The English system of measure is based on offsets to make retooling factories easily done in house. It's very similar to metric paper sizes.
Look into the history it's actually quite logical.
Appelbaum: So the people blocking adoption of the metric system weren't backward-looking traditionalists, but cutting-edge industrialists?
Mihm: That's correct. While the anti-metric forces included outright cranks, including people who believed that the inch was a God-given unit of measurement, the most sophisticated and powerful opponents of the metric system were anything but cranks. They were engineers who built the industrial infrastructure of the United States. And their concerns, while self-interested, were not entirely off base. Whatever the drawbacks of the English units, the inch was divided in ways that made sense to the mechanics and machinists of the era: it was built around "2s" rather than "10s," with each inch subdivided in half and in half again—and so forth. This permitted various sizes of screw thread to have some logical correspondence to all the other increments. The same was true of the sizes of other small parts that were essential modern machinery.
The philosophy seems to be reversed with the ISO 216 paper size standards like A4.
Anyway, the main advantage of metric seems to be its universality between different markets, rather than the somewhat silly idea of ideal relationships such as water in one arbitrary form having a certain weight and volume replacing a system that was derived from a hundreds of years process resembling a genetic algorithm.
MikeTLive|9 years ago
Mihm: That's correct. While the anti-metric forces included outright cranks, including people who believed that the inch was a God-given unit of measurement, the most sophisticated and powerful opponents of the metric system were anything but cranks. They were engineers who built the industrial infrastructure of the United States. And their concerns, while self-interested, were not entirely off base. Whatever the drawbacks of the English units, the inch was divided in ways that made sense to the mechanics and machinists of the era: it was built around "2s" rather than "10s," with each inch subdivided in half and in half again—and so forth. This permitted various sizes of screw thread to have some logical correspondence to all the other increments. The same was true of the sizes of other small parts that were essential modern machinery.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/06/whos-a...
rz2k|9 years ago
Anyway, the main advantage of metric seems to be its universality between different markets, rather than the somewhat silly idea of ideal relationships such as water in one arbitrary form having a certain weight and volume replacing a system that was derived from a hundreds of years process resembling a genetic algorithm.
toomanybeersies|9 years ago
ysleepy|9 years ago
This is complete nonsense and sounds like musings of a desperate advocate.
If you want to believe something, you start to accept the lamest arguments.