4 ms·
Dividing by two has one very significant advantage - the brain is equipped to directly compare two lengths, so a division by two is easy to eyeball and get roug
by jprete 3y ago
Dividing by two has one very significant advantage - the brain is equipped to directly compare two lengths, so a division by two is easy to eyeball and get roughly correct. That's probably also why music is almost always spaced using powers of two, with potentially a single three or occasionally a five - the brain can easily track and measure equal divisions.
- majormajor 3y agoI think that makes a lot of sense in music or other "divide this up" tasks that don't require concrete objects but that's not most of what the metric system deals with. And time isn't decimal-based at the larger-than-one-second level, after all. But in the world of concrete objects "eyeball this into two pieces" is much less useful and less common than "ok so we need to account for the extra 3mm of this extra piece so add that to the 44mm base measurement" - which is much more straightforward than something like "add 3/32nds to 1 and 3/4 inches." especially if you don't know that you're gonna end up with a measurement in the 32nds when you make the first measurement. Or larger-scale like "we went six hundred feet already, we needed to go a mile and a half, how much is left?"