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Comment by gervase | Hacker News Reader

Up to about a yard, divisibility for imperial distances is pretty good, but you're absolutely right that past yards, it doesn't make much sense. However, for most day-to-day, hands-on tasks (with the major exception of driving), those shorter distances are sufficient.

I find this same principle is perhaps better exemplified by weights/volumes commonly used in cooking. Since many sizes (1 cup = 8 fl.oz, 1 pound = 16 oz, 1 gallon = 128 fl.oz, 1 fl.oz = 2 tablespoons, etc) are powers of 2, scaling recipes up or down on the fly is extremely easy.

On the other hand, given an accurate metric scale, all recipes can be converted to weights, allowing scalar conversions. However, I suspect the proliferation of accurate scales in home kitchens is a relatively recent (nascent?) phenomena.

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In a way, there are parallels with a type system. Yards, a measure taken from a human limb, are for fabric, furlongs are for arable land, and miles (a thousand paces) for roads. Prior to the need for exercises in teaching arithmetic to the masses, it might have seemed rather pointless (if not exactly a type error) to express the measurement of one thing in the units for another.

In fact, land wasn't really measured in units of area as much as it was measured in units of productivity (ie bushels), which was much more useful to know

And distances (on land and maybe sea too) were long ago measured in interesting units like maybe an arrow shot (distance an arrow can travel) and such like (from my memory of reading legends as a kid, both Indian and probably Western or other ones) :)

E.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojana

An acre (which is still used in the US for land measurement) is roughly the amount of land a team of oxen can plough in a day.

And a league is the distance a person can walk in an hour. The actual distance doesn't actually matter; two places can be 5 leagues away and be at different distances. However, it'll take you 5 hours to get to any of them, be it because different quality roads or elevation changes

Really? an acre is quite small. i find it hard to believe that a team of oxen can't do much more.

Metric recipes are quite easy to scale too. 8 desiliters / 3=2.6 desiliters, not 7.2 arbitrary units.

People often point to that decimal portion and say it makes metric impossibly hard, but to anyone used to the system, it reads “‘bout half”. Most home measurement problems are not super exact science.

>Up to about a yard, divisibility for imperial distances is pretty good, but you're absolutely right that past yards, it doesn't make much sense.

Seems to work well with miles

miles ft 1/10 528 1/11 480 1/12 440 1/15 352 1/16 330 1/20 264 1/22 240 1/24 220 1/30 176 1/32 165 1/40 132

miles yds 1/2 880 1/4 440 1/5 352 1/8 220 1/10 176 1/11 160 1/16 110 1/20 88

One of the problems here is that given that our "home" numeric base is 2 times 5, we just aren't going to get both convenient unit conversion via moving the decimal point (or appropriate term in base of choice) and convenient divisibility.

So I suppose if metric just isn't signal-y enough for you (in the general sense of "you", not JackFr), you can join the call for the world to convert to duodecimal: http://www.dozenal.org/

That's tremendous -- never knew such an organization existed.

It's surprisingly easy once you get the hang of it. I started counting in dozenal for fun, and now when I think "7, 8, 9" my brain finishes the series with "X, E, 19".

It's not common enough to use with other people, but I use dozenal in my personal projects and journal whenever possible.

This problem will solve itself when we apply appropriate sexual selective pressure to evolve 6-digit hands and feet.

"Hey honey, this is going to sound weird, but hear me out..."

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