As a non American I can't help but think if you are doing anything that involves short and long distances feet must surley be painful. Either you use 5280 feet instead of a mile, or 0.000189 miles instead of a foot. And then you have yards...
Madness!
b) The mistake was picking base-10 as the basis of the metric system. The Base-12/Reciprocal-halves (2^63/2^4) system of feet, inches, fractional inches, is hands-down the best way to engineer and build things on the human scale. It makes it super easy to scale measurements by N/2, N/3, N/4, N/6, N/8, N/12, N/2^m. Three weeks ago had to make 9 evenly spaced holes in a 24' board, with an inch of buffer on either side, which works out to 35-3/4". This results in really convenient interval of N3'-less-N/4" (35-3/4, 71-1/2, 107-1/4, 143"), so convenient I still remember them weeks later.
The yucky part is when you have to use a base(2*5) calculator. Now you get 35.75, 71.5, 107.25, 143", which is a much less obvious pattern.
Every day I'm in the shop, I yearn for a dozenal calculator and measuring tape.
One can dream.
Base 6 is also nice:
The flipside to this I’ve been encountering a lot is engineering drawings in metric for things that are several meters long and all the measurements are in millimeters! Why all the big numbers!
Precision, usually if you are getting something fabricated the numbers are quoted in millimeters if the millimeters is under 10,000. So a desk might be 1800x800x700mm. I don't think I have ever seen something listed as 120000x10000x10000mm. At that point they would switch to meters.
As for the precision, I suspect it’s to defeat the perils of floating point numbers in computers...if you only need mm precision, you rather your CNC computer do integer math and not floating point math...am I correct?
> CNC computer do integer math and not floating point math...am I correct?
Good point.
I doubt that. It would be trivial to have the computer convert from 6.000m or 600.0cm to 6000mm internally.
Using millimeters gives you a "standard precision" which is a boon for interoperability.
Because all my tape measures are in inches ;(
You use feet for short distances, miles for long.
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1. There are a few areas where the hunnerts don't correspond to 1/8 mile blocks: The first mile from Madison to Roosevelt goes from 0 to 1200. Then from 16th to 22nd (Cermak) there are some missing hunnerts and again one missing hunnert between 26th and 31st. Some of these are a consequence of the replatting of the city at the beginning of the twentieth century and some of it, who knows?