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(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle
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Gonna take a shit on this idea like a good American and say dealing with fractions is easier than irrational decimals. I do like the metric system tho and I wish we would switch at least some things like temp and road speed over.
The only reason we do things in fractions of an inch are because we use inches.
I never understood how it's much easier to work with "three eights of an inch" than with one centimeter. Or how 6ft3 is easier to work with than 1.90m. The first one combines two measurement units and has very bad accuracy, the second one is straight forward dealing with fractions of itself and can be made even more precise if needed.
Irrational decimal? You mean multiplying and dividing by factors of ten?
The problem isn't exactly fractions or decimals, you can present the SI system in fractions as well. The issue is unit conversion. If you want to go from centimeter to meter to kilometer it's very simple because all base unit conversion are a multiple of 10. But if you want to go from inch (the rough equivalent to centimeter) to feet (rough equivalent to meter) then that's a division by 12 and if you want to go from feet to mile (rough equivalent to kilometer) then that's a division by 5280 which is a fuck-all number that nobody is going to remember. So instead you have to remember feet to chain and then chain to furlong and then furlong to mile. And this is just one unit in one dimension. For derived unit conversions the imperial system can fuck right off because it's going to get needlessly complex.
I get your point but as an American I've never heard of converting feet to chains or furlongs? Lol sounds like pirate measurements to me
I agree that they probably don't see much use but they're there, along with some other pretty impressive units.
That’s not what they’re saying.
They’re saying that the only way you can keep neat and easy conversions between same-dimension units is by maintaining a lot of those deprecated units such as furlongs or chains, because by removing them, now you end up with complete nonsense conversions.
I doubt that very much. Just yesterday I checked out the product page of the new DJI Air 3 and compared it with the Air 2. One of the new features is a bigger sensor compared to the old one. So I wanted to see how much bigger it got. For some reason though DJI only lists their sensor sizes in fractions. The Air 3 has a sensor size of 1/1.3 Inch and the Air 2 1/2 Inch. To be honest. I thought shortly about that and then concluded I would have to do math to compare those two and did something else with my life. I know how to convert between different bases but honestly - why should I? This is weird! Why use random switching fractions for anything? Fractions are only useful to display numbers that would be hard to express in decimal. And that is mainly 1/3 and 2/3! Which to be honest I dont encounter that much in my life.
I'm steel-manning the argument for sticking with US Standard. I think there is a lot more precision inherent in how the system functions that you don't really get in every day uses. Even so, I would rather deal with meters and liters because I hate having to convert between the two systems and metric seems to have won anyway.
I really dont get why it should be more precise... Precision is dependent on my measurement and calculation. How can it be dependent on units? (if you smaller units as needed by your measurement and calculation)
I've never seen metric units represented with fractions
Well, sometimes, because writing 1,3333333333333 is shitty :P, in those seldom cases I rather write it as 1,1/3