4 ms·

Oddly the same system that's enamoured with measurements like "sixty-fourths of an inch" can't countenance the sort of witchcraft entailed in "half a degree Cel

• ghaff 1y ago
  Eighth of an inch is about the limit of precision in most circumstances. Countries that use Imperial for day to day use still do tend to use metric for a lot of purposes including many engineering tasks. (Imperial is terrible for certain types of engineering calculations--especially involving pounds and lets not get into slugs--but it's fine for cooking even if I tend to use grams for weight on my scale when baking.) "Imperial countries" are actually pretty hybrid for the most part to greater or lesser degrees. UK is more SI than the US but they still commonly use a lot of Imperial units including some "odd" stuff like stones.
  • Y_Y 1y ago
    I presume if you think eighths of an inch is good enough then you mostly work with large objects. Luckily outside of USA, Liberia, and Myanmar inch-based scales are rare nowadays, but I still come across specifications in small fractions of inches for such things as manufacturing tolerances, drill bits, coating thickness, cable diameters. Informal measurement of humans and beer is a nice quirk of the UK system, but in my experience it's not commonplace to use imperial units for anything where accuracy is important (except maybe jewellers, and arguably road speeds/distances). See also, the monstrosity that is AWG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge
• andrewflnr 1y ago
  No one here is defending inches. In particular I don't think anyone is "enamored" with 64ths. We all agree they're a pain.