I count a flat 8.
Oh, get off your high horse
Your basic unit for speed is m/s, but for most day-to-day purposes you use km/hr. The conversion between the two isn’t even an integer!
Not only that, but your system, by virtue of being decimal, inherits all the shortcomings of our quite flawed numbering system. You can’t divide something by the second smallest prime number without breaking out repeating decimals.
In my opinion, a good measuring system would make up for those shortcomings instead. It should be divisible by at least the numbers you can count on one hand. Decimal covers 2 and 5, so ideally the measurement unit would cover 3 and 4. So that would be a base 12 system. Technically 4, being 2², would be covered too, so 3 would do just fine. Ta-da! 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard.
My ideal would be 21 though, get that 7 factor
If you like intervals of 1000, you’ll be delighted (or mortified like me) to know that 7×11×13 is almost exactly 1000 (it’s 1001)
Not only that, but your system, by virtue of being decimal, inherits all the shortcomings of our quite flawed numbering system. You can’t divide something by the second smallest prime number without breaking out repeating decimals.
What’s more 0.203 cm or 0.291 cm? How about 3/8" or 19/64"?
How far is 1/3 of a mile? 1/3 km is 333m. How about 1/9? 1/9 km is 111m How long is 10 x 5/16"? 10 x 3.1cm is 31cm
Yeah, a foot breaks down easy in whole inches with many factors, but that’s about it
You can also count on your finger joints (excluding thumbs) for base 12, too
Metric is used from all around the world, but comes from a quarter of it.
If you want to convert between imperial units, going straight from feet to miles is impractical. You’d be better off knowing the chart of survey units, and they’re all small numbers so they’re easy to remember.
12 inches in a foot
3 feet in a yard
22 yards in a chain
10 chains in a furlong
8 furlongs in a mile
Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.
Remembering 12, 3, 22, 10 and 8 does indeed sound way easier than remembering 1000.
I know right? it’s such an intuitive system with a convenient unit for every scale you might want to work with.
I genuinely can‘t tell if you are being serious. Could you tell me at face value, I just want to know.
Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.
You monster.
The dark side can be a pathway to many abilities some might consider … stupid.
the only thing more aggravating than using imperial is having to listen to all the complaining about how metric is better. We get it, bro; it’s out of our control at this point
My 2 main annoyances with the metric system:
First: The SI unit for mass is the kilogram. That’s fucking stupid. A kilogram is 1000 grams, the base unit for something can’t be “1000 of this other thing”. Because the kilogram is the SI unit for mass, that means that a gram is, by definition, 1/1000th of a kilogram. The stupidity, it burns!
The second one isn’t really an issue with the metric system, it’s more when people are almost using the metric system then fuck it up, like the “Watt Hour” for measuring energy use. You know, there’s already a way of measuring energy use: the “Watt Second”, also known as “The Joule”
I am glad someone else has noticed this. Why is my TV’s power consumption reported in kWh/1000 hours?
Because your power is billed in kWh. Figuring out the kWh cost of a 77 watt TV is straight forward, but a lot of consumer labeling standards are about quick and easy side by side comparisons as opposed to perfect application of units. Easiest way to give a comparison that’s accurate enough and doesn’t involve odd numbers is to convert that way.
Urgh. There’s a unit for that, it’s WATTS. That’s literally 77 Watts.
Honestly that’s the most aggravating part.
Yea but people are idiots.
it’s more when people are almost using the metric system then fuck it up, like the “Watt Hour” for measuring energy use.
Energy is just so important to physics and engineering that it will be measured in whatever unit is most convenient to convert in that particular context: joules as the SI unit, watt hours for electricity usage, calories for certain types of heat or food energy calculations, electron volts in particle physics, equivalent tonnes of TNT for explosion energy, things like that.
I don’t believe that “watt hours” are more convenient than joules, especially when they’re not just watt hours but kilowatt hours or megawatt hours. At that point just use megajoules or gigajoules.
I can understand things like eV where the scale is so different that you’d have to constantly use tiny and unusual prefixes. But, for most other things like calories, it’s just tradition rather than a well thought out reason.
