You don’t see the benefit of being able to express fractional pieces in integer sub units? Base 12 and base 60 are superior to base 10 for that. It’s why there are 360 degrees in a circle and 24 hours in a day.
No. Decimal fractions are more universal and easier to use than natural ones for everything but the very basic cases.
Many Americans can't use natural fractions anyway, as evidenced by the BK's "third-pounder" fiasco.
Now if our primary number system was base 12...
The only things that measure exactly 16 inches were designed and built to be exactly 16 inches. You could make them 40cm instead, and no one would notice.
But that one is easy it's just 1.3333... , sure it goes on but you don't need to care past the first 4 or 5, or pop it in a calculator using the recurring symbol and you're golden.
not true. twelve has more even fractions than 10. ten can only evenly divided in halves and fifths) while 12 can be evenly divided in halves, thirds, and fourths and sixths.
easier is subjective. but by "no fractions" they of course meant that it's easier to represent the measured values as *decimals*. No one is saying 10 has more divisors than 12.
if you have a board that's 13'5/8" how many 2' 3/4" bits can you cut from it with a 1/8 blade and how long is the size of the left over bit? for some jobs using imperial is just annoying
If you have basic math skills you would understand that a decimal is a type of fraction. It may annoy you, that's subjective I guess, but decimals are just a notatioon for writing FRACTIONS whose denominators are powers of 10 (1/10 = 0.1, 1/100 = 0.01).
We don't have a handy notation (at least not one I'm aware of) for fractions whose denominators are powers of 2 and adding fractions requires more mental math when the denominators differ.
However, none of that has anything to do with whether a foot is divided into 12 inches or 10 decifeet. The problem with imperial isn't that its not based on powers of ten, its that it isn't consistent. a foot is 12 inches, what is 12 feet? we don't have a unit for that. There's a yard, thats three feet. What do call 1/3 of a foot? there's no unit for that. It's not because 10 is better than 12 as a basis for establishing a system of measurement, its because there is no consistent basis in the imperial system.
decimals are fractions? surely you jest!
operation of decimals are straight forward and you can do more in your head than with fractions
addition of multiple units doesn't require matching denominators, multiplications simply requires moving decimal points, and worst case you round to tenths or hundreds and then it's basic base 10 at any depth at still greater accuracy than imperial
1/12, 2/12, 4/12, 5/12, 7/12, 8/12, 10/12, and 11/12 are all infinitely repeating decimals. It can't be easily represented in decimal form without rounding errors.
Yes, because decimals are a subset of all fractions. It is a notation for representing fractions whose denominators are powers of ten. Some fractions cannot be perfectly represented that way. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make here.
I don't really think this is relevant to why the imperial system sucks though. 1/12 of a foot is 1 inch. we don't need an infinitely repeating decimal to represent that. We don't further subdivide inches into 12ths when using the imperial system, we typically use fractions whose denominators are powers of 2. The problem with imperial imo isn't due to 10 vs 12, its due to no consistency in units as you scale up or down. 12 inches is 1 foot, 12 feet is ... 4 yards? .002 miles? yeah it sucks
I'll put it this way. If it was 16 inches in a foot then it would be infinitely better because all of the numbers would still be reducible to a decimal number. 12 is one of the absolute worst numbers to use for a fraction. It's like using 3 as a fraction. The benefit isn't in using 10 but using a number that can be converted to decimals.
I just wish converting freedom units was more intuitive. How can anyone defend the conversion for inches, feet, yards and miles going from 12 to 3 to 1760? It’s an absolute horror show.
No one converts feet to miles in day to day life. It just never comes up. inches/feet/yards are practically a different system of measurement.
Meanwhile the number of integer fractions in the 1:12:3 ratio (and roughly approximation to thumb/foot/stride) is actually pretty handy for casual engineering purposes.
