It’s funny how the biggest argument for metric is that it’s so accurate but in real life use it degrades to “close enough”. My main problem with metric is that I can’t get my pencil that sharp.
Comment on 5 tomatoes
kamen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The only positive thing I see about imperial is that things are easily divisible by 3 and 6, but that’s about it. Then again, if doing the same with metric, you’re usually fine rounding to the nearest millimetre, and if that isn’t accurate enough, it’s probably not supposed to be done by hand anyway.
Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
kamen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s accurate when you need it to be and gets out of the way when you don’t. And if you do need the accuracy, you have a unit that doesn’t need fractions.
lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
How is “accurate” an argument?? You can use any unit with any amount of decimal places. The argument is that it’s regular. You learn the prefixes once and apply them to length, volume, weight, …
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The biggest argument for metric is that it’s consistent. It takes 1 calories to heat 1k of water by 1 degree. State something similar in imperial units.
FridaySteve@lemmy.world 1 day ago
1 BTU heats 1 pound of water 1 degree Fahrenheit.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
How many BTUs are there in a big mac?
guy@piefed.social 22 hours ago
You mean 1 gram of water
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I do. Wrong letter.
deltapi@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
And isn’t 1kg of water 1L? And 1L is 1000 cubic cm? So a 10x10x10 cube?
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 22 hours ago
100 degrees out is 100% hot. 0 degrees F is 0% hot
BeardedBlaze@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Most standard measuring tapes have 1/16th of an inch as the smallest fraction on the tape. 1mm is 1/64th. Which is one is “close enough”? Lol
SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 1 day ago
Way off! There are 25.4 millimeters per inch, not 64, and most measuring tapes have 1/32" markings.
BeardedBlaze@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Haven’t had my coffee, you’re right it’s closer to 1/32.
Most measuring tapes in US don’t go smaller than a 1/16th though.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
I’ve banged on about this at length before. I prefer woodworking in inches because I have to divide by 3 and 4 a lot more often than divide by 5. It turns out that the fractional inch system evolved alongside woodworking for a very long time and it solves a lot of the problems woodworkers actually face…as long as you’re not a European scraping in the dirt for something to feel superior about.
bryndos@fedia.io 16 hours ago
I do woodworking a bit too, but I normally just do the slanty ruler/tape trick to divide any straight parallel face into n equal lengths.
I hate all forms of mental arithmetic; I also avoid measuring as much as possible too. Maybe that's why everything i make is so shit.I guess if you're mass producing things you can't just manually mark off each and every part though - but even then I'd probably want to work to a template rather than to measure.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
A template or jig, yeah. If I’ve got more than one part to make, especially if they need to match in some substantial way, I set up a stop of some kind.
At some point I may attempt to build a project to a scored storey stick rather than to measurements, but on the other hand I may not.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Base 12 is easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
It’s not nonsense, just old and focused on priorities that don’t matter anymore. A mile was initially a thousand paces. So you send a group of people out, one counts each time their right foot takes a step and after a thousand times they build a mile marker. Bam, roman road system. 1000 strides per mile, 5 feet per stride.
Later the English used the unit as part of their system of measurement, and built the furlong around it, which is the distance a man with an ox team and plow can plow before the ox need to rest. A mile is eight furlong. This got tied into surveying units, since plots of land were broken up into acres, or the amount of land an ox team can plow a day.
When some unit reconciliation needed to be done, they couldn’t change the vitality of oxen, and changing the survey unit would cause tax havock, so they changed the size of a foot.
All the units and their relationships were defined deliberately and intentionally. They just factored in priorities that we don’t care about anymore.
chaonaut@lemmy.4d2.org 19 hours ago
Because there’s a hidden system of measurement change hiding in the middle. Inches, Feet and Yards are familiar 12:1 and 3:1 conversions, and Rods, Chains, Furlongs and Miles. Their conversation rates are generally nice conversion, with rations of 4 rods : 1 chain, 10 chains : 1 furlong, and 8 furlongs : 1 mile.
So where do we get 5,280 with prime factors of 2^5, 3, 5 and 11? Because a chain is 22 yards long. Why? Because somewhere along the line, inches, feet and yards went to a smaller standard, and the nice round 5 yards per rods became 5 and 1/2 yards per rod. Instead of a mile containing 4,800 feet (with quarters, twelfths and hundredths of miles all being nice round numbers of feet), it contained an extra 480 feet that were 1/11th smaller than the old feet.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
The fun one is a nautical mile. Which is 6076.12 feet. How’d we get there? A nautical mile is equal to a minute of latitude, which happens to be just a bit bigger but on the order of magnitude of most “miles” to include the US statute mile.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
If an alien species has 12 fingers to our 10, would they work in base 12 as normally as we use 10s? Like would their whole system end (or start) with a 0 or equivalent and not end all different?
My maths coherence is too high-school for this thinking, but now its in there.
Marz157@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
There’s really nothing special about base 10 numbering, it just feels natural to us. They probably would use base 12 and just have 2 extra symbols for the digits after 9. Example 10 x 10 = 100 in both base 10 and base 12 math. It’s just the translation of that in base 12 to base 10 looks like 12 × 12 = 144 to us.
the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
The Babylonian number system was base 12, that’s why there are 24 hours in a day and 60 minutes in an hour. Afaik they had the normal number of fingers, they were just smarter about making their numbering system divisible.
saimen@feddit.org 20 hours ago
The just started counting with zero (fist)
Liz@midwest.social 23 hours ago
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1A, 1B, 20, 21, …, A0, A1, A3, …
You can use your hands to count in base 12 if you want to, and some cultures have done so. Just use the segments on your fingers on one hand, using your thumb to count each segment.
youtube.com/shorts/ThOuUa_iLnM
bryndos@fedia.io 16 hours ago
I think a mile is specified in terms of 'chains' not really feet or yards.
Feet and yards are meant for measuring smaller stuff, like the size of a foot, or a courtyard.
The 'chain' was a specific surveyors tool for measuring larger land areas. I imagine defined to be a length of physical chain practically manageable by the surveyor - probably pre-dating optical / triangulation methods before lenses got cheap.
I think an acre was then defined as 10 square chains or something.
But go back in time far enough and different jurisdictions have different lengths of standard chain, so different miles and acres derived from it. But it doesn't really matter because if you were buying land in Scotland, then you'd probably want to use a Scottish surveyor and his big long chain.
The nautical mile is then a whole other kettle of fish.
Olhonestjim@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Base 60 can do 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, and 12.