10 points

Okay now I want a Geiger counter that uses a banana for it’s scale.

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6 points

…it’s for scale

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3 points
*

Ok but who’s been to the moon? /s

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4 points

Okay but who’s crashed a Martian lander due to a conversion issue?

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-3 points
*

A few nations have. The USSR, the US for Mars and Several nations have crashed things into the moon, unintentionally, including Israel and India. So maybe the problem wasn’t the metric system and something a lot more meaningful instead of what specific arbitrary unit of measurement you think is “better.”

e: Like look at this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars There are more failures then successes, and only one of those failures was because of different units used for two related measurements. It’s weird to even bring it up as a point about the metric system.

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15 points

Hououin Kyouma wants to know your location

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6 points

El Psy Congroo

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7 points

Exactly my thoughts.

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-7 points

Hot Take, the metric system, being a base-10 system sucks for task where you want to make thirds/fourths of something to come out as a round number. It’s like the people who are huge proponents of metric don’t know the purpose of a human-centric systems of measurement and think that the ascetics of appending “kilo” or “milli” to something is the purpose on it’s own.

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4 points

Metric is based in such a way that the idea is ease of unit conversion.

In base 4 multiplying by 4 would change the unit to kilo or whatever. That would be metric but base 4.

We use base 10, you can argue about the validity of using base 10 but it bears no effect on the metric system. And yes arguements about bases exist.

Base 12 Base 6 Base 60 are all common suggestions. But base 10 is what we are probably are going to be stuck with for a very long time.

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-4 points

What about time? That’s base-60, and one of the most useful measurements we have.

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1 point

The base 60 part of time is the least-used part of it. Very few people care enough about exactly what minute or second it is and end up rounding it to the nearest 5 or 15 anyway.

The people who do care about having precision in seconds usually aren’t converting it to minutes or hours.

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5 points
  1. Decimals exist

  2. Why is a third or a fourth more important than a fifth or a tenth or a half?

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-5 points

It’s not about thirds and fourths per se. It’s actually about lack of divisors. In our current metric system of base 10. We have two divisors, 2 and 5. That’s it. No matter if you are talking kilometer, gigameter’s whatever, it’s just 2’s and 5’s The imperial system uses more divisors to make the system more useful. There are 5280 feet in a mile. But why? Well because that number has divisors of 2,3,5 and 11. Which allows you a lot of flexibility for how you want to divide a mile. Or think about time, 3600 seconds in an hour, 24hrs in a day, that’s a lot of ways you can easily divide up time. The ability to divide these arbitrary units of time is what makes them useful.

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3 points

Ok but decimals are still more useful and intuitive. Don’t be afraid of the dot!

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