See I would have said 1.5 feet is 18 inches. That’s the way I write it for myself anyway. I’m ok until I get into cups and smaller. I get tablespoons and teaspoons mixed up. I have to ask the wife but she doesn’t know either. Then when the instructions say two ounces, I don’t know if it is by weight or volume. I’m glad no ones life depends on me.
I did break down and buy a caliper that can switch back and forth which helps but still have trouble converting drill sizes. Again the only one paying me is me so I just write a letter of complaint once in a while to myself but never get an answer.
Edit: Sheesh, by, buy, bye, bi-yeah I no (know) the difference.
If you stop and think about it, the traditional inch subdivisions are binary. 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 etc.
Come to think about it, so is music notation, whole notes, half notes, quarter notes etc. Would a piano score really be easier to play if someone came up with decimal notation?
We would have been better off with six fingers on each hand. Then everything would be in base 12 which has 4 whole factors (2,3,4,and 6) making fractions easier and decimals would work the same. Our 24-hour days, 60-minute hours, 12-inch feet, 360-degree circles, etc. have this benefit.
That and a little common sense. I would think that more than one person saw the medical chart. And looking at a 225 lb man and seeing weight entered as 100 would seem out of place.
Even 20 years ago, common sense sadly wasn’t that common. My brother (probably 10ish years ago) was having pain in his ankle while playing soccer and it was later discovered via X-Ray that he had a hole in his ankle bone (likely since birth) and somehow made it years of playing soccer without fracturing it. The surgeon told my parents after the surgery that after they peeled back his skin and touched the bone with a scalpel the entire outer bone fell apart, so instead of using some cadaver bones to fill the hole, he got an entire cadaver ankle. The measurements given to the surgeon from the X-Rays didn’t match up with the actual density of the bone, hopefully it was just a dictation error, though the hospital that did the scans isn’t known for quality…
@insightful Years ago, I taught a 7th grade math class and had a little fellow in the class who was extremely bright, but full of mischief. We were studying bases different than base 10 and this kid was really fascinated and began expressing fractions in different bases which was way beyond the lesson. When he got into base twelve, he decided for the reasons you gave, that base 10, the decimal system, should be scrapped and base 12, the duodecimal system should be implemented. He then made posters that read “Down with the decimal system. Up with duodecimal” and put these posters on bulletin boards all over the school. When I taught computer science courses years later, I had students ask why the computers couldn’t operate on ten states instead of two. It was a great question that would lead into a discussion about the computer isn’t even reliable with two states and we have to have error detection and correction processes to recognize when a zero changes to a one or a one changes to a zero in the hardware. I then ask “Why do we have the decimal system?” If I didn’t get a response I would give this hint:. “Suppose man invented the rotary power mower before he developed the numeration system. We would probably be doing our mathematics in base 9”.
There would be no converting to base ten, just like there’s no converting to base 12 now (outside of a math theory class). You’d have two new symbols for ten and eleven, and ‘10’ would be twelve. Higher number names would have evolved, and be used as intuitively as we use twenty or thirty. Remember kids saying “eleventy-one”?
Correct. Math bases are theory. Far to confusing for the masses like my point of SAE/metric. When the space aliens invade and take over they could have seven fingers and toes. we will be forced to accept base 14. LOL
Had the government not required us to have deadman controls on our lawnmowers so that the blade stops when you release the handle, we might well be using a base 9 system because apparently too many people stuck their fingers under a mower to see if it was running. However, this might cause a person to be unbalanced, so a finger would have to be removed from the opposite hand to balance things out. I often wonder if the Control Data computer company saw this coming. Control Data grouped the binary bits in groups of three and expressed results in octal or base 8. However, the government beat them to the punch and put deadman controls on the lawn mowers.
One nice thing about binary fractions is that it’s so easy to divide something into a binary number of pieces. Try cutting a pizza into 10 equal slices. It’s a lot easier to cut it into 8 equal slices by cutting it in half three times.
That’s probably one of the main reasons that binary divisions were popular with instrument makers who made rulers and scales.
It was said that Daniel Fahrenheit chose ice water and human body temperature as the two calibration points of 32 and 96 degrees mostly because they were 64 divisions apart and it was easy to bisect the divisions 6 times to make a scale.
After Fahrenheit’s death, boiling and freezing water became the two calibration points at 32 and 212 which shifted body temperature to 98.6 degrees.
Anders Celsius’ original centigrade thermometer used freezing and boiling water as calibration points, but he did not have water freezing at zero and boiling at 100. He had water boiling at zero and freezing at 100, an inverted scale that measured how cold it was rather than how hot it was. This avoided confusing negative and positive temperatures in meteorological record books.
So, if we would have evolved with eight fingers on each hand, we’d be using hexadecimal (base 16) normally, and maybe the invention of the binary computer would have happened much sooner.
The real reason most Americans choose to stick to Imperial units for a lot of things is simply that we are familiar with those units, not because we are afraid of the metric system or can’t be bothered to learn it. Most of us already know metric units.
I know how far away 10 or 100 miles is without having to convert it into kilometers first. Give me a distance in kilometers and I find myself mentally converting it into approximate miles in order to have an idea of how far that is.
Tell me that today’s high is going to be 80 F and I know how to dress. Give me a Celsius temperature and I mentally have to convert it to Fahrenheit to have an idea whether I need to wear a jacket or not.
The Fahrenheit scale is actually a great scale for measuring earth’s weather since most weather falls in between 0 and 100 degrees F instead of plus 40 and minus 18 degrees C.
My personal yardstick for measuring car engine size is the cubic inch. Give me the displacement in liters and I find myself having to convert it to cubic inches to know how it compares to a 283 V-8.
But for motorcycles it’s the opposite. Tell me that you ride a 50 cubic inch motorcycle and I find myself having to convert that to cc’s so I know how it compares to a Honda 350 or Triumph 650.
Not everything in Europe and Asia is metric either. The rest of the world still shoots “12 gauge” shotguns for example. Named because a lead ball that fits the bore weighs 1/12 of a pound.
Roller chain is still sized by Imperial units. A #530 roller chain has a 5/8 inch pitch and a 3/8 inch width. However the #530 designation successfully hid that fact from the metric purists and the roller chain manufacturers escaped having to scrap perfectly good and expensive chain making machinery just because the sizing offended metric purists in position of authority.
The base 8 reminds me of shop class in high school fake news I am not sure. In discussing shop safety the teacher told a story of a kid who lost his little finger on a joiner, kids were asking him how it happened, since his hand was bandaged he showed them with his other hand, and lost another little finger. I would like to make it car related, but coming up blank.
I remember in grade school the talk was we’d be converting to metric soon. All that happened was that now I have to have two sets of sockets and two sets of wrenches whenever I go work on anything. I really never saw the benefit but understand the need in the medical field. I just hope some of these clever idiots aren’t going to get the idea that we should convert our power supply to 250V DC. Of course it would be a boon to the economy to have to replace all our tools and appliances and TVs and computers and not to mention those electric cars and chargers.
True, Europe is 230-240 VAC 50 Hz AC, but that has nothing to do with the metric system. The US came out with 120 volts 60 Hz for various reasons, and when European manufacturers wanted to electrify, they picked different numbers to lock out the US manufacturers.
Also, much of electronic gear will operate on 100 to 250 volts AC, 50 or 60 Hz AC.