Whose foot? Chances are yours isn’t even a good approximation.
Jokes aside, there isn’t even such a thing as foot anymore. All these idiotic measurement units like feet and elbows have thankfully been deprecated and are now simply a name for a certain amount of civilized units. Foot is exactly 0.3048 meters since 1959.
+/- 20% is good enough for e6 and covers the overwhelming majority of men’s foot lengths.
For making a measurement without a tool +/-20% should be fine.
It’s all fun and games, but I take issue with calling metric “civilized units”. Human civilization developed all kinds of units appropriate to the work being done and calling the ones defined almost in defiance of everyday use the civilized ones is absurd.
Being able to easily convert between various units makes the metric system the only one worth considering civilized.
Every time I see a wrench labeled with some insane fraction like 18/32 my eye starts twitching. I honestly cannot tell which size is bigger without dividing and converting to decimal.
Human civilization developed all kinds of dumb shit we’ve since discarded. Please let’s discard the idiotic units in my lifetime.
I think you mean a 9/16. It’s be pretty crazy to see one labeled 18/32.
When you wanna make fun of sae use an odd number on top so no one can make fun of you for not reducing your fractions like a fourth grader. Or so you whip out 9/12 and get elementary school math mogged anyway.
How is it easier to convert between units under metric? I don’t have any use for a kilogram length of lumber or a meter of gasoline. What unit conversions are you doing?
Nah, my ruler has cm on one side and inches on the other. The side with inches actually, unironically, lists 1/8 through 7/8 in each inch, including 2/8, 4/8 and 6/8!
It’s not @dagad@lemmy.world who is being dumb, the Imperial system is.
I can’t see what you described the sae side as because of a word filter, but I can guarantee a worse pejorative was used for people who chose that ruler on a job or worse, were assigned it in shop class. I think there’s a not for dumb people use for the unreduced scale but for the life of me I just can’t think of it.
Is that really the complaint, that people don’t wanna do fractions?
I called it dumb with stronger wording, but that was unnecessary and I’ve updated my comment to be more clear.
And yes, among many other reasons. The main complaint is that the systems uses many different conversions internally; 12 inch in a foot, 72 points in an inch, 3 feet in a yard, an arbitrary amount of yards in a landmile, and slightly more at sea… I understand this wasn’t designed deliberately, that imperial is really just 3 measurement systems in a trench coat. But that’s exactly the problem.
But also yes, I’d rather do 9 mm or1 cm, than 3/8 inch
All those different divisions exist for a reason, none of the things you listed are arbitrary. People have been measuring things for millennia and developed systems appropriate to the measurements, scale and tools involved. Saying that they should all use the same system because it would be easier to convert between units is just about the most elitist thing possible.
Before you write that last sentence off as mad ranting, really think on this: how often are people converting between units and how often is that conversion problematic? I’ll come out and say that almost no one ever needs to convert units. I measure stuff all the time and I’m almost always using the appropriate unit right on the tool I’m using to measure. In the case that I need to convert between units it’s very easy, multiplication or division by bases that have many factors, so it’s always incredibly fast. On the wildly rare change I need to go from a type of measurement to another, I have to deal with multiplying by a constant at least so nothing is easier there.
That’s not to say that there are no benefits to a system with codified conversions and prefixes. People who make a very wide range of measurements would benefit from it, but that’s a very rare use case. I’m a huge proponent of the metric system in those cases, measurements like those used when working with electricity are perfect for metric. You still have to learn fractions to do any kind of radio work but we aren’t getting away from those things any time soon.
So when I say it’s elitist to suggest everyone abandon the established systems in order to adopt one that really only benefits a tiny fraction of people making measurements that’s why.
Sorry for the wall of text but it’s required to make clear I’m not simply badjacketing and actually have a critique with real material basis.
Tldr: goose chasing meme with “for what density, motherfucker, for what density” text.
Actually that’s a modern measurement concept based on the original meter. By using this concept, the size of a meter is tied to absolute terms in physics that “anyone” could measure with the right tools, while the original concept was based on a physical object called the meter, which is subject to many things such as heat dilation for example making it not accurate, and if the original object was lost we would not have a way to tell what is a meter (conceptually speaking of course).
The foot on the other hand (lol) is traditionally based on the king’s foot size. This of course depends on which country (or realm?), and to make matters worst, who’s the king at the time, because yes the official measure would change based on that too.
Of course that’s not how it is today, but we can say the original foot was lost long ago.
Ditto for the original meter. We sure are lucky that an approximation of the measurement is built into the name of the foot. It’s frighteningly European to have a measurement name that roughly translates to “measure”
honestly curious, as someone that doesn’t intuitively know how long a foot (in terms of measure) is, does it actually compare to the average size of the average foot? Like if you say something is 2 feet long, can you actually walk 2 steps and that’s a pretty good approximation?
How long is that thing?
A foot.
How long is that?
About as long as a foot.
Oh cool, I have two of those to compare right here. Thanks for telling me how long stuff is in an easy to understand way.
What about that thing?
30 centimeters.
How long is a centimeter?
A hundredth as long as a meter.
How long is a meter?
As long as the distance light can travel in a vacuum in 1/299752458 of a second.
Please throw yourself off a bridge for using bizarre measurements developed by frenchmen.