I don’t believe that “watt hours” are more convenient than joules
Clearly you’ve never had to do the calculations where these things come up, where hours are a much more common unit of measure for time than seconds, so that multiplying and dividing by time is easier when working with hours.
“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” ― Josh Bazell, Wild Thing
I remember reading this quote a few years ago (probably Reddit), but I don’t remember if attribution was given. Kudos to you CAVOK.
“High. You put the stove on high.”
I love this quote.
I use both in my wood shop. Sometimes it’s easier to lay things out in metric or divide numbers, but other times it’s easier to remember an imperial number to go make a cut.
What about a nautical mile?
“Because we are free men, we will be free to measure liquids in liters and milliliters… but not all liquids, only soda, wine, and alcohol because for milk and paint we will use gallons, pints, and quarts, god willing”
“How many liters are in a gallon, sir?” “Nobody knows.”
“Why not use meters and kilometers?” “We sill, soldier. But only in certain unpopular sports like track and swimming.”
All units of measure are abstract.
I like metric because it’s structured around an abstract amount. Even something like Celsius is pretty abstract, because the freezing and boiling point of water changes depending on the atmospheric pressure. The measure of a second? Why is a second, 1 second long? Why is it 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of a day? There’s other stuff based on seconds too, like Hertz, which is literally “cycles per second”
I like to think about how abstract these things are, because if we were to ever try to communicate with a truly alien race, we couldn’t really use numbers, because their base numbering system would be different than ours, their symbols for numbers would be different, their entire understanding of math and how to calculate stuff could be wildly different, possibly because they understand things we do not. We couldn’t even say to them to communicate on a specific frequency of EM, because that frequency is based on Hertz, which is based on seconds, which is based on ??? IDFK (neither would they). We base everything we know on the world around us, and that’s entirely unique to earth. We make so many assumptions about how things are because we’ve only ever experienced life on this planet.
The only thing that kind of makes sense is how many days of the year there are, because it’s based on solid science about our solar system. It’s still unique to earth, but at least it makes sense on a larger scale. Everything else? Who the hell knows. Why is a meter as long as it is? Who defined this? Why? What abstract Earth-based thing was this based on that other societies of individuals would have no point of reference to relate to?
It’s wild we’ve made it this far, to be honest.
Anyways, I kind of got sidetracked… I guess all I’m really trying to say is that metric makes more sense than whatever the USA is doing. Even if it’s just as abstract in its conception.
…which is based on seconds, which is based on ??? IDFK (neither would they)
“The second, symbol s, is the SI unit of time. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9 192 631 770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1.” https://www.bipm.org/en/si-base-units/second
their base numbering system would be different than ours, their symbols for numbers would be different, their entire understanding of math and how to calculate stuff could be wildly different
The neat thing about math is it’s built upon universal truths that exist independently of how you describe them. 1+1=2 regardless of how you represent those numbers. Even among humans we have plenty of different ways of describing numbers.
Also, the best thing about science is that physics works the way it does regardless of how you describe it. An atom of hydrogen will always have the same spectral peaks, regardless of what units you describe those peaks in.
It’s these kinds of things we consider when trying to communicate with aliens. Take a look at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
These messages will probably never be received, even if there is intelligent life out there. But if something intelligent does find these messages, they will probably determine they are artificial, and hopefully manage to decode some of it.
See, this is all fascinating for me. I love this stuff.
It’s also a good exercise in recognizing the assumptions we make every day. I’m trying to get to a point where I can articulate my thoughts and I don’t have to struggle through the curse of knowledge.
I think one useful comparison would be to convert their measurement of the speed of light to our measurement and vice versa. They will use different units of distance and time, but the values themselves will be proportional unless they live in a black hole.
That could work for velocities, but any measure of distance is based on our notion of time, like “light year” (the distance light can travel in one rotation of the Earth around the sun), which is relative.
Even an AU is the distance from Earth to our sun.
To be fair, we don’t really have another point of reference with which to measure stuff.
