Now do it with a dozen eggs.
Integer factors have a hard practicality about them that eludes the elegant abstraction of SI.
Integer factors have a hard practicality about them that eludes the elegant abstraction of SI.
That handiness is why the usage of the dozen and the foot persists.
You can easily express any content (0.1, 0.2, 0.3...) Move to the lower unit (move the coma). A quarter of an egg in egg packs? 0.025 Want to move in the egg unit? 0.25
Please prove me wrong but i fail to see how it's easier in 12th, when using a decimal number system.
In contrast, cutting a 10cm thing in thirds or quarters requires estimating the point 0.33 or 0.25 of the way between marks, which is perceptually harder.
You're just taking arbitrary numbers that are easier to operate with using the imperial system. The metric system is superior because most numbers are easier to operate and measures in fractions of ten.
Note that machinists, who do want that sort of precision and can achieve it, mostly work in metric or metric-lite ('mils'=1/1000s of an inch).
It's not. You have to have a base 12 "decimal" system (dozenal or duodecimal). A half is 0.6, third is 0.4, quarter is 0.3, a sixth is 0.2, an eighth is 0.15, and a twelveth is 0.1.
Eight eggs is 0.8 of a dozen, 0.08 of a gross, or 8 "pg", per-gross, akin to per-centum.
The mistake was adopting decimal, not dozenal.
Your instinct is to immediately convert into decimal point numbers, but the strength of the base 12 system is in fractions.
Its very easy to visualize and measure one half, one third, one quarter of something. Humans in their daily life don't come across a situation where they need 0.2 of something. It is much more natural to think of halves and thirds.
Milk (as an example of imperial liquid measure) is another good example. Nobody looks at a gallon of milk and says "boy I wish I could only buy 0.7 of that". The brain is just wired to think of halving and doubling, so we have quarts which are 1/4 gallons, and pints which are 1/2 quarts.
For another example, You never hear about people "0.7x" a recipe. People halve or double a recipe, and imperial measures make that easy to do.
I like the phrase: Imperial units are for humans, SI units are for scientists. This is why I prefer the Fahrenheit temperature scale. The Celsius scale is much more "concrete" in that it has a physical basis for degree 0 and 100, but that doesn't matter for humans. I never have to relate temperature in terms of boiling and freezing water.
In Fahrenheit, 0 is "really cold" and 100 is "really hot". It's arbitrary, but more human friendly.
If the SI people could have broken with the idea that everything must be a strict power of 10, they could have used 200 degrees instead of 100 and had much more human-friendly units.
Both the fact that imperial uses base 12 for some units and the fact that Fahrenheit is centered around the human experience of temperature support my larger point that imperial units are more ergonomic.
I don't relate at all to the Farenheit scale. You can give whatever number, it just doesn't talk to me at all. The Celsius one does though. This is not a matter of a unit being better than another, but what we're used to.
Plywood is sold in 8 foot long sheets, or 240cm in metric countries. 200cm would be a more natural metric size, but it is too short to be useful (because plywood is used for things that need to be human height), and so being compatible with the US standard is the compromise construction uses.
Metric is nice in math when you can choose to your values to make things easy. As you get to engineering things get messy just because the nice sizes are not normally even values. Of course all systems suffer from this, 5000 feet in a mile would be a nicer measure but it doesn't fit in with the other things that you want in a system so you compromise. Metric compromised differently and is equally annoying to use for everything.
We should still go metric in the US, consistency is useful.
Engineering is math. You start from your constraints, and finish with an acceptable level of imprecision based on your requirements, your tools and your materials. Whatever you do it's never precision work, exactitude only exists on paper.
AKA, a dozen eggs is purely a convention.
Eggs are also sold in boxes of 6 or 10 in Denmark.
In 2015, Cadbury stopped selling its creme eggs in packs of six in the U.K. and now sells them in packs of five. Ironically, a subsidiary of a U.S. conglomerate (Cadbury having been taken over in 2010) metricated creme egg packaging.
Oh, and also packs of six. :D