• 0 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 27th, 2023

help-circle

  • Now go cut me a board 1/6m without a measuring device. Do it by eye. With a fractional system 1/6 of a foot is far easier to do.

    You probably could do it if you grew up measuring things in centimetres and metres, instead of inches, elbows and feet.

    In fact I’m often eyeballing ~10cm = 1/10m and ~20cm = 1/5m based on my hand*. If you asked me however “how many feet is this” I’d need to mentally convert “3ft = 1 m” to get any sensible answer.

    You’re confusing “it’s more intuitive because I grew up with it” with “it’s intrinsically more intuitive”.

    *10cm: from the tip of my middle finger to the knuckle. 20cm: between the tips of my thumb and pinkie, when the fingers are spread out the max.



  • A dozenal metric system would work as well as the decimal metric system, as long as everything else was base-12:

    in base 12 in base 10
    1m’m = 10⁻³m = 0.001m 1m’m = 12⁻³m = 1/1728m
    1c’m = 10⁻²m = 0.01m 1c’m = 12⁻²m = 1/144m
    1m = 1m 1m = 1m
    1k’m = 10³m = 1000m 1k’m = 12³m = 1728m

    Since we’re at this might as well say the day has 10₁₂k’s = 20736₁₀s. Each k’s is exactly two of our current hours, and each “new second” is roughly two four of our current seconds. Enough of this Sumerian mixed base already!