Let me start of with: Screw metric, gooo inches!
Unfortunately… I’m still pretty bothered by all the dumb 3/16 5/8 fractions. They’re hard to think about unless you’ve got them down to rote. But here’s an idea. Why not use binary numbers? It’s perfect!
Imagine… “so for your standard 10. x 10. you want you use the .101 screw into pre-drilled .1 holes to fasten .0011 plywood”
All the beauty of metric… all the sense of imperial.
I always wanted to reform Imperial units to have a more useful “measure”, or scrap all existing measures. I dislike the fact that Metric units are somewhat divorced and aritrary. Dammit, a real measuring system would be based of Plank Length and Absolute Zero as foundational units! I figure we can then easily come up with an adjusted “foot” and “mile” that pretty closely match what we’ve got.
0.1[sub]10[/sub] = 0.0001100110011…[sub]2[/sub] booo
I just started using “milli-inches” and “decapounds” to freak out the squares.
Imperial has the rather large problem that scaling from one ‘size class’ to the next is not a factor of ten (or even powers thereof). That is, there are not ten inches to a foot, there are not ten feet to a yard, there are not 10 or 100 yards to a mile. So, any amount that is nice in one unit size (say, 1.6 feet) will not be a trivial transaction to the next unit size up or down. (19.2 inches? 0.533 333… yards?)
Absolute zero would be hard to use as a unit, since it’s just a single point. However, the Planck temperature is 1.4x10[sup]32[/sup]K.
But I agree. I like Planck units. Interestingly, while most Planck units are ridiculously small, or ridiculously large, the Planck resistance is about 30 ohms. (Not that that’s relevant or anything…)
Binary inches would work great if we didn’t have any fingers.
I’ve always like giving the speed of light in furlongs / fortnight myself, and think all distances should really be given in farads.
What problem is this supposed to solve, exactly?
Metric may not be perfect, but I haven’t seen any legitimate arguments against it, other than the costs of switching over. Everyone admits it is a better system. It makes math easier! Who could argue with that, except people who refuse to do math no matter what?
And as an engineer, I don’t use imperial units at all, other than at home for cooking and cutting wood. Of course, it helps that there is no such thing as an imperial voltage, or current, or resistance, etc.
It is actually relevant in some contexts. You can in some contexts consider a black hole to have a resistance, and guess what it is?
Meanwhile, the Planck momentum is about the momentum of a running housecat. That’s a heck of a lot of momentum to cram into one subatomic particle, but it’s not so much for a macroscopic object like a cat. The Planck mass is also relatively accessible for some purposes, being about the mass of a bacterium.
While we’re at it, one of the professors here measures the sugar for his tea in barn-megaparsecs, and there are exactly 99 inch-miles in an acre.
What sense? Seriously. I think you mean ‘familiarity’.
I thought the farad was a unit of capacitance.
Just measure everything in “kesselruns”.
Oh, no, there’s a lot of sense. At least in the specific case of an inch being divided into quarters, eights, and sixteenths (and combinations thereof).
For you see, decimals are only really good for measuring arbitrary quantities. For engineering (eg carpentry or PCB layouts) the fractions start to make a lot of sense.
Of course no reason my idea can’t be used for centimeters. Basically, I’m just saying that base-2 works much better for engineering than base-10 (and competitive with good ol’ base-60).
Really? I still don’t see what you mean (and I have some experience of carpentry, in which I found imperial measures inconvenient more of the time than metric).
Metric is just numbers, processed using straightforward maths. Imperial is a mixture of units and multiples - inherently awkward to use, regardless of familiarity.
ETA: and I don’t understand what you’re saying about binary at all (I understand binary - I just don’t see why you’re thinking it’s in any way convenient)
Would this be a cat following a sunbeam, or a cat having just caught the scent of a cheeseburger? 
It is. But, as seen at this page,
The capacitance of a parallel plate capacitor is
C = epsilon A / d
where epsilon is the permitivity of the material between the plates, A is the area of the plates, and d is the distance between the plates. Now epsilon is measured in Farads/meter, but is obviously a scalar. So we get A / d which is distance. It makes sense, because capacitance is controlled by how big the plates are and how far apart they are. It’s not a particularly useful measure of distance, but that’s the point.
I can haz both?
And further on the capacitance thing, in some unit systems commonly used for electromagnetism, the units are defined in such a way that epsilon is dimensionless (equal for vacuum to either 1, or 1/4pi, depending on the system). So in one of those systems, a capacitance is not just equivalent to a length; it is a length. Unfortunately, this means that to use a farad as a unit of length, you have to specify whether you’re using Gaussian units or Heaviside-Lorentz units.
Imperial’s really handy dividing things into half. And into half again. And even into half again. Or into thirds, and then by half.
QED this $20 supercapacitor has the value of 1 lightyear.
7 can ship immediately.
Sure, but although cutting pieces of wood in half over and over was fun, I eventually tired of it and moved on to other things, when carpentry was my main hobby.
Of course carpentry is when the Planck length becomes really useful.