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Originally Posted by ZephyrSapphire /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I don't see how the foot is superior to the meter. IMHO, the imperial system just fails at small numbers. 1/32, 1/64, 1/128 and etc. Sorry, I don't have a calculator ready all the time to accurately get that down to decimal numbers. 1.2 nanometers. Oh I know what that is. 0.0000000012 meters. And look! I didn't even need to use a calculator to get it down to that many decimal places!
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The Imperial system has a perfectly good unit to measure small distances in the mil. Perfectly sensible unit for measuring small stuff. As far as easy conversion, I do a bit of drafting stuff at work, and I've never worked on anything that needed measurements from nanometers to meters. Same for mils to yards. It's possible I guess, but rather rare. Really, the only time that conversion between such differently sized units came up was during metric drills in high school.
Also not really sure why you'd need go go down to decimals when given fractions, unless it's for "so I can". Easy enough to convert up and down when combining various fractions.
As far as the superiority of Imperial units in daily life, it's pretty easy to estimate measurements since you already have the tools on your body. Feet for foot, thumb for inch, and stride for yard. Metric you got the meter and the centimeter. Meter's easy since it's a direct sub in for the yard. Centimeter, not so much.
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Originally Posted by ZephyrSapphire
Fahrenheit as well. I don't see how it is "better" than the Celcius or even the Kelvin. And how can be cutting of 273.xxxK to create the Celcius be a bad thing? As if the Fahrenheit doesn't reach more than 100 Degrees Fahrenheit in some places in the States as well.
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It's pretty simple. In the Fahrenheit system, it's damn cold if it's under 0 and damn hot if it's over 100. Perfectly sensible human scale. Not so much with Kelvin.
Conversion of Kelvin to Celsius ain't bad, but Celsius ain't Metric and we're talking Imperial to Metric.
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Originally Posted by nickdawg /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Also, Metric is scientific and I like things to be scientific and rational.
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Metric is so scientific that the basis of the system, the meter, was dictated as 1/10,000,000 of circumference of the earth through the North Pole, South Pole, and Paris. Or, rather, the distance between two marks on a certain platinum-iridium bar since they weren't quite capable of correctly measuring the circumference of the earth at that time. For some reason, that sounds just a mite bit arbitrary to me.
Now though, it's no longer based on that platinum-iridium bar. Rather, scientists keep trying to redefine it into more and more exotic and stable forms while keeping the exact same measurement for the meter. I believe pseudo-scientific is a better description for all this nonsense given how arbitrary the meter was to begin with.
Decimalization used to be more rational when we were still doing huge amounts of calculations by hand. But that's no longer the case. Now, it mostly burns processor cycles to convert base 2 calculations into nice neat base 10 results with round off errors. Which, much like metric to Imperial conversions, can also cause nasty errors as shown with the botched Patriot interception during Gulf War 1.
Computers can, however, properly compute fractions with 2^nth denominators, which are rather common in Imperial measurement usage. All those 16ths and 64ths that give Imperial system users such grief are handled perfectly by computers.
