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Comment by naikrovek | Hacker News Reader

Because adding 7/16ths of an inch to 7/8ths of a mile and getting an answer in inches isn't easy for a human. Adding 1cm to 982m and getting an answer in centimeters is dead easy for a human.

THAT'S why human intuition about measurement doesn't mean a damn thing.

Using metric means using the system optimized for humans. Period.

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Your absolutism is a bit silly. I don't think the Imperial system is good for anything beyond construction or cooking, but there's a reason it excels those areas. And it's exactly because it's more usable by humans in certain contexts (like construction or cooking). 1/3 of a meter should not be an irrational number - how is that "optimized for humans"?

A scalable system that shares the divisibility of the foot would certainly trump both systems.

Nit: 1/3 of a meter is rational. You're looking for "whole number."

Correct - I've admittedly had a few beers.

Which might be obvious due to me debating the merits of the number 12 on the internet.

Well 12 is amazing, but arguably there are too many other negative aspects in the imperial system as a whole.

But 1/2 isn't a whole number either.

Base-10 absolutism rears its head again. The objection to 1/3 is that it has a non-terminating decimal expansion. This is not a problem if you're using base-anything-with-3-as-a-factor.

What about 1/5 instead? There's always going to be problems with some base, the point is that unit conversions are super easy with metric, and it's easier to teach to children.

As for temperature, 0 is really gold and 100 is really hot in pretty much every scale, that's just a very subjective way of describing things.

If you want to measure ⅓ metre, go ahead. Nothing stops you from doing that.

The usual convention in construction in Europe is multiples of 150mm, for example a typical large appliance is 595mm wide to fit a 600mm wide space.

The imperial system is not good for construction. Try measuring a 2x4 sometime.

It's just an established convention. And it sucks.

A 2x4 is cut to 2" by 4" wet and shrinks when it is dried. I'm no huge fan, but this is not an issue with the imperial system.

Uh, no. The final 2x4 product is milled mostly dry. Mills allow the timber to air dry, then mill, then post-kiln, and may mill the final product after that e.g. by cutting 2x4s out of a 12x4. The reduction of a 2x4 from 2x4" to 1.75x3.5" is done on purpose, because modern mills can put guarantees on the density of knots in the wood, thus requiring less wood for the same engineered strength guarantee. So the 2x4" product is not actually 2x4 because the mill is asserting that while there is less wood than just cutting a 2x4, the board they're selling is as strong as a 2x4 would have been at the turn of the 20th century, when they didn't have a way to guarantee the density of knots.

The imperial system is terrible for cooking, in my experience as a home cook and baker.

Measuring dry goods by volume instead of by weight? Good luck ever getting consistent results.

Base 10 math is the most intuitive for humans. Fractions are an abomination.

Math isn't intuitive for humans. It takes a lot of work to learn it and most people don't remember any of it past school age. If we taught base 12 instead of 10 it would be just as intuitive.

But we don't. The number system used in the western world is base 10. So why add base 12 on top of that?

It is appalling for cooking. Don't get me started on the shitshow of using "cups" to measure weight.

1/3 of a metre is 333mm, which is generally precise enough for construction.

How is the system good for cooking? Literally the first thing amazon echo was showcasing was unit conversions while cooking.

In what situation would you be adding 7/16ths of an inch to 7/8 of a mile? If you have such crazy tolerances you shouldn't be using fractions from the start. And even if you did, with imperial system you could just write '7/8 mile and 7/16th of an inch' or '7/8 mi. 7/16 " ' and when they measure it out they will measure 7/8 of a mile, then add on that 7/16 inch.

And whatever you are measuring that length with, fucking awesome job getting 1/16 or better tolerances over that amount of distance with .

Do people in metric-using countries commonly need to know what 982m + 1cm is? It never seems to come up here in the US...

Perhaps not, but nonetheless I instantly worked it out in my head without even trying.

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