• ricecake@sh.itjust.works
    7·
    7 months ago

    Or you end up doing what I do to troll my friends, and mix the styles the systems like.
    “This post should be 5/16ths of a decameter” The rational numbers you find in imperial are helpful for dividing things compared to decimals, but everyone gets all weird when you do fractional meters or kilograms.

    • dankm@lemmy.ca
      7·
      7 months ago

      I like to measure the area of rooms in foot-metres. Square foot-metres is a great unit for volume.

      Today I unironically described the length of something as “about 1 centimetre less than a foot”.

    • Baŝto@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      7 months ago

      And I just understood why that’s the case. Most of the old units used highly composite numbers as factors, which have an incredibly high number of divisors. We still widely use such factors for time and angles.

      • 4: 1, 2, 4
      • 5: 1, 5
      • 6: 1, 2, 3, 6
      • 10: 1, 2, 5, 10
      • 12: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12
      • 20: 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20
      • 24: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24
      • 50: 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50
      • 60: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60
      • 100: 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, 100
      • 120: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 24, 30, 40, 60, 120
      • 360: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180, 360
      • 840: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 20, 21, 24, 28, 30, 35, 40, 42, 56, 60, 70, 84, 105, 120, 140, 168, 210, 280, 420, 840
      • 1000: 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 20, 25, 40, 50, 100, 125, 200, 250, 500, 1000