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Comment by trothamel | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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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