Quote:
Originally Posted by Arragonis
The Metric system is logical though, unlike the 'based on the length of the upper arm and an average stride of a man' nonsense of the older system.
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I don't think it's all that logical. It just replaced those arm & stride lengths with "the length of this metal bar we keep in Paris", then when technology got to where it could do accurate measurements, redefined as "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second", with a second being defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom". That's logical? That's even accessible to ordinary mortals?
Then instead of having different names for units, you just stick on confusing prefixes - and worse, abbreviate them so you're never really sure whether M stands for milli, micro, or mega.