I never really had strong feelings about the metric system until I read an essay by the brilliant (and beautiful) Joan Pontius called Metric Land. Now available at Metric Sucks. (I can’t locate a home page for her anymore.)
Metric is base 10, which is supposed to be its strength. Yet base 10 isn’t a strong number system. It doesn’t have enough prime factors, most notably the number three. So you simply can’t get a third of a meter, for example. But people use fractions. They’re handy and simple. They’re easy to express and understand. Pontius points out that,
With a foot you can divide by not only by two prime factors, 2 and 3, but also their multiples, 4 and 6. Metric takes a clumsy number base, ten, and creates a clumsy measuring system to match it. To get back to the elegance of the imperial system, new measures have to be created: instead of feet, metric gives us “the-standard-length- that-carpenters-buy-their-wood-in”; instead of a pint, metric gives us the-standard-quantity-of-beer-in-a-bar (“a pintje”).
So now I’m tending to agree that metric sucks.
How do you feel. Is metric the way to go, or is it a fool’s paradise? Why do you feel this way?