argument has always felt pointless to me -- is it not obvious that you will always find things you are most familiar to be the best tools for the job? It's almost like watching an Englishman and a Frenchman hotly debating which language is uniquely better suited to writing poetry -- all the while ignoring that equally brilliant poetry has been written in both languages.
    - rikroots 6y ago
      > It's almost like watching an Englishman and a Frenchman hotly debating which language is uniquely better suited to writing poetry -- all the while ignoring that equally brilliant poetry has been written in both languages. I think the French won that argument when they managed to kill off English alliterative verse.
    - Joker_vD 6y ago
      Also feet, my goodness, is it annoying to read anything with distances given in feet. 600 feet! Wow, that's a long— wait, no, it's about 200 metres, not 600 metres, so not that long a distance. A thousand feet! No, that's not even close to a kilometre, that's just slightly more than 300 metres. And so on. Really wish book translators would translate the units inside as well. In fiction the exact numbers don't matter much, so that'd be perfectly fine.
  - whatusername 6y ago
    Carpentry/Construction is done in millimetres (with the occasional length shortened to metres). I've never heard anyone use cm. Eg: to pay for some timber at bunnings you might say: "ninety by fourty-five. one length at two-four". (90x45mm timber, 2.4m long). On site - if you needed to cut it - you would measure and cut at "twenty-three-fourty-two" (eg: 2.342m or 2342mm)
  - kortex 6y ago
    Same with woodworking. Dyadics are super useful and American rulers are marked as such, usually 1/16ths. But then trying to do mental math requires base 10 decimals mixed with dyadics, so you get 5's everywhere. Compounding this, dimensional lumber involves lots of multiples of 1.5". If I could get a natively dozenal (or seximal) calculator with a decent UX, it'd probably be worth it to relearn mental math (common times and divs) in base 12 or 6.
  - naikrovek 6y ago
    All of those qualities you assign to imperial measurement seem likely due to years of use and experience. No one I know who grew up in a metric-only (in practicality, "metric-mostly") environment feels this way about imperial measurement, and they all wax on at length about the elegance of metric, very similarly to how you did about imperial measurement. It seems that context and experience are more responsible for the comfort with a particular measurement system than anything inherent to any particular measurement system.
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

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
        The primary advantage of metric is that everyone else uses it. The decimal is useful, but fractions have their place as well, so there isn't a clear win.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      It turns out that the thou is a great division for metal working. The even metric are just a little too course, or a little too fine for most metal work. Either way though machinists do great work in either system, to the same fine standards.
- Jedd 6y ago
  > I typically prefer imperial measures in simple projects because they tend do feel more practical. I posit that you almost definitely prefer imperial measurements because that's what you grew up with, and consequently have the most familiarity, experience, and comfort with. And that's okay. But it doesn't speak to objective practicality. Papercraft - somewhat aside, have you looked at how ISO A series paper sizes [0] are determined? Now that's an exercise in gorgeous and thoughtful standards design. I'll point out that I do a fair bit of woodwork too, and my equipment - rules, squares, drop and band saws, router table markings, screws, bolts, drill bits, etc - are all metric. I have a tiny number of imperial items (eg a dovetail jig from a company in North America) but they tend to not have to interact with any metric gear, and finding metric versions of these tools is difficult/expensive. All of us metric-only people (let's say ~95% of the world) are just fine using what they grew up with to make & build stuff -- so it's going to be hard to demonstrate that imperial is 'more practical'. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#A_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#A_series
  - Jedd 6y ago
    I feel I should share this -- it's an explanation provided in the Leigh dovetail jig manual for why two things share the same scale. Leigh's based in Canada, which appears to be nominally metric, but I gather most of their market is the other part of North America (which obviously isn't). I bought the metric version of this jig - and I'm ecstatic they make this. The metric measurements are just different scales & translations - they didn't redesign the device at all. Decimals don't slow me down, but comparing fractions with different denominators does. Most of the manual they mention metric values in parenthesis, but in some sections it seems the authors just, understandably, gave up. I'm perversely envious of people who can effortlessly make sense of this: """ Section 8-23 : Why are the 1⁄2" and 11⁄16" [12,7 & 17,5mm] pin widths on the same scale line? 1⁄2" through dovetails are routed using a 7⁄16" guidebush. 11⁄16" through dovetails are routed with a 5⁄8" guidebush. That's a 3⁄16" difference in size between the two bits ... and between the two guidebushes. The 5⁄8" diameter guidebush for 11⁄16" joints requires that the guide fingers be opened up by 3⁄16". This automatically makes the pins 3⁄16" wider but on the same scale setting. """ (From https://leightools.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/D4R-Pro-User-Guide-Complete.pdf https://leightools.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/D4R-Pro-Us... )
