this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Hot Take, the metric system, being a base-10 system sucks for task where you want to make thirds/fourths of something to come out as a round number. It's like the people who are huge proponents of metric don't know the purpose of a human-centric systems of measurement and think that the ascetics of appending "kilo" or "milli" to something is the purpose on it's own.
Decimals exist
Why is a third or a fourth more important than a fifth or a tenth or a half?
It's not about thirds and fourths per se. It's actually about lack of divisors. In our current metric system of base 10. We have two divisors, 2 and 5. That's it. No matter if you are talking kilometer, gigameter's whatever, it's just 2's and 5's The imperial system uses more divisors to make the system more useful. There are 5280 feet in a mile. But why? Well because that number has divisors of 2,3,5 and 11. Which allows you a lot of flexibility for how you want to divide a mile. Or think about time, 3600 seconds in an hour, 24hrs in a day, that's a lot of ways you can easily divide up time. The ability to divide these arbitrary units of time is what makes them useful.
Ok but decimals are still more useful and intuitive. Don't be afraid of the dot!
Decimals are absolutely not intuitive. Whole numbers are. If I say I have .473 liters of liquid how much is that? Sure it's 473ml's but how much is that? A lot a little? Could you drink that much? Should you drink that much? If I say, let's go have a pint of beer, then you would obviously say, sure, maybe two. The amount is the same, but way you think about it is more important.
By the way, 8 pints of beer is gallon, so if you say I don't want to drink a gallon of beer, you'll know you should stop at 7 pints. But no one is going to say I can only drink 3.3liters of beer tonight. They may say, I promised my wife no more then 7beers (or 3 that number doesn't matter), the point is you want to measure things in whole numbers for human-centric activities.
That just seems like a strawman. What it boils down to is that when you convert from one system to another, conversions are not going to produce nice round numbers. There's nothing special about pints that make them the authoritative drink. Why not just go for a nice, round half liter?
I think what you're getting stuck on is the imperial system being the default for you instead of these both being human constructs.
No what you aren't getting is that the measurement units are arbitrary. However the divisors for those units is what makes the measurement system useful for people. If you are in construction it's much more useful to deal with whole numbers then it is to deal with fractions. Hence if you want a third of a foot, you want 4", not .166666 of a Meter. If you are drinking beer you count by the number of glasses of beer whatever size those happen to be, you don't count in Milliliters of beer. Measurements are supposed to be USEFUL to humans first and foremost, and moving a decimal to convert a unit to a different unit is trivial and can be done regardless of metric or not, and isn't really useful.
I was specifically talking about your example of .473 liters of liquid. No one using the metric system primarily is going to be serving .473 liter glasses of beer. They're going to be serving half liters. Or 500 mills. Or 200 mills. It really isn't that hard or unintuitive. Likewise, they're going to build buildings using measurements that make sense in metric. The problem is you're taking measurements that work nicely internal to the base-2 and base-12 imperial system and asking why they don't work well in the base-10 metric system. Well yeah, they don't, especially when you start out by converting from an imperial unit.
I'll pose it another way. Quick, what is a tenth of a foot? A tenth of a gallon? Ten cups in gallons? Why is a fork so bad at eating tomato soup?
I absolutely get a feeling of.437 L of beer. Not only that, but most people I know are able to divide by more than 2 and 5. It's not about numbers being whole, it's about relative proportions. It's quite intuitive that a third of a thing is three things. So a third of 1 is about point 3. Wanna make it more accurate? point 33. Wanna divide by 7? Okay, 10 beans divided in 7 parts gives 7 beans, one in each part and 3 left to divide in 7 parts which looks pretty close to half a bean in each part since 3 is about half of 7. So there - 1 and a half beans. I haven't even computed the right result but I know I'm pretty close because the proportions make sense.
Metric is based in such a way that the idea is ease of unit conversion.
In base 4 multiplying by 4 would change the unit to kilo or whatever. That would be metric but base 4.
We use base 10, you can argue about the validity of using base 10 but it bears no effect on the metric system. And yes arguements about bases exist.
Base 12 Base 6 Base 60 are all common suggestions. But base 10 is what we are probably are going to be stuck with for a very long time.
What about time? That's base-60, and one of the most useful measurements we have.
The base 60 part of time is the least-used part of it. Very few people care enough about exactly what minute or second it is and end up rounding it to the nearest 5 or 15 anyway.
The people who do care about having precision in seconds usually aren't converting it to minutes or hours.
The nearest 5 minutes is a 12th of an hour, the nearest 15minutes is a quarter of an hour. No one ever cares about a 10th of an hour (6minutes) i.e. the nearest minute or second so you inadvertently demonstrated my point. Also the "high precision in seconds" is also conveniently a base 60 system which also goes evenly into a full day, or week, or year despite none of those measurements being metric either.