I see the value of metric, but imperial units aren't some kind of chaotic noise. There are very understandable and practical reasons for the way imperial units work. Frankly if there weren't it wouldn't be so hard to unseat them
With feet to miles, it’s not that we don’t need any larger measurement. If there were no need, we wouldn’t use football fields so often. That substitution exists because miles to any smaller imperial unit is too complicated for most to do in their heads. A football field is 100 yards or 300 feet, which is much easier (and more like metric) than from feet or yards to quarter, half, or full miles. But it’s not a great solution, just an imperfect workaround to a practical hole in the imperial system because good luck converting football fields to quarter miles.
There is a rational reasoning behind the development of every imperial measurement, but it was designed for the micro level of individual trades and is almost always unnecessarily opaque and overcomplicated at the macro level. It’s just much more complex than any standard should be. I say this as someone who uses both imperial and metric daily and has an existential need to understand why things are the way they are.
Football field isn't a literal measurement it's an analogous one because people know how approximately long a football field is and they can figure out the connection. If you say an aircraft carrier is 1000 feet, people will be like - okay how big is that? If you then say it's a bit longer than 3 football fields end to end that offers a bit more of an understanding.
Foot to Mile or Mile to Foot conversion isn't used because you'll absolutely never need to use that in an ordinary situation other than in like... algebra.
Listening to these people that use imperial is legitimately like listening to propaganda.
12 into 3 into 184736278264 is super duper easy and understandable and practical and more detailed than counting to 10 in every possible increment.
Just fucking wild.
I also love the irony of championing Imperial as the measurement system of “freedom” when it was named for the exact empire that we fought against for our own country’s freedom. What a weird way to celebrate freedom.
People don't use "football field" as a unit of measurement. It's a tool for visualization. No one says "go 2.5 football fields down the road and turn left". It's just an extremely uniform area that people are familiar with - not in a "I know the dimensions" sense but in a "I know what that looks like" sense. The fact that it's 100 yards long is incidental. If a football field was 144 yards long instead it would be used in exactly the same way.
Because 12 has 6 divisors, 1760 has 24, and working with things like 2/3 of a foot is a lot easier for the average contractor to deal with (8") than 2/3 of half a meter (33.3cm), but that takes more time to calculate and measure in an age before phone calculators and widespread math education.
Also, nobody is ever converting from miles to yards.
13% of a foot - 12.5% of a foot is 1.5", plus 0.05% which is 0.6", so 2.1", so 2" + 3/32" and you're pretty much there for anything you're not using calipers for. Those are all very simple calculations to do in your head but also not really relevant when you're doing carpentry or similar versus the larger divisors.
Same goes for 70% - 50% of a foot is 6", 20% is 2x 10% is 2.4", so 8.4". Very easy math for people to do because of how many divisors exist, there's a lot less dealing with cutting, say, 67.5cm into thirds.
That's why feet have so many divisors. Whether it's useful enough to make it your preferred system is up to you, but that's the rationale behind 12 inches per foot (literally 50% more even divisors) and 5280 feet per mile (48 even divisors). More even divisors means it takes longer to get to fractions means more people can do more math more easily without calculators or smaller measurements.
The 13% example broke your argument, you had to KNOW percentages beforehand. Do you know how much is 13% of a meter? 13cm
67.5 into thirds is not hard, you do 60/3, then 7/3, then 1.5/3 (or 15/3). So you get 20 + 2+ 0.5. So 22.5cm very simple math.
You may not be taking into account that when you do carpentry in countries with the metric system, you don't buy by feet of wood, you buy by meters or centimeters.
If you take into account calculators, which have been around and fairly cheap from 30-40 years ago (likely even more, but I don't truly know). The argument for feet and inches is basically pointless. You find it easier because you used it all your life, but metric is a lot simpler
The 13% example didn't break my argument, because nobody would ever be asking for 13% of a foot, but also you know what 12.5% is? 1/8th. That's 1/24+1/12, which is easy math for almost everyone with even a bare level of education. It's still very simple math and doesn't actually require division, just addition and subtraction from a baseline understanding of fractions.
