I doubt anyone measures their weight in grams, or even kilograms to two decimal places – The first decimal place changes when I use the toilet. I expect that the only reason you’ve quoted the “.44” part is because you converted from imperial – if you weighed yourself on a kilogram scale you would just say “93” or maybe “93 and a half”. When I’m quoting my own weight in kg, I just give the whole number.
The kilogram is the natural unit for human weights in most cases. I’ve never heard anyone seriously using any other.
Nobody would ever quote their weight to decimal places. Your weight would increase or decrease by half a kilo if you just drank a pint of water or went to the toilet.
(People often seem to do this, subconsciously or not, to disparage metric measurements: “I’m 6ft tall, not 182.88 centimetres!”… “I want a quarter-pounder, not 113.398093 grams!” Er, metric doesn’t have to equate to “ridiculously overprecise”…)
You just need a mental example to relate to. Once you’ve internalized that the average male adult is about 1 meter 75 cm to 1 meter 80cm tall, it’s natural.
On a recent Top Gear (a font of knowledge for all British, along with Ashens, Ab-Fab, Are You Being Served, and Weebl & Bob), they had a throw away shot of The Stig being weighed on a regular bathroom scale (he being the Stig, some say his weight was 0). However, the weight increments on this scale (I assume a standard household scale) was in Stones and Kilos - no pound increments were visible (this was on-line, so I was able to feeze on the image of the scale dial). For some reason this was deeply distributing to me (the lack of pounds increments in the Stone measurements, not the Stig’s implied weight)
Looking at the wiki entry for Stone (Weight), it doesn’t seem to say why anyone thought the Stone was a really great unit to weigh people by in the first place, especially since it varied (like many other such units pre-metric) from location and location, and between different usages; and also because the pound had been around since Roman times - why use stones?
I’m American, and I do all my carpentry and such in metric. When I was growing up and learning to do it, my father did it in feet and inches. I switched because it is much easier. Anyone who says otherwise is just equating easier=what I’m familiar with. Which is, of course, trivially true, but only until you become familiar with another, better system.
I don’t know, and I was brought up to express weight in stone myself. But my speculation is that it is the “right” level of precision for the purpose, just as inches are the right level of precision for someone’s height.
The difference between someone who is 11 stone and someone who is 12 stone may be significant (for example if you are going to fight them, or carry them) and may be visually apparent. You could make a reasonable guess at someone’s weight in stones, just as you could estimate their height in inches. The difference between 11 stone 5 and 11 stone 6, however, is of no relevance or significance, unless the person is dieting.
As a Brit, having scales with no increments between the Stone markings would disturb me. Every bathroom scale I’ve seen has sub-divisions, normally 2lb increments. Scales marked only in Stones would be fairly useless so - assuming it was a mechanical scale with an analogue dial I’d guess the fine markings had just got lost with the screen resolution. See these scalesfor an example of the fine lines.
Yeah, scales have pounds between the stones. Conversationally, you tend to round it to the nearest half stone, but you know your weight in stones and pounds just like you know your height in feet and inches.
You could ask the same about any pre-metric measure. Why feet? Pounds? Bushels? Gallons? Barrels? They all varied from place to place too (gallons still do). The answer is they grew up locally before people travelled much, it was only really with the formation of modern countries and in particular rail travel that drove a need for standardisation.
Like TokyoPlayer said, human height in Japan is pure centimeters, never meters and centimeters. In construction, especially land and floor space, there are some traditional measurements used（坪、畳）but most people know the SI equivalent too. Lumber length for pieces under 2 m is usually given in mm, probably because you’re likely to be working with smaller, more precise measurements with something furniture-sized than if you’re building a building.
After using it for a while, you get used to different measurements. You do have to use it and internalize it, not “translate” constantly. It’s kind of like how, if you’ve ever traveled, you start to get a handle on whether something is expensive or cheap in a foreign currency.
Sometimes it’s easier in metric, sometimes not. The old US/UK imperial system has some conveniences. There are more factors of 12 and the subdivisions in a foot are just half the previous measurement interval. So deciding where to put 3 evenly-spaced elements, for example, requires far less mental arithmetic than when you try to divide by thirds in a decimal system, and you don’t have to guesstimate how many fractions of a millimeter; it’s right on whatever interval you’ve decided to use.
This is one reason besides entrenched attitudes that traditional measurements are preserved. Sometimes, they’re still more useful for a particular task than the new system.
In construction and hardware, things are often sold in multiples of 300mm. A standard cabinet or benchtop might be 600 or 900mm wide; in a few cases you might see 450. No guesstimating, no fractions of mm. The idea that fractions or other awkward values are involved reminds me of this column by some guy on the internet:
Not really - in applications where sub-millimetre placement is critical, the equipment to make those measurements is available and the calculation is just straightforward decimal math that works the same whether it’s about multiples of millimetres or elephants.
Whether any particular operation of dividing by three is convenient in US/Imperial is a matter of luck. Sure, 36 inches divides in three (so does any number of millimetres that happens to be a natural multiple of three), but what’s one third of a measured distance of 2 feet 11 and 5/8ths?
I’d say they were “One - Eighty-one” tall and “Two - Thirteen-and-a-half” or “Two - Thirteen-point-five” high, myself. Feet are so far outside the memory/context of length measurements here that the metre/cm standard is just ingrained. Depending on context, I might specify cm for the decimal, like “One - Eighty-one centimetres” if there’s a risk people might thing I meant mm.
In some cases (at least in casual UK terminology), the unit can replace the decimal point - so 1.81 metres could be 'one metre eighty one" - this is a habit carried over from imperial, but it works, as long as the units are very common ones, and precision doesn’t extend too far - 213.5cm would be awkward as ‘two metres thirteen and a half’ - and it’s clearer to state it in a single unit with decimals, i.e. ‘two point one three five metres’