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Apparently our ancestors had the same frustration...this is from Alaska's most famous comic, Tundra:....
I grew up with metric, as I stand earlier. I can do what you are saying you can do with the metric, but not the us! lol Main thing, obviously both work...I'm a fan of both. Metric is great for so many things, especially those divisible by 10. Perfect for engineering. Great for so much.
The one place the imperial system is superior in my opinion, is woodworking. A cm is a silly measurement for human proportion and things we use on a daily basis—sure you can get used to it. But an inch is a glorious thing, because we can divide it in half again and again and it's still a measurement we can conceptualize and do simple math between our ears. From framing a house right down to cabinetry, imperial is king...wait a minute, isn't that where we got imperial???
As the son of a machinist, I was raised hearing long passionate lectures about how thousands of an inch are far superior for fine measurements. I can't succinctly repeat the reasons having barely worked in those fine tolerances myself...what do you think, Odie?
Main thing, obviously both work...
Maybe I'll head out to the shop, put my lathe in reverse and turn on the other side for a while...
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!
Ely
how much tea went into boston harbor????????????
As a woodworker - well sort of - in Canada, my irritation is that Canada only partly adopted metric. We buy plywood in 4 x 8 sheets. We buy 2 x 4's. Even Oneway, a canadian made lathe, measures swing in inches.
But, we buy gas in litres, lunch meat in grams and measure temperature in celsius. Then, just to really mix things up, we don't care how many miles per gallon we get out of our cars. Instead, we care about how many litres of gas per 100 kilometers we burn.
Zach that there is a Neanderthal, and you know what happened to themApparently our ancestors had the same frustration...this is from Alaska's most famous comic, Tundra:
View attachment 23370
One theory discussed in my anthropology class was that Cro-Magnon Man ate them all. Yuk! :-(Zach that there is a Neanderthal, and you know what happened to them
Zach that there is a Neanderthal, and you know what happened to them
A knot does makes sense. Boat and ship people use knots all the time for navigation. A nautical mile is 1/60th of a degree of latitude. The divisions on nautical charts are in 60ths
The original definition of the kilometer was that it would be 10,000 of them from the equator to the pole along a meridian. A very similar definition to the knot since that is also a 90 degree arc of latitude.
This would make the Meter 1/10,000,000 of that distance. When French made the calculations they came up with a meter that was .02 mm short and that became the standard.
It ought to be noted that the SI system (what we refer to as metric) isn't purely decimal. There are still 24 hours per day and 360 degrees in a circle. Nautical miles and knots make a lot of sense for navigation and are used for both ship and aircraft navigation. The grad unit for angle measurement never caught on ... 100 grads vs. 90 degrees in a quarter circle .... Why would 400 grads be any better than 360 degrees in a full circle. At one time the speed of light was defined as three hundred million meters per second ... then it was discovered that this isn't exactly correct so something had to give. The speed of light is a constant so the meter was defined as the distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second. Imagine if that had been the original proposed definition of the meter ... It surely would have been DOA.
Just wondering what the length of a day or distance to the pole from the equator has to do with turning?