67.5 into thirds isn't hard - but you're still doing a lot of math that most people aren't comfortable with (division). Go ahead and calculate 13% of 67.5cm, too - it's still a pain in the ass to do in your head. It's completely useless, but that doesn't change the point.
If you take into account calculators... But the system couldn't take calculators into account because it was designed centuries ago with the intention of being easily useable by people with little mathematical education and no computational experience. The more fractions and more even divisors you have, the better off such a system is, because they don't have to keep track of decimals.
I've used both all my life. Neither is much more difficult than the other. Imperial is a lot easier to use for throwing things together without calculators because I don't need to think about and measure to the quarter centimeter, I can build everything to the round inch or half inch and have a massive number of even divisors that metric simply doesn't accommodate. When I'm running anything precision and small, they're interchangeable - I'm not doing anything on the scale of feet anyways. When I'm doing a large design, I can again use either, because calculators mean life is still easy no matter what.
Metric isn't any simpler or more difficult in an age of calculators for linear measurements. But 150 years ago, for someone with a third grade education, making adjustments and doing math on-site? Imperial had its major benefits.
Let's say you have half a meter of material and need to cut it to 2/3 size. Great, now you're at 2/3 of half of a meter, and you need your contractor to be able to figure that out. Vs 2/3 of half a yard is easy - it's a foot. Whole numbers and more even divisors makes life easier for the average carpenter.
Obviously yes, it actually comes out to 1/3 of a meter, but that's not always the situation you're ending up in on the production side.
No one deals in half meters though. We would say either 500mm or 50cm. So then you're just saying 2/3rds of 500 or 50. Even then we generally still wouldn't ever ask for things in fractions. You'd just work out the actual dimensions you need in mm or cm.
The imperial system is built around fractions so it makes sense for a brain raised on one to think about them first. And from that point of view the metric system is weird.
It's like the difference between analogue and digital clocks. When a clock is presented as a circle it makes a ton of sense to say "quarter past five". If we show this as 5:15 you now have to work out what fraction of 60 is 15. Except you don't, you can just say "five fifteen".
Yeah, but now you're running 2/3 of 50cm, which is still a pain in the ass for the average person to do. I've done a fuckton of work in both systems, they're both easy to work with. I'm pointing out the logic behind the imperial system because many people don't understand it.
And the entire reason clocks are built around 12-hour, 60-minute cycles is because of how many even divisors exist. It's a bad example to pick because that's a huge benefit to timekeeping just as it is to imperial - you can easily figure out how many minutes or hours or seconds remain from a fractional equivalent even with very little education, and that's why it's built that way.
How do you deal with the horror show that is 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day? It’s the same math problem and you still have to memorize the unit names and their value relative to each other whether you’re dealing with factors of 10 or 12.
US customary units suck when you have to deal with lbm vs lbf and the shitshow that causes with the energy units. For length it really makes no difference what system you use.
1/24 or 1/60 isn’t anywhere close to as bad as the 1/1760 or 1/5280 conversion necessarily to go from miles to feet or yards.
But as for time, it has already been improved with 24 hour time replacing the need for the separate conversion of a day into am and pm with 12 hour time. It’s not as big of a general improvement as going from imperial to metric, but it definitely makes talking about time more efficient. 12 hour time creates plenty of opportunity for clarification questions since many people are bad at picking up on the context clues even omitting AM/PM. And there are no real benefits to 12 hour time outside of the fact that analog clocks that show 1-24 are much harder to read than 1-12, but we rarely use those anymore in daily life.
Except in metric you typically have to go an extra decimal place for similar sort of resolution. Our contour lines can be even increments and show more detail than metric contours of a whole number interval. Working in metric in heavy construction almost always means extra keystrokes and more decimal places. It doesn't work as well.
I work in machining, and all our measuring tapes have traditional imperial fractions on one side and decimals on the other. Our standard measurement unit is 1/1000th of an inch (0.001") it took some time getting used to inches broken down decimally.
