Can you give an example? I can't imagine calculating conversions between inches and feet to be easier than using millimeters/centimeters/meters. Or using mostly millimeters in construction in Europe. You have one unit to deal with that generally tends to be integer value. No need to fractions.
You don't convert. Airplanes are designed in mm and you never need meters. Houses are in inches - we say 92 5/8. Or sometimes 2 feet 3 inches. Our measurement tools have both marks so we can do it without coversion.
Depends. they are designed so the whole units are easy for the common things you do with that size. this is a common case for things will still do today like we did 200 years ago (like build houses). But even in those areas a lot of things are not round units.
When things are not nice round units though both systems are equally hard. This is common in the modern world where we do a lot of things impossible 200 years ago.
in reality you almost never calculate on the job. You measure what is on the print and anything not on the print is figured out 'when you get there' by measuring the space left when you get there - which also corrects for previous measurement errors
Related to this, I find the "default to round numbers" influence interesting on things like minimal speeds. Where my understanding is many metric based systems have a smallest max speed of 30km/h. Which is between the common 15 and 20 that I'm used to seeing as the lowest.
I tried asking on a forum once on how this impacted default room sizes. I see standard ceiling size in the US is moving to 9 feet. I am assuming places on metric would not standardize on that number, but curious if they would just stick to the nearest half, or go to the nearest whole meter. (I "tried" asking, as people seemed to think that you would just design the room to be 2.74 meters and call it a day. That strikes me as very unlikely, as design tools really love "snap to grid.")
Units based on base 12 or base 2, as U.S. standard measures tend to be, are easier to divide in many ways.
Now if we used base 12 numbers instead of base 10, and we had a system of units based on that, I bet we’d have the best of both worlds. No idea if Napoleon could have imposed base 12 arithmetic on most of Europe the way he did metric, though.
Ronsenshi|1 month ago
bluGill|1 month ago
ecommerceguy|1 month ago
12 divides cleanly by 2, 3, 4, 6
10 divides cleanly only by 2 and 5
Obviously downvoters who've never used a speed square nor tape measure before.
bluGill|1 month ago
When things are not nice round units though both systems are equally hard. This is common in the modern world where we do a lot of things impossible 200 years ago.
in reality you almost never calculate on the job. You measure what is on the print and anything not on the print is figured out 'when you get there' by measuring the space left when you get there - which also corrects for previous measurement errors
taeric|1 month ago
I tried asking on a forum once on how this impacted default room sizes. I see standard ceiling size in the US is moving to 9 feet. I am assuming places on metric would not standardize on that number, but curious if they would just stick to the nearest half, or go to the nearest whole meter. (I "tried" asking, as people seemed to think that you would just design the room to be 2.74 meters and call it a day. That strikes me as very unlikely, as design tools really love "snap to grid.")
pineappleoreos|1 month ago
gdwatson|1 month ago
Now if we used base 12 numbers instead of base 10, and we had a system of units based on that, I bet we’d have the best of both worlds. No idea if Napoleon could have imposed base 12 arithmetic on most of Europe the way he did metric, though.
NuclearPM|1 month ago
ecommerceguy|1 month ago