• radio_free_asgarthr [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    7 months ago

    Dude, WTF are you talking about? When I was a machinist it was so much easier to deal with metric. 1 inch ~ 25 mm, from there it is just way easier to deal with measurements such as 27.5 mm instead of 1 5/64 inches and all of these inverse powers of 2. I was always jealous of the French machinist I worked with talking about how the only units you should ever have to work with is meters and millimeters. If you are concerned about “Human Scale” then intuitively a meter and a yard are close enough for estimates and you don’t have to deal with “wait, what is 5/8 + 3/16 + 1 7/64?”

    • frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      “wait, what is 5/8 + 3/16 + 1 7/64?”

      Those are so easily commensurable! It’s 1 and 59/64 obv.

      It’s set up to make this easy.

      Let me ask: do you think people have usedit for hundreds of years for no reason?

      • Paradoxvoid@aussie.zone
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        7 months ago

        Those are so easily commensurable! It’s 1 and 59/64 obv.

        I legit can’t tell if this is sarcasm.

        • frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          “wait, what is 5/8 + 3/16 + 1 7/64?”

          In binary it’s 0.101 + 0.0011 + 1.000111, or laid out vertically:

          0.101
          0.0011
          1.000111
          =
          1.111011
          

          Halving numbers is no harder than decimating them, probably easier for most of us. Even computer scientists don’t think of base-10 as The Way The Truth and The Light; they use base-2 or base-16 for various things.

          Decimal/base-ten is fine as a convention, but insisting that One Convention is perfect and others are heretical is stupid.

          • Paradoxvoid@aussie.zone
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            7 months ago

            You do you, but if you’re reverting to binary to explain how simple it is to add values together, I think you’ve made a wrong turn somewhere.

            • frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml
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              7 months ago

              halving is a really easy mental operation; we do it all the time mentally and with physical things like bits of food or drink or folding a piece of paper

      • MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml
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        7 months ago

        Let me ask you something in return: do you think you can’t use fractions with metric? If you prefer fractions, that’s fine, but you haven’t justified why it’s better to use a system of measurement based on vibes.

        1/4" = 0.25" 1/4mm = 0.25mm