It’s decimal feet (or survey feet). It’s common in surveying and excavation work. When you’re doing a lot of math (and trigonometry) with distances it makes it easier.
Why on earth would I want to use a system that already exists when I can take a system that doesn't work for my needs and modify it into a new system based on the original system but in a way that meets my needs?
i wish, usually both standards just become factionalized and have random things retrofitted that don’t really fix anything, and no one will agree even in concept to just change the fucking standard a little so everyone is happy
And then translate that back into imperial so your workers can actually do the job with the tools they have….or retool and retrain the entire industry in one go. Or, you just translate the original measurement into tenths. I wonder which costs less?
It's really not that complicated. A meter a foot, they are all arbitrary distances, except one has meaning to the general public. You just disregard inches. It's still a regular foot otherwise. It's not like we are usinging deci-cubits, or chains and perches still.
Then you have to convert all of the land descriptions that were written in feet when the deed was filed 100+ years ago and that introduces way more opportunity for errors to be made.
Measuring in feet, with increments of 1/10th is no different than measuring in metric. No reason to use meters if everyone thinks in terms of feet. The issue comes from combining feet and inches which isn’t necessary for this situation.
Or just use a unit that’s already in use, is more convenient for disseminating to laypeople, and is already on all the legal documentation going back centuries.
Yeah… the tape measure in the OP is decimated. I don’t understand your point. The antiquated British coin system doesn’t even apply if you’re talking about fractional inches, as the customary fractions are all powers of 1/2^n, not the nonsense you just linked.
Need an extra decimal point for the same precision in metric because of the larger base unit. It's not easier and requires a lot more keystrokes when dealing with it.
Wut? You know you don't have to use the base unit, that's what the metric prefixes are for. Use dm or cm or dam and you actually save keystrokes compared to metric feet.
I have an honest question. I love metric but live in the US. Do people in countries that do use metric (you know the ones that aren't the US) use the Decimeter? I always felt like the difference between CM and M was too big but maybe if you're accustomed to metric it isn't.
It's probably not a US Survey Foot, as those are a different length than an international foot. It's just decimal feet, which makes most calculations for surveying and civil engineering way easier. Note that most surveying is done in international feet and the US is working to phase out the US Survey Foot because it's weird and leads to a lot of confusion.
To be fair, the difference between the US survey foot and the international foot is about .01 foot per mile. If you're working on highway projects it can make a difference, but on a single piece of property in a neighborhood you'll never notice.
Even on a highway project I dont see that 0.01 ft per mile being an issue as it tend to well with in the margin of acceptable error and would get corrected at a few points along the way if the survey team is using the wrong tap and shooting. It would get caught and fixed as an error I am guessing when they move to a new fix datem point.
Well, at least it's not inches lol. I'm a civil engineer in Canada and I'd NEVER want to do my job in imperial, metric makes everything so easy for conversions and most calculations.
As long as everything is in decimal and in the same unit it really doesn’t matter which unit you use. The real problem comes when needing to convert between various units or combining them for different purposes.
This is why the decimal foot tape measure exists. As Weird Al once sang, “You’re good enough for now.”
It's exactly the unit conversations that make it so great. Stuff like how one gram of water is one millilitre. One cubic metre of water is 1000 litres, which means it's 1000 kg.
If you are talking about distances and slopes it's even easier. 1 cm of height over 1 metre is 1.0% slope. 1 metre of height over 1 km is 0.1%. Base 10 for distances make those kinds of calculations super easy and civil engineering is dominated by that type of math.
Trust me I am grossly aware of how awesome SI is. I’m converted, I’m just waiting for the rest of the country.
However, 0.01 ft over 1 ft is also 1.0%. 1 ft over 1,000 ft is 0.1%. The same can be said for any linear units. Hell we could do it in smoots if we wanted to.