A good way to portray distance could be a blip the length of time it would take light to travel that far. Like an RF signal that lasts as long as it would take for light up travel from one edge of an object to the other edge of the object.
… It’s a difficult problem to try to solve even as a mental exercise.
Me watching a BBC TV show: “The suspect’s home is five miles away.”
shocked pikachu
there’s a very important video on the measurement rules in the UK, if you haven’t seen it: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNh9z3IzG8t/
Without seeing it let me guess: If it is serious --> metric units and if you want to confuse customers --> imperial
It’s not helpful for us seriously distracted people. To remember a number, I must remember a smaller number. Damn, how many was it? Three tomatoes? Eight tomatoes?
Was it even tomatoes? Maybe it was potatoes?
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.
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.
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.
Base 12 is easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12
5,280 ft in a mile is fucking nonsense though
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.
Because there’s a extra system of measurement change hiding in the middle. The Inches, Feet and Yards system (with the familiar 12:1 and 3:1 ratios we know and love), and Rods, Chains, Furlongs and Miles system. Their conversation rates are generally “nice”, with ratios 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.
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.
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.
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.
The just started counting with zero (fist)
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.
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.
Base 60 can do 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, and 12.
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.
What are you even trying to say here? Yeah, in real-life use we use “close enough”. I don’t need to know that it’s 1,546 metres to the nearest supermarket. 1.5 km is close enough.
But nobody is suggesting it because it’s “so accurate”. Any system can be accurate, depending on how many sig figs you use. The advantage of metric is on how easy it is to convert between different scales. Use millimetres, metres, or kilometres for the appropriate case, depending on the need you have for precision. And just move the decimal point if you decide you don’t need as much precision…or need more. In archaic measurements, you can’t do that. If you’ve got 342 feet and decide you actually only need to be accurate to the chain, you have to memorise the arbitrary number of 3 feet to a yard, and 22 yards to a chain, and divide 342 by those numbers, to arrive at 5.2 chains.
Aren’t chains only used by railworkers?
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.
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, …
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.
You mean 1 gram of water
I do. Wrong letter.
And isn’t 1kg of water 1L? And 1L is 1000 cubic cm? So a 10x10x10 cube?
1 BTU heats 1 pound of water 1 degree Fahrenheit.
How many BTUs are there in a big mac?
100 degrees out is 100% hot. 0 degrees F is 0% hot
Most standard measuring tapes have 1/16th of an inch as the smallest fraction on the tape. 1mm is 1/32nd Which is one is “close enough”? Lol
Edit: 1/32, not 1/64
Way off! There are 25.4 millimeters per inch, not 64, and most measuring tapes have 1/32" markings.
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.
Fair, but I lived in Denver for 26 years. I will never forget the number of feet in a mile. 😂
Heeey, I’m currently living in Northglenn. Same, it’s forever etched in my memory.
What the heck does this mean? Is the number 5280 just painted all over billboards in Denver?
Pretty much. If you go to a Broncos game, you’re going to see a graphic saying we’re 5280 feet above sea-level at least a hundred times.
Edit: These are just some examples that in the non-public areas of the stadium to mess with opposing teams.
They’re right. Altitude sickness is absolutely real. I live in CT pretty close to sea level. I hiked the flatirons in Boulder and puked my guts out when I came back down.
The first time I ever took a non-pressurized aircraft to 10,000 feet was an interesting experience. I noticed myself breathing…not heavier, that feels like the wrong word, because I had the opposite problem to “heavy.” I needed to breathe noticeably deeper and faster just sitting still at the controls of the plane doing maybe slightly more work than typing this sentence. Somebody from a lower area going up to Denver (about half the altitude I flew to that day) to play a sport has an elevated chance of Not A Good Day.
You’d think the Rockies would have a better record but they somehow still consistently suck
Basically yes. We even have a local magazine called 5280.
Sounds like they take their distances pretty seriously over there in the mile-high city
So many businesses and shops are named 5280. Breweries, coffee shops, bars, transmission shops, interior design shops, animal hospitals, dry cleaners, bakeries…that number is plastered on signs and advertisements everywhere. 😂
