Do you say "Turn right in 5,604 feet?"

[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

[calculating the distance from pole to equator by measuring the stars]
Not quite as simple as all that. Quite aside from the fact that few people have precision astronomical gear, you have to figure that the Earth is not a perfect sphere, and Paris is not at sea level. Whereas almost everyone has many people have a pair of legs, and can count :-)

Guess what - measuring the position of stars, combined with precise land metering (see Geodesy) allows for a very good approximation of the changing curvature of the earth.

I hane a hunch that even if that variance was ignored after all, the result would be more precise than measuring pace length by walking.
My wife is 30.6 centimeter smaller than I am. Guess what that does for pace length.

[Xist]

I knew Soldiers from 4'9" to 6'6". That is a difference of twenty-one inches or 53.34 centimeters.

Everyone marched with a thirty-inch step.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

My wife is 30.6 centimeter smaller than I am. Guess what that does for pace length.

So if you're short, you add a bit more*. Still easy to figure out when you've walked about a mile, with no extra gear required. Similarly for many of the other irrationalities of the metric system. In everyday life, just as in elementary Euclidian geometry, it's much easier to divide something into two equal parts, than into 10, or even 5.

On the same subject, I've sometimes wondered why, if the metric system is such a great thing, the world never adopted the metric timekeeping system, but still uses 60 second minutes, 60 second hours, 24 hour days, &c. (I suppose celestial mechanics has stuck us with a year of 365 and a fraction days...)

(*Interesting observation: my horse and I have exactly the same pace length, so we can "march" in step quite easily. But my dog's legs are maybe 1/3 as long as mine, and he walks along with me quite comfortably - at least when he's not off chasing rabbits & bears :-))

[Xist]

I was always late everywhere when I was in eighth grade, so I lengthened my stride, and it is still much longer than the tallest person that I have met. People stupidly claim that I am a jerk because I leave my girlfriend behind (when I have one).

Wait, what?

When I have a girlfriend I walk her speed, but I take issue when old people pass us easily, and everyone else passes the old people.

Anyway, the obvious solution to Imperial timekeeping is to declare 87.66 hours one 100-hour day. Then you only have one hundred days per year!

You will not be able to rely on the position of the sun or your circadian rhythm, but those are mere crutches!

[RedDevil]

There's a reason why the real world uses days, months and hours while relying on the metric system for measurement.

Because the length of your stride is irrelevant when measuring out clothes or driving on the highway. But adjusting your wake/sleep interval to the activities in everyday life is very relevant.

Anyway, any system is a system. To claim the system you're used to is better than others is ridiculous. I would not call the metric system superior because I'm used to it.
I call it superior because it is based on a limited set of carefully chosen base units, to make conversion between the properties of the system as logical as possible, instead of a system that contains several non-aligning units for each aspect.

Time for bed now. Good night.

[Xist]

The Imperial system is inherently better because I use it.

Unless I feel like using the metric system.

[gone-ot]

HISTORY is older than SCIENCE, but science is more accurate.

[seifrob]

This game was already fought: https://ecomodder.com/forum/showthre...html#post87034 ... And I am not buying it again.
See you in more reasonable thread.

[Xist]

That was when we created the dollar. How many cents?

Right. One hundred.

On 15 February 1971, known as Decimal Day, the United Kingdom and Ireland decimalised their currencies.
Under the old currency of pounds, shillings and pence, the pound was made up of 240 pence (denoted by the letter d for Latin denarius and now referred to as "old pence"), with 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings (denoted by s for Latin solidus) in a pound.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day

That must have been the inspiration for Harry Potter:

29 Knuts make up one Sickle, and there are 17 Sickles in a Galleon.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Muggle...er/Magic/Money

Then to paraphrase a guy on Quora:

By the way, quick, what's the digital equivalent of 1/3? Ok now write that into a legal document about the boundaries of your property. Hmm. Now split it amongst your two children. Easy to do with fractions. Not so easy with the metric system.

https://www.quora.com/What-do-Americ...-metric-system

Seifrob, hopefully we have more reasonable contributors than you.

[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by Xist

Curious. I am not sure when I last had enough sleep, but I usually use more precision than 2.54 cm per inch, although it took me a while to find anything more precise than that. Then I found 2.5400051 cm.

2.54 cm is adequate for me. 1 / 0.03937 = 25.400051.

Converting different English units is a pain, but from Imperial to Metric can cause your orbiter to crash.

Anyway, I need to figure out how to replace the alternator tensioner bolt on my Accord. Parts stores do not carry it. Either I drive seven hours for $15 or less in parts or I wait a week for shipping.

In theory I could fix my Civic sooner.

I would not bet money on it, though.

Actually, the inch is 2.54 cm exactly by definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch

In 1946, the Commonwealth Science Congress recommended a yard of exactly 0.9144 metres for adoption throughout the British Commonwealth. This was adopted by Canada in 1951,[25][26] the United States on 1 July 1959,[27][28][29] Australia in 1961,[30] effective 1 January 1964,[31] and the United Kingdom in 1963,[32] effective on 1 January 1964.[33] The new standards gave an inch of exactly 25.4 mm, 1.7 millionths of an inch longer than the old imperial inch and 2 millionths of an inch shorter than the old US inch.[34]

As luck would have it, 2.54 was right in between the Imperial and the US inch.
Since then the inch officially is 0.00000000254 times the distance from the poles to the equator.

But it goes too far to call the inch a metric unit.
ISO_2848 defines a metric foot (30 cm) and inch (25 mm).
Which nobody really needs, of course.