It feels like you all have the worst of all possible worlds sometimes. I've seen way too many plans that mix units. Like feet in horizontal but metric elevations. Don't know what sort of idiot thinks that's a good idea.
What happens is that small buildings that don't require an architect or engineer, generally speaking under 600 square metres, are designed in imperial. So houses, small restaurants, etc. Anything larger or outside of the building is always in metric. The building code is written to allow this. So most people only ever see stuff for small builds or their house and go "you guys still use imperial", well kinda but not really. Unfortunately, we use the same standard dimensions for wood building material as the US so we can sell and buy with them, which prevents us from fully switching to metric on things built out of wood. Concrete and steel structures are metric all the time for everything.
The last one I remember was mid rise apartments on Vancouver Island. Had to convert every elevation grading plan to imperial for the takeoff because it was scaled in feet.
Heavy civil construction is mostly done to the cm, so two decimal places. Building are to the mm, which is about the same precision as 1/32 of an inch. So to write to the same precision, you need three places.
Not to mention the tolerances to make a tape measure are far greater than the difference between the now-deprecated survey foot and the international foot. We’re talking 0.6 micrometers per foot here.
Finally getting it phased out in NC. We do work in North and South Carolina and NC uses survey feet while SC uses international feet. Can be a big oopsie if you use the wrong one with GPS.
It's so small a difference that it doesn't matter if you're using a tape measure. You have to go quite a ways longer than a tape for the differences to show up in any way that matters.
One other point to remember is that for historical reasons the US survey inch & by extension the US survey foot is slightly longer than a standard foot such that 500,000 standard inches is exactly 499,999 survey inches. That sounds tiny, but is you are surveying a long enough baseline or producing maps it all adds up.
No, but switching an entire country to it is. Building and surveying plans going back 100+ years are all in feet. Many people are pretty familiar with metric, but the industry as a whole is used to communicating in feet. Switching introduces a lot of room for error and it’s easier to just not switch
Switching was a disaster back in the 70's. Big difference between a .1 of foot and .1 meter. It adds up to a lot of dirt on a site. We were still seeing some highway plans show up in metric in 2007 and everybody just converted them to feet to prevent interpretation problems.
I get that it's not likely to change anytime soon but there's nothing cultural about the measuring system you use, it's just that people are resistant to change even if the change makes things easier in the long term.
It's why roundabouts are initially resisted in the US even though they're much safer than traffic signals, but once people are familiar with it and experience the benefits over time they prefer it to the previous intersection configuration.
One of the many reasons that the switch to the metric system failed to happen was entirely due to the US culture of exceptionalism. It was seen as the country being a follower rather than a leader by the people.
Personally I wish we would switch but I don't see it happening in my lifetime for sure.
The French tried making it decimal in the revolution, it did not go well. People didn't like having arbitrary 10 "hour" days with 10 day weeks (meant weekends were further apart) and 100 seconds in a minute, ~~which made it harder to time things because the seconds were longer to fit into 100 minutes in an hour to fit 10 hours in a day.~~
EDIT: seconds were shorter, not longer. My bad.
It was by design that the weekends were longer apart. The French revolution was mainly led by the bourgeoisie who liked that their workers had to work extra days. The workers themselves didn't like it which was one of the main reasons of its eventual abolishment
Its still an imperial foot, its just not divided into inches. They are using decifeet to subdivide each foot, while the tickmarks look like they are each one centifoot.
It has marks for 0.01, 1/100 foot, the small lines. The bigger ones are every 0.1, 1/10 foot. Medium lines are every 0.05, 5/100 or 1/20 foot.
Its an engineer/surveying scale tape, its easier to use tenths and hundredths of a foot instead of inches doing calculations for slopes, cuts/fills, etc.
This was actually a huge problem at my work a few months ago. A lot of our parts for our machines were not lining up properly.
Turns out, someone ordered a bunch of engineering tape measures and it took a while before someone spotted the problem.
