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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Imperial units are not “human scale” any more, or less, than metric: https://xkcd.com/526/

As computer specialists, we should advocate a return of the Imperial system using fractions of an inch for measurements. This is because it fits perfectly into the binary floating-point system. There are no more problems relating to 0.1 being an irrational number in binary. It's all broken down into 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 etc which in binary is 0b0.1, 0b0.01, 0b0.001, 0b0.0001

A 1 foot sandwich can be easily shared with 2, 3, 4 or 6 friends. And nobody has 5 friends anyway. There are no meter long sandwiches .. and if there were, you couldn't split it between 3 people. It's impractical. It's like if there were 100 degrees in a a circle.. You'd go nuts

Metric is for when you've made a mess of things and have completely given up on having nice round integer values

EDIT: This comment has been timed to coincide with when Americans wake up to defend me :) ~ USA! USA!

Splitting a meter-long sandwich between three people is easy. You give each person a footlong slice, and the remaining 8.6 cm to the dog.

Or, you know... You look at it, more or less find the one third point from the tip, cut it there, then cut the remaining larger part in half.

Which is probably the same way you'd do it if it was a 3.28ft-long sandwich instead.

Impossible. Ever since Hercules accidentally stepped on his lunch sandwich in the stables of Augeas, his 12-inch foot has been the standard measurement for Ideal Sandwich.

In The Netherlands you can order beer in meters.

At any spring break resort or in Vegas, you can order beer by the yard

Edit: mustn't forget the French Quarter either

Obviously a meter of beer is better than a yard of beer.

Those last 3" (76.2mm) would just be foam anyways

Foam is measured in fingers.

Depends on how thick it is, doesn’t it? Why the insistence on measuring the length? Couldn’t you just as easily talk about 1kg sandwiches?

I dunno, a quarter meter sandwich seems just as natural as a quarter pound burger.

> It's like if there were 100 degrees in a a circle

There are 100 gradians in 90 degrees, does that count? They're probably supported on your calculator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian

It's a similar kind of thing to decimal time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

I could down a meter long sub by myself, and I’m fairly certain my dog could too. No need to share.

I mean, sorta? First, arbitrary numbers are arbitrary. But I can point to my foot and say that is about a foot in size. An inch is roughly one of my knuckles. A yard is roughly a step.

Even that comic you linked drives this home. None of them are referenced to humans. They are things we mostly know, sure. But they aren't based on a human. (Well, I suppose the mass ones have an amusing set of people listed.)

And this avoids the measures that, for my memory, just haven't made it to metric yet. Acre, Astrological Unit, Knot, etc.

I never understood why we never popularized a comparable metric measurement. A quarter-meter perhaps?

A decimeter is about 5 inches, which is the height of a cup, diameter of a burger, span across a hand, etc. To me that's a lot more human-friendly than a 'foot' being 12 inches.

“Hand” is already a historical unit, equalling almost exactly 10cm; i.e. 1dm. Horses are measured in hands.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_(unit)>

"3 L - TWO-LITER BOTTLE"

Um, okay...

You are citing a cartoon with a dick joke and a mom joke to say that metric is just as human oriented as imperial. Seriously: Imperial: 1 Foot ~ the length of some guy's foot. 1 Second - the duration of one heart beat. Metric: 1 Meter - some 1/10000 of 1/4 of an mis-measurement of the circumference of the Earth. 1 Second - stolen from the Imperial system cause 86 microdays did not easily divide by 10, 7, 24, 60, 30, 31 or 29.

The first mechanical clock that could accurately and reliably measure seconds was a pendulum clock with a length of one metre. Seconds and metres go hand in hand with the metric system.

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