Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "TED-Ed"
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@Konrod, you seriously think that powers of 10 make sense? Powers of 10 make conversions that people don't do very often very easy while ensuring that none of the units of measure are convenient. It causes the problem where a meter is really too long for measuring short things and the centimeter is too short. The decimeter is a poor man's foot.
Base 12 is something that gives a large number of ways of dividing it up without having to resort to fractions as 12 has factors of 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12, whereas 10 only has factors of 1, 2,5 and 10. So, anything else has to involve either decimals or fractions. Plus, we have 3 joints on each finger giving 12 (if we exclude the thumbs) meaning that we can count to 24, without involving toes.
To make matters worse, all of the units that the SI defines are completely arbitrary and disconnected from human existence. The kilo is based on an arbitrary amount of a specific metal, the meter is definited based on the distance from the earth's equator to north pole and all the other measures are equally arbitrary. At least the imperial measures are easily related back to our own personal body parts, even if the conversion does vary a bit from person to person, it leaves us with a much more intuitive estimate process as those conversions don't change much once we hit adulthood.
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@Ace The FireDragon, most countries use the metric system because they are either too small to have factories building things in the local measure or they didn't have a functioning and enforced system of measure that covered the whole country.
The US never really went through that BS that the French did with thousands of different measuring systems. One of the great things that the Brits did for us was leave us with a functioning system of measure that we created an entire agency to oversea. The Bureau of Weights and Measures would regularly conduct stings and ensure that all measuring devices used for trade were accurate.
As a result, we have a system that's convenient, relatively easy to use and universal across the country. Something that was generally not true in countries that agreed to adopt the metric system measures.
But, as somebody that lived under the metric system for over a year, I will tell you that the things people cite as being easier with the metric measures are just not done often outside of science. You're not going to want to convert miles into feet typically, And probably not into yards either, you'd just use the decimal approximation in most cases as you are unlikely to be dealing with the precision necessary to go beyond 10ths of a mile in the first place. If you do, you're a professional surveyor and you're still not going to mess with yards or feet at that point for the same reason that you wouldn't normally mix kilometers, hectometers, meters, decimeters and centemeters in one measure, it's inconvenient to write.
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It's rife with inaccuracies though. The metric system is extremely arbitrary through most of it's units and the unit that was most in need of reform, time, never got fixed. We could have had 10 or 20 hour days with 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute. We could have had the even months have 30 days and the odd ones, except November with 31 days and put the leap year day at the end of November. But, that never happened.
The rest of the measures are incredibly arbitrary, why 10 000 000 meters to the North Pole? They could have made it any number they liked, 30 000 000 would have given us a meter that's actually convenient, instead of the poor man's yard equivalent. Similarly, Celsius is really bad, it's only valid at sea level under specific conditions. It places the start and end points in weird places where they may not really apply to the location that you're at.
Meanwhile, the KG was based off of a physical artifact that had a variable mass. It's not much in terms of variation, but enough to be a problem.
The Imperial measures aren't perfect, but once you learn the conversion from the lengths of your personal body to the official ones, it's very easy to estimate things without a measuring device at all. And because temperature is roughly based upon body temperature, it's far more natural to estimate Fahrenheit temperatures than Celsius ones.
People get brainwashed into thinking that metric is logical, but from an objective stand point, it isn't. It's incredibly arbitrary and makes mental math really hard. Probably the best example is all the people claiming that metric measures are better, but they don't even understand how to work with Imperial measures. Sure, there's a bit of investment, but there are so many factors that working with it without a calculator in the real world is a treat.
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