• kamen@lemmy.world
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    12 days 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.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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        11 days 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.

      • yermaw@sh.itjust.works
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        12 days 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
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          12 days 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
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          12 days 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.

            • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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              11 days ago

              That gets you base 11, which is what we count on our fingers in now.

              They counted, at least for tallying, by putting their thumb on the three finger bones if the other four fingers on the hand. One hand can count to 12, and then you lift a finger in the other when starting over. That method gives you a count of 60’on your fingers. That’s why 12 and 60 still crop up all the time.

      • bryndos@fedia.io
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        12 days 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.

    • Peppycito@sh.itjust.works
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      12 days ago

      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.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      12 days 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
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        12 days 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
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          11 days 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.