Other than for laughs, the only superiority of metric/decimal systems is ease of learning.
Fractional units have a role to play, and it isn’t going away entirely, ever.
Doesn’t matter what is being measured, or what exact units are options, there’s a use for all of them. Some might be extremely niche, but that’s kinda the point. Not every unit is going to fit all circumstances perfectly.
Hell, when it comes right down to it, for ease, we’d be better off switching between definitions. An inch, for example, has more versatility than the centimeter for casual, day to day use. Define a foot as ten inches, or whatever, and you’d be better off in that specific case than using meters and decimal parts of that just because an inch is just easier to estimate with body parts. There’s less mental overhead when you don’t have to learn a non-concrete unit.
Point being that if ease of mental factoring and estimation is the (ha-hah) metric we’re using to pick what units and processing to make our default, then a lot of the common imperial units are vastly more friendly to that use case. Pounds are definitely easier to “feel” than grams. Inches and feet can be guesstimated off of one’s own body. Can’t say there’s any real benefit on either front to gallon vs liter or mile vs kilometer (beyond that they aren’t as equally nested with other units of distance, what with miles not being feet based in the modern format, though miles did start more neatly meshed with subordinate units).
Doing math with fractions is harder to learn for the same reason though. Harder to intuitively grasp when you don’t have built in counters the way you do with metric. Ten fingers, ten toes. You’d have to think in whatever joints you have to reach a similar level of intuitive ease, and the numbers are bigger because of the number of joints in a hand.
Anyway, that’s just me rambling, not some kind of serious thing
I need to divide by 2, 3 and 4 a lot more than I need to divide by 10 in the wood shop. Starting with 12 inches to a foot, and then dividing by powers of two, solves problems in ways metric’s base 10 doesn’t.
You can use tenths, hundredths and thousandths of a metre if it makes you happy. There’s actually a handy shorthand notation: d, c and m respectively. So if you need 3 tenths of a metre you can just write 3 dm, although most people mostly deal in hundredths or thousandths if need be. So 30 cm will be the more common notation.
Not really. Epsilon is exactly 1/3 of a millimetre. That’s likely already less than the thickness of your saw blade. You can drop into micrometre, but measuring 333,333 μm accurately probably exceeds the precision provided by a wood workshop.
~ is epsilon? I’m not up on notation like that, I was assuming it was being used as shorthand for approximate, which is the equal sign made of tildes when using a keyboard that can generate it (mine can’t and neither can most on screen keyboards, though I copied one from a search, just don’t know if it’ll show right) like so ≈
I do agree, btw, that in any situation where you’d be using fractions for sizable things that a third being .33 of whatever is “close enough”, if you have actual units involved.
I would still point out that when units aren’t in play, fractions tend to work better since it’s way harder to fold strings into tenths. Not impossible! Just harder than halves or thirds (which can then be redone got quarters, sixths, etc if needed). That’s mostly for day to day lengths, since weights aren’t going to be usefully divided by fractions or decimals, and liquid measure is way harder to be accurate with unless you have a very even container
![I'm sorry, but I CAN'T COUNT unless your numbers are in UNINTUITIVE MULTIPLES [eagle screech]](https://media.piefed.social/posts/t8/Gx/t8GxBmT36rhFWup.webp){kind=link}
I keep saying this
Other than for laughs, the only superiority of metric/decimal systems is ease of learning.
Fractional units have a role to play, and it isn’t going away entirely, ever.
Doesn’t matter what is being measured, or what exact units are options, there’s a use for all of them. Some might be extremely niche, but that’s kinda the point. Not every unit is going to fit all circumstances perfectly.
Hell, when it comes right down to it, for ease, we’d be better off switching between definitions. An inch, for example, has more versatility than the centimeter for casual, day to day use. Define a foot as ten inches, or whatever, and you’d be better off in that specific case than using meters and decimal parts of that just because an inch is just easier to estimate with body parts. There’s less mental overhead when you don’t have to learn a non-concrete unit.
Point being that if ease of mental factoring and estimation is the (ha-hah) metric we’re using to pick what units and processing to make our default, then a lot of the common imperial units are vastly more friendly to that use case. Pounds are definitely easier to “feel” than grams. Inches and feet can be guesstimated off of one’s own body. Can’t say there’s any real benefit on either front to gallon vs liter or mile vs kilometer (beyond that they aren’t as equally nested with other units of distance, what with miles not being feet based in the modern format, though miles did start more neatly meshed with subordinate units).
Doing math with fractions is harder to learn for the same reason though. Harder to intuitively grasp when you don’t have built in counters the way you do with metric. Ten fingers, ten toes. You’d have to think in whatever joints you have to reach a similar level of intuitive ease, and the numbers are bigger because of the number of joints in a hand.
Anyway, that’s just me rambling, not some kind of serious thing
Woodworker here. I also keep saying this:
I need to divide by 2, 3 and 4 a lot more than I need to divide by 10 in the wood shop. Starting with 12 inches to a foot, and then dividing by powers of two, solves problems in ways metric’s base 10 doesn’t.
You can use tenths, hundredths and thousandths of a metre if it makes you happy. There’s actually a handy shorthand notation: d, c and m respectively. So if you need 3 tenths of a metre you can just write 3 dm, although most people mostly deal in hundredths or thousandths if need be. So 30 cm will be the more common notation.
What’s a third of a meter?
~333 mm.
It’s that ~ that’s the tricky part :)
Not really. Epsilon is exactly 1/3 of a millimetre. That’s likely already less than the thickness of your saw blade. You can drop into micrometre, but measuring 333,333 μm accurately probably exceeds the precision provided by a wood workshop.
~ is epsilon? I’m not up on notation like that, I was assuming it was being used as shorthand for approximate, which is the equal sign made of tildes when using a keyboard that can generate it (mine can’t and neither can most on screen keyboards, though I copied one from a search, just don’t know if it’ll show right) like so ≈
I do agree, btw, that in any situation where you’d be using fractions for sizable things that a third being .33 of whatever is “close enough”, if you have actual units involved.
I would still point out that when units aren’t in play, fractions tend to work better since it’s way harder to fold strings into tenths. Not impossible! Just harder than halves or thirds (which can then be redone got quarters, sixths, etc if needed). That’s mostly for day to day lengths, since weights aren’t going to be usefully divided by fractions or decimals, and liquid measure is way harder to be accurate with unless you have a very even container
It’s not. It’s “approximately” as you said. But epsilon is commonly used to mean the error, which still kinda fits.
Gotcha!
Thanks for the explanation
No
Is that a metric no?
A metric ton of no 😁
I was thinking a metric buttload, but a ton is fine ;)
But which buttload? England or american?
Oh, right, english would be “buttock”, which is 0.897 american buttloads; because americans are fatter
More like 108 gallons, which are the same in both places. That’s roughly 491 liters
Edit: a butt is a unit of measure. Seriously, that’s where boatload comes from
What? A butt is a unit? Hahaha, what’s next, feet? /s
It used to be. Kinda fell out of regular usage, though I’ve been told you can run into it with wines here and there