- ajuc 6y ago
  Traditional unit in metric crafts is cm and the smallest traditional distance is 0.5 cm (pronounced "half" not "O point 5"). Notebook grid is 0.5 cm for example and you write and draw everything at shool on that grid so you get used to it (and get intuitive feel for how long a cm (2 grids) is in the process). The dimensions you're mostly using are 0.5 cm, 1 cm, 1.5 cm, 2 cm, 2.5 cm, 5 cm, 10 cm. > A quarter inch generally seems right for a small spacing. A quarter inch is 6.35 mm compared to 5 mm (0.5 cm) which is basically the same for estetic purposes, any preference will be caused by familiarity more than any objective criteria. > 1 inch and 1 half inch feels easier to keep in mind than 1 centimeter and 5 millimeters Nobody says or thinks "1 centimeter and 5 millimeters" just like nobody says "I'm 1 meter and 80 centimeters tall". You're "180 centimeters tall" or (less often) "1.8 m tall". There's even a word in my language "półtora" which means "one and a half", so 1.5 cm is just "półtora centymetra". But even with languages without this word people think "one and a half cm" not "one cm and five mm". You almost never mix units in metric in the same expression, it just makes everything difficult for no reason. I think Americans don't understand that decimals are second nature to people using metric. When you write 1/2 we write 0.5 but we think the same - "half".
  - xxs 6y ago
    >Nobody says or thinks "1 centimeter and 5 millimeters" just like nobody says "I'm 1 meter and 80 centimeters tall". You're "180 centimeters tall" or (less often) "1.8 m tall". one-eighty is quite common. That might depend on the country and language.
    - ajuc 6y ago
      I guess. "One" is shorter than "hundred" in English while it's the other way in Polish (jeden vs sto). I was very surprised that English people say "fifteen hundred" for 1500, I never thought about that number this way before, it was always "tysiąc pięćset" (one thousand five hundred).
      - Symbiote 6y ago
        Most English speakers say the year is "fifteen hundred", but it's mostly American people who say "fifteen hundred" in other cases. en-GB: Today is the thirty-first of August, twenty twenty. The USA has reported an additional one thousand, seven hundred and seventy one Covid-nineteen cases. I would normally leave work around five-thirty, since I can catch the seventeen forty-five train home and watch the end of the six o'clock news. If I miss the train, I might take the two thirty bus instead [i.e. bus 230], or else the one three five.
- marosgrego 6y ago
  It's just about what you are used to. For people who've grown up with metric units, it's natural to work with them.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    Not really, you can learn. I spent quite a bit of effort in my twenties to convert myself over to metric for heights, weighing food, measuring liquids and such (I'm from UK). UK had been officially metric my whole life and EU were at the time mandating pricing in metric. Supermarkets were very reticent to use metric - or at least flouted the regulation, presumably as prices seem lower in pounds (UK 'lb') than kilograms. Now I find they often don't show weights but hide behind pack sizes for fruit pricing; presumably to prevent customers comparing. They do still have scales but it's a PITA weighing half your produce. Getting comfortable so I could 'feel' what a particular mass (and £/kg) of apples was, say, took effort for me. Same with heights, and shifting to using kg for person-masses too.
    - ajuc 6y ago
      Do you use "deko" (dekagrams) for buying meat in UK?
      - OJFord 6y ago
        No, grams & kg.
        ajuc 6y ago
        Makes much more sense, I never understood why everything is in g or kg and meat is in dg :) It's not like you buy 10 grams of pork :)
    - OJFord 6y ago
      > Now I find they often don't show weights but hide behind pack sizes Not legal, btw, unless you mean e.g. 'Lemons £1 (12p/ea.)? The usual complaint is that the denominators haven't been standardised, so you might get A selling lemons /ea. and B selling them /100g. But then, when they are literally sold as a number (or a rough number) in a net, as opposed to being weighed and stickered, even if there were a /100g (or whatever) price, it'd be +/- 10% or something. (That actually is standardised, that funny 'e' symbol for net weight, but the tolerances vary with nominal figure, so I'm not sure off-hand what it is at 100g.)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dep_b 6y ago
  I thought that there's a slight advantage because some imperial measures are 12-based instead of 10? So it's easier to get 1/6, 1/4, 1/3 or 1/2? Otherwise I observe that many things like fitness devices look way more bulky when they're from the US. I have the feeling that it's partially because of the system you use, since people tend to gravitate to whole numbers you might say "a 2" bar would be about right" and somebody from Germany would make it 4cm instead. Both whole numbers but the German fitness machine would be sleeker. In an ideal world we would count 12-based and use the metric system.
