this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle
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Gonna take a shit on this idea like a good American and say dealing with fractions is easier than irrational decimals. I do like the metric system tho and I wish we would switch at least some things like temp and road speed over.
The problem isn't exactly fractions or decimals, you can present the SI system in fractions as well. The issue is unit conversion. If you want to go from centimeter to meter to kilometer it's very simple because all base unit conversion are a multiple of 10. But if you want to go from inch (the rough equivalent to centimeter) to feet (rough equivalent to meter) then that's a division by 12 and if you want to go from feet to mile (rough equivalent to kilometer) then that's a division by 5280 which is a fuck-all number that nobody is going to remember. So instead you have to remember feet to chain and then chain to furlong and then furlong to mile. And this is just one unit in one dimension. For derived unit conversions the imperial system can fuck right off because it's going to get needlessly complex.
I get your point but as an American I've never heard of converting feet to chains or furlongs? Lol sounds like pirate measurements to me
I agree that they probably don't see much use but they're there, along with some other pretty impressive units.
That’s not what they’re saying.
They’re saying that the only way you can keep neat and easy conversions between same-dimension units is by maintaining a lot of those deprecated units such as furlongs or chains, because by removing them, now you end up with complete nonsense conversions.