Dr. Fahrenheit put a lot of serious thought into the system, and wrote about it. He actually rebased the system to have more whole divisors early in the process - people used to understand the utility of this in the days before calculators - and to eliminate the frequent occurrence of negative numbers, since such “imaginary” values were a bone of contention among mathematicians and philosophers.
Also, in his day landowners didn’t have access to standardized tools, but they could get access to ice, water, salt, and livestock. Zero degrees Fahrenheit is supposedly the freezing point of brine, and 100 degrees is roughly the rectal temperature of a cow and the armpit temperature of a human. The inconsistency of those values was masked by the inaccuracy of equipment at the time, but it’s still pretty close to right - you can calibrate your Fahrenheit thermometer enough to be useful in an 18th century veterinary shed.
“Whole numbers are digits such as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 and any combination of these digits. They are used to count things but not parts of things. Decimals, fractions, and negative numbers are not whole numbers.”
This is what children in 3rd Grade across America will learn in the next few weeks – Fractions are not whole numbers so your question doesn’t make any sense.
A wonderful sententece in translators notes through the years of my childhood:
“Med mil avses här amerikanska, varav det går sex på en svensk”
Six miles is roughly ten kilometers, One Swdish Mil.
Edit: Or do you actually not get the point? A foot is twelve inches. Twelve can be divided evenly by 1,2,3,4,6, and 12, and into very manageable fractions by 5,8, and 10 without any advanced math education. Ten can only be divided evenly by 1,2,5, and 10, and returns infinite repeaters - which have been a subject of dispute among mathematicians for over two thousand years - when divided by 3,6, or 9. You can’t spend a day building a house without the need to divide a measurement by three - it’s one of the most common division operations in real world use. It’s true that 12 divided by 11 or 9 also produces an infinite repeater, but that’s an unusual operation in real construction (unlike thirds).
Water from the sky around here is actually very weak sulfuric acid, with a healthy dash of carbon particulates and some zesty complex molecules donated by local chemical companies. Pure water comes from filters.
But personally I drink the sky stuff right out of the stream. The other animals have to drink it so it’s only fair.
And that system requiring less math skill is the metric system. I think you are begging the question by saying that things are moving metric because we are eliminating jobs for the less gifted, and by extension the suggestion the less gifted are less adept at their work everywhere in the world except Burma, Liberia, and the USA. Metric is easier in the majority of everyday (but especially technical) uses and searching for the rare exceptions doesn’t change the weight of the big picture. But forget that, assuming they were equivalently easy, the utility of natively speaking the global language in a rapidly globalizing world is only gaining strength. The USA squanders a lot of resources maintaining a redundant and shrinking bubble. Trying to slow the natural shrinking of the bubble seems like a waste. There are more productive things to be doing instead.
“Twelve can be divided evenly by 1,2,3,4,6, and 12, and into very manageable fractions by 5,8, and 10 without any advanced math education.” Only because your starting with base-12 and kids learn fractions in 3rd Grade. But guess what – kids learn decimals in 3rd grade, too (all that advanced mathematical education …)
Your original question was “Tell me the whole number corresponding to ten divided by three without using fractions.” Let’s forget my “dodge” that fractions aren’t whole numbers …
You are talking about building construction so what I think you are really asking is ‘if I have a ten foot wall how do I divide that into thirds?’
– Which is calculated as 3 and 1/3 feet
– which needs to be converted to 3 feet 4 inches or 40 inches on a tape measure.
Here is the equivalent in metric – I have a 3.05 m wall how do I divide that into thirds?
– Which is 1.02 m (if I am happy with the the lowest tolerance being a millimeter)
– which appears on my tape measure as 102 mm.
– If you aren’t happy with the precision of 102 mm then the answer is 1.016 although no tape measure will account for that 0.6 mm (or 1/40 of an inch) which your sawblade is likely to mess with anyway…
– Need to convert that number to cm - move the decimal point; to meters - move the decimal point; to km - you get the idea…
In the same way you learned to build using 2" lumber (which is actually 1-1/2" lumber … go figure) people will learn to build with 32mm lumber and will learn that walls are built 406mm on center (or as I write it ‘centre’) which is roughly the width of 13 32mm boards.
There isn’t anything magical about fractions if you aren’t measuring in feet. In fact ask most 3rd grade teachers if students have more difficulty with fractions or decimals … talk about advanced mathematical education.
And, BTW, mixing mortar by the shovel is a ratio, not a fraction. Neither Imperial not SI (metric) measurement provides magical insights to understand ratios.
What we should REALLY do is switch to a base-12 numeric system and then adjust the metric system accordingly. But nobody listens to me because apparently grafting extra digits onto the hands of children would be “unethical.”
Conversion would not be such a pain in the ass if our ancient US system used one base -like Metric uses base 10. Here inches are 12, miles are 5280 feet, 1 cubic foot is 1728 cu inches and apparently eggs are base 12. You gotta look all this crap up. Criminy.
I’m with the woodman -I’ll buy 1x6 hardwood but I’ll cut those bastards up in metric. The table will still stand. There is simply no good reason we keep to a non standard and inconvenient system that hardly anyone else uses anywhere. Then we can use all that math conversion time for somethings kids might really use when they grow up.
They can keep their new-fangled steam powered “Imperial gallon” and we’ll stick with our old fashioned “Queen Anne’s wine gallon.” --unless we’re measuring fruit.
