What exactly do you think is the “beauty of metric”?
To me, the “beauty” of the metric system are:
[ul]
[li]Purely decimal. *[/li][li]Only one base unit for each quantity, modified by prefixes representing powers of 1000. So it’s easy to convert between different scales.[/li][li]Everything is defined in terms of 7 base units. E.g. Joule is m[sup]2[/sup] kg s[sup]-2[/sup]. (Anybody even know how much a calorie is in terms of inch[sup]2[/sup] lb s[sup]-2[/sup]?)[/li][li]Already widely used[/li][/ul]
None of these apply to this binary inch system you are suggesting.
(Except for the pesky hour/minute/second thing, which we can’t really change without changing the rotation speed of the earth)
Machinists already use decimal inches (tenths, hundredths, thousands, etc.) for precision work. It’s still the English system of patched-together incoherent units. Well, really just the “American” system, now that even Albania has gone metric. :rolleyes:
Hmm, patched-together and incoherent - if I say so myself, not a bad metaphor for both the system of units and the one nation left on the planet that still uses them.
Machining things to tolerances of thousands of an inch is not too hard - even I’ve done it, with a lot of direction from experienced machinists, but I’ve done it. Ten thousandths is hard. Hundred thousandths take much special equipment. After ten-millionths of an inch, “reality stops”, as one machinist told me. I checked, one hundred-millionth of an inch is 2.54 angstroms, about atomic dimensions. It’s hard to “machine” things smoother than a single atom plane.
Don’t belittle your proposal. Imperial has no sense at all. A binary system at least does make some sense, within a context where we divide our units up into eighths, sixteenths etc.
Well, I do use kiloseconds, but people look at me funny and don’t understand…
It’s exactly 86.4 kilosecond per day. Since it seems that many Americans can’t grasp 24-hour clock, I doubt they could understand 86-ks one. And with fraction before midnight.
The United States is not the only country still using the Imperial system. And they’re certainly not the only country in the world to still employ non-metric measurements.
I had to fill out my prefectural census form recently by describing the size of my apartment in tsubo, or the area of two tatami mats, which is about 3.3 m[sup]2[/sup]. That’s not to mention all the other ones like the shaku, a unit of length equal to a little less than a foot that gets used in construction and the sho, which is the volume of a bottle of sake, about 1800ml. In cooking the go is used, which is about 180ml.
Thankfully, the measurements of volume are all decimal, but the other measurements are a little weirder.
And a lot of other bases, too:
There are two pints in a quart
Three teaspoons in a tablespoon
Four quarts in a gallon
Five fluid ounces in an Imperial gill
Six feet in a fathom
Seven days in a week
Eight ounces in a cup
Nine hands in a yard
Ten chains in a furlong
Eleven fathoms in a chain
Twelve inches in a foot
Fourteen pounds in a stone
Sixteen ounces in a pound
Eighteen inches in a cubit
Twenty fluid ounces in an Imperial pint
Twenty-two yards in a chain
Twenty-four teaspoons in a stick
One hundred twelve pounds in a hundredweight
And to top it all off,
Two hundred thirty-one cubic inches in a gallon
Fair enough, metric could have adopted a milliday or microday as a fundamental unit of time. Probably would have been impractical though, since the 24-hour day has been used in most cultures for centuries if not millennia.
True, it’s common to have specialized non-metric units (e.g. cups for cooking), or traditional units used in common language (e.g. stones for body weight). But I’m curious, is there any other country where non-metric hardware and tools are the norm? Where the TV weather forecast uses Fahrenheit? Where the space agency use inches (decimal) in their engineering drawings?
I meant that Absolute Zero would be the starting point for temperature calculations.
This kind of measurement has a lot to recommend it, actually. It’s an absolute scale system, and is the most utterly non-arbitrary system ever. It won’t be quite as easy for some math purposes as Celcius, but would be even more precise.
The other advantage is that we can adjust to local scaling conditions. We can use a measure similar to feet/meters/miles/AU’s (which will be so many million/billion/trillion/quadrillian Planks and adjust the final outcome to be close and perhaps more precise as what we have now.
Not exactly. The US simply has no standardized scales for anything. We use anything convenient. With computers expanding, I suspect that outside of a few measures like kilometers, most countries will vaguely mishmash their way out of using metric as a standard anyhow. Businesses will just use whatever measure is convenient to them, and conversions will be easily done on the future’s pocket cellphones loaded with all kinds of data.
Almost forgot: I actually prefer Base-12. It doesn’t do orders of magnitude for 10 very well, but it handles other functions so much more easily.
I happen to use whatever is convenient, as well, though by necessity this is often metric, due to mating European-manufactured parts. I move between the two systems on a small scale with relative ease (F/C, in / mm) but I’ll be damned if I have any feel for a kilometer. It doesn’t help that it is about 39.4 kiloinches.
What exactly do you mean by base-12? Using an actual base-12 number system (e.g. 9 cm + 1 cm = A cm)? If there are any minor advantages to this, I think it would be vastly outweighed by the inconvenience of having to use whole different number system.
Or did you mean having a different unit after every factor of 12? Like 12din=1inch, 12inch=1ft, 12ft=1Dft, etc.? That would result in a lot of prefixes or units.
