this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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What's more 0.203 cm or 0.291 cm? How about 3/8" or 19/64"?
How far is 1/3 of a mile? 1/3 km is 333m. How about 1/9? 1/9 km is 111m How long is 10 x 5/16"? 10 x 3.1cm is 31cm
Yeah, a foot breaks down easy in whole inches with many factors, but that's about it
Most people who deal in imperial units know off the top of their head that 1/3 of a mile is 1760 feet. They don’t have to calculate it. After a while you see that number come up often enough and it’s committed to memory.
I’m not saying that metric isn’t better, it is, and I wish we would hurry up and switch to it. I’m just saying that the numbers involved aren’t a handicap once you have worked with the imperial system for a while. If you have a set of sockets that you work with every day, you know instantly that 3/8” is bigger than 19/64”. Hell, even 5/16” is bigger than 19/64”.
And, you must admit, 333 meters is not one third of a kilometer. It is one third of 999 meters. The number 5280, for all its awkwardness, is beautiful in the sense that it is evenly divisible by 12, Meaning that it can be exactly divided into quarters, thirds, or halves without a fractional part.
How would you convert to e.g nautical miles?
I gotta say, you make some fair points.
It's a lot of memorization that I simply haven't done and won't ever have to do.
The fraction reduction doesn't help intuitive thought. If imperial operated on 'significant digits' and marked any set or document with a 64th always as 64ths, as in 16/64ths, I'd be more on board.
We just need to replace out base 10 system of counting with base 12 and we'd get the best of both worlds!
Yeah, absolutely, I’m not arguing in favor of making everyone do the memorization, I just think it’s interesting that it occurs after enough exposure.
I’ve often thought that if we’d have evolved to have 6 digits instead of 5, we might have adopted a base 12 system and made fractional calculations a lot easier.