  - ajuc 6y ago
    Quarters and halfs are as easy (I'd even say easier) in metric: 0.5 and 0.25 and the nice thing is you don't need to convert fractions to add/substract them. 2.75 - 1.5 is much easier for me than 2 and 3/4 - 1 and 1/2 Another advantage is that half cm is roughly a quarter inch, so you usually don't need to go down to quarters, just use wholes and halves (or millimeters if you need precision). I'm not sure imperial is easier for thirds in practice. I have 2 by 4 inches (5x10 cm) board and want to drill 2 equally spaced holes at 2/3 inches and 4/3 inches into it - how would I do this? There's no 1/3rd inch on an imperial ruler? I google and I got this :) https://science.blurtit.com/1709608/where-is-13-of-a-inch-located-in-a-ruler https://science.blurtit.com/1709608/where-is-13-of-a-inch-lo... I agree base 12 or base 60 "decimals" would be the best of both worlds.
- cyphar 6y ago
  As someone who grew up with metric measurements, I could easily use the exact same "practicality" arguments against the imperial system. To me, an inch is a weird measurement that is slightly longer than 2cm, a mile is a bit farther than 1.5km, a gallon is about 4 litres, and I always have to lookup up what ounces are (let alone fluid ounces -- which I have to constantly remind myself are not the same thing). But that isn't because the imperial system is "less practical" in any meaningful sense -- it's just that I didn't grow up with it and so I have to constantly convert back to the system I know (and since the conversions will never be nice integer ratios, of course your "native" measuring system will appear to work better). As for the whole "imperial fractions are easier to deal with" thing, I personally disagree but I suspect that's also because I'm not used to the idea. In everyday life I'm so used to seeing decimal quantities that from a young age I learned how to quickly deal with them. However, I must admit I struggle to handle fractions as quickly because it isn't as common as decimal division in my everyday life. I imagine the inverse is probably true for people who have dealt with fractional quantities their entire lives. I hasten to point out that most people wouldn't say nor think of 1.5cm as "1 centimetre and 5 millimetres", just as you wouldn't say nor think of 1⅝ inches as "1 inch and 5 eighths-of-an-inch". Honestly this whole argument has always felt pointless to me -- is it not obvious that you will always find things you are most familiar to be the best tools for the job? It's almost like watching an Englishman and a Frenchman hotly debating which language is uniquely better suited to writing poetry -- all the while ignoring that equally brilliant poetry has been written in both languages.
  - rikroots 6y ago
    > It's almost like watching an Englishman and a Frenchman hotly debating which language is uniquely better suited to writing poetry -- all the while ignoring that equally brilliant poetry has been written in both languages. I think the French won that argument when they managed to kill off English alliterative verse.
  - Joker_vD 6y ago
    Also feet, my goodness, is it annoying to read anything with distances given in feet. 600 feet! Wow, that's a long— wait, no, it's about 200 metres, not 600 metres, so not that long a distance. A thousand feet! No, that's not even close to a kilometre, that's just slightly more than 300 metres. And so on. Really wish book translators would translate the units inside as well. In fiction the exact numbers don't matter much, so that'd be perfectly fine.
- whatusername 6y ago
  Carpentry/Construction is done in millimetres (with the occasional length shortened to metres). I've never heard anyone use cm. Eg: to pay for some timber at bunnings you might say: "ninety by fourty-five. one length at two-four". (90x45mm timber, 2.4m long). On site - if you needed to cut it - you would measure and cut at "twenty-three-fourty-two" (eg: 2.342m or 2342mm)
- kortex 6y ago
  Same with woodworking. Dyadics are super useful and American rulers are marked as such, usually 1/16ths. But then trying to do mental math requires base 10 decimals mixed with dyadics, so you get 5's everywhere. Compounding this, dimensional lumber involves lots of multiples of 1.5". If I could get a natively dozenal (or seximal) calculator with a decent UX, it'd probably be worth it to relearn mental math (common times and divs) in base 12 or 6.
- naikrovek 6y ago
  All of those qualities you assign to imperial measurement seem likely due to years of use and experience. No one I know who grew up in a metric-only (in practicality, "metric-mostly") environment feels this way about imperial measurement, and they all wax on at length about the elegance of metric, very similarly to how you did about imperial measurement. It seems that context and experience are more responsible for the comfort with a particular measurement system than anything inherent to any particular measurement system.

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