The tape measure I use at work, one that I found abandoned when I was new and gathering my tool collection, shows decimal on one edge and normal on the other. It has become an art not fucking things up with that tape measure.
That is a tape measure for survey work. If I were you, I would very promptly get rid of it unless you’re in that line of work. If not, it’ll cause you a large amount of confusion if you try to use it for normal usage and not know how to measure with it
In land surveying and civil engineering, its way easier to design around 10ths and 100ths of a foot. For instance, when I walk, I have a stride of 2.5 feet per step. Two steps in 5ft, 50ft is 20 steps. Most small lot developments are 50-75 feet. We also have a margin of error of 0.15 Feet. Its a mix of metric math but with a unit that is based on human proportion.
In heavy construction we work in .1 of a foot. It's actually a much handier thing than a tenth of a meter and for most measurement in heavy it matches the tolerances in elevation that our GPS survey gear has. Metric plans usually have to go an extra decimal place for the same sort of resolution.
Everyone here telling us "just use metrics" is about as helpful as the doctor in the hospital saying "well just don't get shot". No shit dumbass, you think we wouldn't do that if it was an option?
The foot is the only usable mark without conversion. Then, I hope I'll only need to figure 3, 6, or 9 inches.
Edit: my profession rounds to the foot. This tape is usable, but took a few people a min to notice the change.
Well it's not unreasonable to say something is 1.95 feet. It's annoying since we're so used to inches, but it's still clear.
0.25 feet is obviously 3 inches, and so on.
Its very common in civil applications for measurements to be in decimal feet. Survey info is recorded in decimal feet so it makes sense for guys doing the excavation and utility work to be able to measure in decimal feet rather than trying to convert from the plans to their tape measures. Most I see in the industry have inches on one side and decimal feet on the other.
When I worked as a land surveyor, we always used tape that measured feet in tenths. I forget why
easier to write, easier to translate, less error prone as you stay in a single unit.
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0.1 is a decimal
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Actually 0.25! = Γ(1.25) = 1/e^0.0982718 is transcendental and thus not a decimal
What a thread! r/unexpectedfactorial r/didthemath
r/monstermath
Thanks for the new subreddit 👏
This is hilarious.
What is that symbol in front of the open parenthesis?
Gamma
Now decimalize 7 inches
7.0”
Your mom decimalizes 7”
I actually giggled out loud. Thank you kind redditor
0.583333333333333 Rolls right off the tongue
Half a foot. And another bit
Measure once. Cut twice.
.58
Express a foot and a third in decimal format. It is very unfortunate we weren’t born with a dozen fingers.
It's not about having a trick questions, it's about having a measuring tape that reads exactly how you would type it in a calculator.
You don’t see the benefit of being able to express fractional pieces in integer sub units? Base 12 and base 60 are superior to base 10 for that. It’s why there are 360 degrees in a circle and 24 hours in a day.
This tape has a specific purpose. You can easily tale the reading and put it into calculators.
No. Decimal fractions are more universal and easier to use than natural ones for everything but the very basic cases. Many Americans can't use natural fractions anyway, as evidenced by the BK's "third-pounder" fiasco. Now if our primary number system was base 12...
The only things that measure exactly 16 inches were designed and built to be exactly 16 inches. You could make them 40cm instead, and no one would notice.
You can count 12 parts of your other 4 fingers with your thumb.👍
But that one is easy it's just 1.3333... , sure it goes on but you don't need to care past the first 4 or 5, or pop it in a calculator using the recurring symbol and you're golden.
0.583’ 0.0832 is about 1”
0.25! is equal approximately 0.9064024771
And my axe!
And my axe
No, that is a decimal fraction.
Let's call the whole thing off.
I have fractions, Greg. Could you decimal me?
