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Comment by raphinou | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that the book is available about everywhere save for North America according to the author, but the first distances in the text are given in yards, mainly used only in North America. Ok, this is not the exact book text, but still, it looks as a misfit to the audience of the book.

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The UK wasn’t on the metric system during the first world war.

https://ukma.org.uk/press/metrication-timeline/

still isn't for most purposes, and most people are still more comfortable with yards than meters for day-to-day stuff (friends are often looking at me blankly when I give a distance in meters)

> most people are still more comfortable with yards than meters

I feel this is highly context dependant, too. Hanging out with a rural group of people born in the 80s? yards. Anyone in a city and/or born after 1990 is probably more comfortable with meters

When I was a student one of my mates was going on about the superiority of the metric system and how he wished the UK would adopt it fully rather than the heterogenous mix we actually have. The football was on in the background, and shortly after a goal was scored he exclaimed 'that must have been from thirty yards!' Personally I quite like the fact we use both, it underlines that our human systems of measurement are arbitrary rather than baked into the fabric of reality.

I'm too old to be a zoomer and too young to be a millennial, but I'm more or less bilingual with unit systems. Useful for a European who deals with the US often!

I find it mildly amusing that fully metric countries are seemingly stuck with some standardized measurements based on imperial units. Like how a soccer/football goal is 8 feet x 24 feet / 7.32 m x 2.44 m. Or how a standard shipping conatiner is 40 feet x 8 feet x 8 feet 6 inches/ 12.192 m x 2.438 m x 2.591 m. Or standard gague railways being 4 feet 8.5 inches / 1.435 m.

That's due to outsized British and American influence, but even that is waning. Nobody will change legacy sizes such as football goals, but every sport invented outside of those countries will use metric sizes. As the US wanes in influence, this will happen more and more.

I'm a year older than Conway and have never heard people using yards to mean anything other than a concreted or paved area, even in rural settings.

Maybe posh horsey types are different, but even they're mostly concerned with furlongs and hands and suchlike.

(Not wanting to disparage Conway or his work - it's likely that, as gp suggests, his choice of measurements is simply due to the historic source material)

I was in England last month and the road signs still have yards on them. Their government has a whole website complaining about it: https://metrication.uk/transport/roads/distance-signs/

IMO metric is missing a critical measurement that is roughly the size of "a foot".

Most measurements in one measuring system have very similar equivalents in other measuring systems or useful approximations, like a pound being 1/2 a kilo, a liter being about a quart, or a meter being about a yard. Even various ancient chinese measurements can be similar like this.

Except the metric system seems to have eschewn the common measurement of "About the length of a human foot". It confuses me.

What do you call a footlong submarine sandwich in the metric system? A third-meter-long? A decimeter-long? It wouldn't fit into the power-of-ten based system.

Imperial measurements are often based on the human body: an inch is the width of a thumb, a yard is the distance between your nose and your outstretched finger, a fathom is outstretched finger to outstretched finger, a mile is a thousand paces, hands are still used to measure horses...

This is great for estimation, but these separate measurements had to be massaged to get them all on the same base (there were three different definitions of the fathom in use well into the 1700s) so the result is somewhat arbitrary (4 inches to a hand, 3 hands to a foot, 6 feet to a fathom, 880 fathoms to a mile). Metric's clearly the more consistent, simpler system for anything beyond estimates.

The closest to what you're looking for is probably the decimetre (dm) at 100mm (roughly one hand). But in everyday speech, "30 centimetres" sounds less clunky than "3 decimetres", and in technical speech everything human-scale is done in mm.

Subway (the fast food chain) calls them "30cm subs", or colloquially "a thirty".

The smaller sandwich is a "15cm sub", or "a fifteen".

It's because inhabitants of metric land neglect the decimeter, probably because it's too awkward of a word.

Define 1 metric hand = 1 decimeter, and you can cleanly convert between hands and meters (it's just a factor of 10 instead of the weird jump from centimeters to meters) and at the same time be able to approximate three metric hands to a foot.

I went to school with a 30cm ruler in the 80s. As a result I have an instinctual sense for that length.

Why shouldn't a measurement that is so natural and familiar to most people that most human societies developed an analogous version and even places without it still end up using it, be a first class citizen of that measurement system?

That's what confuses me. It's a dumb confusion admittedly. It's basically an argument to "Beauty" or aesthetics or similar.

Why do you need feet to measure anything? I've never in my life measured anything using feet. Paces, that's a different story, but those are closer to 1m, anyway.

It's the length of an A4 sheet of paper (also, by extension, the size of many school books, backpacks and … rulers).

In the UK 300 mm is, or at least used to be, referred to as a metric foot.

I lived all of my life in metric countries and I never felt that was missing. One foot is 30cm, two is half a meter, three one meter.

Britain has a strange relationship with metric units, and there are certain things particular imperial units are still used for. Beer and milk is in pints (but nothing else), people are in stones, and how far you can sling something (a golf drive, a rugby ball, or a bullet) would be yards.

In England they still use imperial for some things, like miles, mph and mpg for cars, pints for drinks etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if shooting still used yards as well.

Never met a Canadian who used yards, unless they're talking about the grass in front or back of their house.

It comes out mid-August according to https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0593467426/

A yard and a meter are basically the same anyways within a reasonable margin of error for lengths less than 5 or 10 meters.

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