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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Imperial units would be a lot more defensible if they were consistent. But just in your example we've got things being divided into 12 and 16 parts, and many other random divisors are common. I'd be onboard with a system of units where the divisor is always constant, but having it random is annoying. Fortunately there is a system of units where the divisor is always constant - SI! Yeah, it's 10 instead of 12, but it'll have to do.

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I agree that the Imperial system is a mess. 5,280 feet in a mile?

But my point is that people who prefer old units are not being entirely irrational, or averse to change.

It's just that for their particular use case (making human-scale furniture out of wood, for example), the Imperial system works pretty well, and perhaps better than the base-10 metric system.

If they had to spend their days converting between acres and square feet (43,560 of the latter go into the former, by the way), they might be more inclined to switch to metric.

One thousand paces in a mile, where each pace is two steps.

A property of the US customary units is they tend to be more optimized for specific uses at a given scales, with little thought given to changing scales. Metric units make conversion easier, at the cost of often less suitable for use at scale - how many steps does it take to go a kilometer?

Unless you're in a military unit that is on the march, what does the number of steps in a kilometer matter for at all? And there is a huge natural variation in human stride length anyway -- you won't be surprised to know that the figure you mentioned for miles is an average that only applies for adult males of military height (i.e. not even shorter men). I think SI units are great for measuring distance at scale. Nanometers, micrometers, millimeters, centimeters, meters, and kilometers are all in common usage, and can represent pretty much anything you'd need. By contrast, it's imperial that has the real problems with use at scale, specifically down at tiny scales.

> adult males of military height (i.e. not even shorter men)

Adult males of roman military height, so probably about 5'7" (170cm): http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/17072/average-hei...

> Unless you're in a military unit that is on the march, what does the number of steps in a kilometer matter for at all?

Playing Pokemon Go?

I do play Pokemon Go, and I don't see what the number of steps has to do with anything. Nothing in the game is step-based; it's all kilometer based.

A mile is no longer anything resembling 1000 paces, given that a standard imperial pace is 5 feet, rather than 5'3" and some change.

Besides, it takes about 10 minutes of walking to go a kilometer. You don't count paces, do you?

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