3 ms·
> I've mused in the past that it's kind of a shame - you can imagine a world where people ignored their thumbs when finger counting and just lucked into a base-
by edanm 6y ago
> I've mused in the past that it's kind of a shame - you can imagine a world where people ignored their thumbs when finger counting and just lucked into a base-8 system thousands of years ago.
What a fascinating hypothetical!
But to the main topic - sorry to be dense about it, but I'm actually just not used to the imperial system. Which parts of it are easy to manipulate in this way? I know there are 12 inches in a foot but that's the only "easy" conversion I remember off the top of my head.
- tempestn 6y agoThe metric system, since it's all based around base-10 counting, tends to operate in decimals. So you wouldn't normally talk about for example a quarter cm; rather you'd have 25mm. In the imperial system working in fractions is much more common, so you have quarter inches, eighth inches, etc. Halving is more intuitive using fractions since it amounts to multiplying the denominator, rather than dividing. Anyway, I'm not really arguing for the imperial system, just saying that aside from legacy use, that's the one advantage I see for it vs metric. But a metric system based on base-eight... that would be beautiful.
- edanm 6y agoOh interesting, you're saying it's not about the specific conversion factors, but rather the idea that people tend to subdivide units into halves/quarters/etc in imperial, whereas they don't in metric.