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> It imperial units for days Imperial made quite a lot of sense when numbers were small and calculations done without the aid of instruments: Using bases divis

• xamolxix 12y ago
  > Using bases divisible by both 3 and 4 makes mental calculation quite quick. Easier than base 10?
  • jccooper 12y ago
    Half a foot, six inches. Third of a foot, four inches. Quarter of a foot, three inches. Sixth, eighth, and twelfth also go into whole inches. For bigger projects, yards are fairly easy to decompose too, into whole feet and inches. It's a good system for projects of human or slightly super-human scale using low resolution instruments and mental math. It's rotten for high precision computerized tasks of widely varying scales.
    • Dylan16807 12y ago
      I can't recall the last time I needed a third. Halves, quarters, tenths, hundredths...