Whose foot? Chances are yours isn’t even a good approximation.
Jokes aside, there isn’t even such a thing as foot anymore. All these idiotic measurement units like feet and elbows have thankfully been deprecated and are now simply a name for a certain amount of civilized units. Foot is exactly 0.3048 meters since 1959.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(unit)
0.9144 m is 3 feet
TY. I refuse to use idiotic units to such degree, my brain didn’t even flinch at completely wrong number I copy/pasted.
Let’s go with Ariana Grande’s foot. The whole Ariana Grande is already used as a unit of measurement, so this will make the conversions easier.
+/- 20% is good enough for e6 and covers the overwhelming majority of men’s foot lengths.
For making a measurement without a tool +/-20% should be fine.
It’s all fun and games, but I take issue with calling metric “civilized units”. Human civilization developed all kinds of units appropriate to the work being done and calling the ones defined almost in defiance of everyday use the civilized ones is absurd.
Being able to easily convert between various units makes the metric system the only one worth considering civilized.
Every time I see a wrench labeled with some insane fraction like 18/32 my eye starts twitching. I honestly cannot tell which size is bigger without dividing and converting to decimal.
Human civilization developed all kinds of dumb shit we’ve since discarded. Please let’s discard the idiotic units in my lifetime.
I think you mean a 9/16. It’s be pretty crazy to see one labeled 18/32.
When you wanna make fun of sae use an odd number on top so no one can make fun of you for not reducing your fractions like a fourth grader. Or so you whip out 9/12 and get elementary school math mogged anyway.
How is it easier to convert between units under metric? I don’t have any use for a kilogram length of lumber or a meter of gasoline. What unit conversions are you doing?
Nah, my ruler has cm on one side and inches on the other. The side with inches actually, unironically, lists 1/8 through 7/8 in each inch, including 2/8, 4/8 and 6/8!
It’s not @dagad@lemmy.world who is being dumb, the Imperial system is.
I can’t see what you described the sae side as because of a word filter, but I can guarantee a worse pejorative was used for people who chose that ruler on a job or worse, were assigned it in shop class. I think there’s a not for dumb people use for the unreduced scale but for the life of me I just can’t think of it.
Is that really the complaint, that people don’t wanna do fractions?
I called it dumb with stronger wording, but that was unnecessary and I’ve updated my comment to be more clear.
And yes, among many other reasons. The main complaint is that the systems uses many different conversions internally; 12 inch in a foot, 72 points in an inch, 3 feet in a yard, an arbitrary amount of yards in a landmile, and slightly more at sea… I understand this wasn’t designed deliberately, that imperial is really just 3 measurement systems in a trench coat. But that’s exactly the problem.
But also yes, I’d rather do 9 mm or1 cm, than 3/8 inch
All those different divisions exist for a reason, none of the things you listed are arbitrary. People have been measuring things for millennia and developed systems appropriate to the measurements, scale and tools involved. Saying that they should all use the same system because it would be easier to convert between units is just about the most elitist thing possible.
Before you write that last sentence off as mad ranting, really think on this: how often are people converting between units and how often is that conversion problematic? I’ll come out and say that almost no one ever needs to convert units. I measure stuff all the time and I’m almost always using the appropriate unit right on the tool I’m using to measure. In the case that I need to convert between units it’s very easy, multiplication or division by bases that have many factors, so it’s always incredibly fast. On the wildly rare change I need to go from a type of measurement to another, I have to deal with multiplying by a constant at least so nothing is easier there.
That’s not to say that there are no benefits to a system with codified conversions and prefixes. People who make a very wide range of measurements would benefit from it, but that’s a very rare use case. I’m a huge proponent of the metric system in those cases, measurements like those used when working with electricity are perfect for metric. You still have to learn fractions to do any kind of radio work but we aren’t getting away from those things any time soon.
So when I say it’s elitist to suggest everyone abandon the established systems in order to adopt one that really only benefits a tiny fraction of people making measurements that’s why.
Sorry for the wall of text but it’s required to make clear I’m not simply badjacketing and actually have a critique with real material basis.
Tldr: goose chasing meme with “for what density, motherfucker, for what density” text.
Actually that’s a modern measurement concept based on the original meter. By using this concept, the size of a meter is tied to absolute terms in physics that “anyone” could measure with the right tools, while the original concept was based on a physical object called the meter, which is subject to many things such as heat dilation for example making it not accurate, and if the original object was lost we would not have a way to tell what is a meter (conceptually speaking of course).
The foot on the other hand (lol) is traditionally based on the king’s foot size. This of course depends on which country (or realm?), and to make matters worst, who’s the king at the time, because yes the official measure would change based on that too.
Of course that’s not how it is today, but we can say the original foot was lost long ago.
Ditto for the original meter. We sure are lucky that an approximation of the measurement is built into the name of the foot. It’s frighteningly European to have a measurement name that roughly translates to “measure”
Hey, how many measures is that?
honestly curious, as someone that doesn’t intuitively know how long a foot (in terms of measure) is, does it actually compare to the average size of the average foot? Like if you say something is 2 feet long, can you actually walk 2 steps and that’s a pretty good approximation?
Its a tad low if you’re barefoot, frighteningly close when you have shoes on. For men’s average shoe sizes.
It’s a man’s man’s man’s foots world.