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submitted 1 year ago by Deegham to c/196

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[-] ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think the two points missing from most debates are

The imperial system does a damn good job at measuring things the way a human would. A foot is roughly the length of a big foot. A single degree farenheit is just big enough that you could guesstimate it with enough practice. If the temperatures are negative, you dump sand on the roads instead of salt.
It's like seven units of measurement in a trenchant. You never have to convert gallons to cubic miles. You never have to convert from dots to angstoms, and nobody has ever had to convert the surveyors mile to the nautical mile. It feels schizophrenic because claiming it's one singular system is like saying Italian, French, and Portuguese languages are all regional dialects of Europeanese.

My point isn't "it's not a bug, it's a feature", I'm saying for the average non-scientist there may be a logical reason why we like it so much

[-] kaffiene@lemmy.world 36 points 1 year ago

Yeah. You're used to it

[-] turmacar@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No no. The rest of the world is constantly out of sorts on what common measurements are. It's like how monolingual non-English-speaking people are constantly aware they're not speaking the natural language of English.

this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023

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