Base ten system. Dividing everything by ten is fine for ‘indoor kids’ - engineers, computer programmers, …umm…and other engineers…but ten is nearly a prime number. You can divide by 2 and 5. How often do you divide stuff into fifths? A base 12 system can divide into THIRDS! FOURTHS! SIXTHS One of the ‘can’t quite put your finger on it’ reasons why a lot of modernist/brutalist/Vulcan design in buildings, landscaping, even furniture (IKEA) can be…uncharming, is because our eyes prefer things that are grouped or split into threes or fours or more. For example, wind turbines with two blades are infinitesimally more efficient than wind turbines with three blades, but they’re visually just icky, so that three-bladed turbines are normal.
From Wikipedia: “Finally, aesthetics can be considered a factor in that some people find that the three-bladed rotor is more pleasing to look at than a one- or two-bladed rotor.”
The metric system has no relation to the human form. My feet, when encased in steel-toed work boots, are EXACTLY 12 inches long. I can pace off the dimensions of a room or a driveway just by doing that silly heel-toe-heel-toe walk across it. It’s so easy, I can even sing along to the radio while I do it! There are lots of little body dimension hacks that you can do with ‘Murrican’ measurements that can’t be done with metric. You’re a human, with human dimensions, and you’re going to live in an environment built to a system of measurement. Will you be more comfortable in an environment designed by and for Vulcans? Or humans?
Tangentially, it took me ages to understand what the idiom “room-temperature IQ” meant. I assumed it meant something like “lukewarm intelligence” or something.
Have you ever tried to maneuver a 5.5 yard pole down the dungeon corridors? Even a 10-foot pole can be tricky in corners.
All of those problems were anticipated some three or four thousand years ago in Babylon. Their base-60 system (which alas lacked zero) divides by every prime below 7, which is a nasty number anyway that nobody really cares about.
Came here to say this. Abundance of prime factors is defintely a major argument in favor of a duodecimal system (or dozenal if you prefer) like the imperial series for length. Base-10 is relatively useless on pretty much any basis besides that we use it for the common counting system.
It’s horses for courses and one of the reasons that there are lots of different grids is that each has benefits in a given application. Decimal inches anyone? mils er… thous? Or two’s-power divisions? Main thing is to clearly call out the systems in use at the start of a project or there will be problems.
(funny thing - I just took delivery of a metric tape measure from amazon, but the printed “add-length” for the case … “3 inches”)
“The problems of the world can’t be solved in meters. The problems of the world can only be solved the way we made em. Inch by inch and mile after mile” - Arlo Guthrie, Garden Song
Doing some world-building for a fantasy campaign that I never got around to actually having any players for, I developed decimal time pretty far, to the point of pulling it into the game mechanic.
A day was divided into ten “bells” which were about 2 and half of our hours long.
A tenth of a bell was the unit of time for recovering stamina, and was about fifteen of our minutes long
A tenth of that was the unit of time for a long action, something like lighting a fire or applying first aid, which was about 90 of our seconds
And a tenth of that was the length of a melee round, about 9 of our seconds
Ten years ago, I changed some of the door handles in my kitchen. I noted their measurements from the store (they were in inches). I looked up my notes before searching for replacements this year, and went to the store. Everything was in mm, so I had to convert.
Also, we have both measurements on speedometers. The one time I drove a car in Canada, it took me a few minutes to realize I was looking at the wrong set of numbers! Fortunately, I noticed before anyone else did.
When i last worked in a fine/industrial optics shop, the function of 25.4 figured into nearly every calculation. Tiresome as hell, either the customer or the machining required it and it drove everyone from engineers to glass jockeys up the wall. I’m certain nothing has changed.
Actually in programming, base 10 is pretty easy to handle in terms of its binary representation. Metric makes it much easier since it’s n-powers of ten. So you just shift bits to get the right precision unlike imperial measures which are all over the place. There’s no relation to volume vs mass which is a real pain especially.
Hey guys? Would you mind retaining slavery, enfranchisement for only white adult land-owning males, Senate appointed by the legislatures, anti-semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, no banking laws, no environmental laws, no labor laws, no commerce laws, no food/drug regulation. Because it makes me kind of queasy to do anything that dates to after 1789. Also, let’s get back to candles and horse-drawn carriages. Kthxbai.
They all do this. Say a certain phrase, get $. Keep saying the phrases, get $$$. It’s simple operant conditioning. Tucker Carlson is a pigeon.
