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this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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Oh right, fractions of an inch are usually expressed in fractions of powers of two. SI humour went right over my head because I'm used to seeing weird fractions involved in those measurements.
Feet are divided by 12 but inches are divided by 8. And a yard is a foot times 3.
It makes way more sense when you use it, but trying to explain it does make it sound crazy.
I thought it was powers of two because it's not hard to find the halfway point between two other points, so you find the 1/2 mark, then the 1/4 mark, then 1/8, 16, 32, depending on how much precision you need. Then, at some point the unit changes again to mils or something like that.
After doing some digging in to this, I was thinking of the thou or mil, which is a thousandth of an inch. There's also another one that I hadn't heard of: the line, which is apparently equal to... 1/12 of an inch. Lol full circle.