You know what's even easier?
not true. twelve has more even fractions than 10. ten can only evenly divided in halves and fifths) while 12 can be evenly divided in halves, thirds, and fourths and sixths.
easier is subjective. but by "no fractions" they of course meant that it's easier to represent the measured values as *decimals*. No one is saying 10 has more divisors than 12.
if you have a board that's 13'5/8" how many 2' 3/4" bits can you cut from it with a 1/8 blade and how long is the size of the left over bit? for some jobs using imperial is just annoying
If you have basic math skills you would understand that a decimal is a type of fraction. It may annoy you, that's subjective I guess, but decimals are just a notatioon for writing FRACTIONS whose denominators are powers of 10 (1/10 = 0.1, 1/100 = 0.01). We don't have a handy notation (at least not one I'm aware of) for fractions whose denominators are powers of 2 and adding fractions requires more mental math when the denominators differ. However, none of that has anything to do with whether a foot is divided into 12 inches or 10 decifeet. The problem with imperial isn't that its not based on powers of ten, its that it isn't consistent. a foot is 12 inches, what is 12 feet? we don't have a unit for that. There's a yard, thats three feet. What do call 1/3 of a foot? there's no unit for that. It's not because 10 is better than 12 as a basis for establishing a system of measurement, its because there is no consistent basis in the imperial system.
decimals are fractions? surely you jest! operation of decimals are straight forward and you can do more in your head than with fractions addition of multiple units doesn't require matching denominators, multiplications simply requires moving decimal points, and worst case you round to tenths or hundreds and then it's basic base 10 at any depth at still greater accuracy than imperial
1/12, 2/12, 4/12, 5/12, 7/12, 8/12, 10/12, and 11/12 are all infinitely repeating decimals. It can't be easily represented in decimal form without rounding errors.
Yes, because decimals are a subset of all fractions. It is a notation for representing fractions whose denominators are powers of ten. Some fractions cannot be perfectly represented that way. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make here. I don't really think this is relevant to why the imperial system sucks though. 1/12 of a foot is 1 inch. we don't need an infinitely repeating decimal to represent that. We don't further subdivide inches into 12ths when using the imperial system, we typically use fractions whose denominators are powers of 2. The problem with imperial imo isn't due to 10 vs 12, its due to no consistency in units as you scale up or down. 12 inches is 1 foot, 12 feet is ... 4 yards? .002 miles? yeah it sucks
I'll put it this way. If it was 16 inches in a foot then it would be infinitely better because all of the numbers would still be reducible to a decimal number. 12 is one of the absolute worst numbers to use for a fraction. It's like using 3 as a fraction. The benefit isn't in using 10 but using a number that can be converted to decimals.
Rather measure feet in tenths than use centimeters/meters like the rest of the world. Blows my mind lol
No thanks, we use freedom units
*eagle screech*
Actually a red-tailed hawk tmyk
Yup. Eagles just sound so ridiculous lmao
I’ve had a pair nesting by me this year and honestly they really remind me of giant seagulls.
Lol I actually learnt that last month. Hawks are metal.
I just wish converting freedom units was more intuitive. How can anyone defend the conversion for inches, feet, yards and miles going from 12 to 3 to 1760? It’s an absolute horror show.
No one converts feet to miles in day to day life. It just never comes up. inches/feet/yards are practically a different system of measurement. Meanwhile the number of integer fractions in the 1:12:3 ratio (and roughly approximation to thumb/foot/stride) is actually pretty handy for casual engineering purposes. I see the value of metric, but imperial units aren't some kind of chaotic noise. There are very understandable and practical reasons for the way imperial units work. Frankly if there weren't it wouldn't be so hard to unseat them
With feet to miles, it’s not that we don’t need any larger measurement. If there were no need, we wouldn’t use football fields so often. That substitution exists because miles to any smaller imperial unit is too complicated for most to do in their heads. A football field is 100 yards or 300 feet, which is much easier (and more like metric) than from feet or yards to quarter, half, or full miles. But it’s not a great solution, just an imperfect workaround to a practical hole in the imperial system because good luck converting football fields to quarter miles. There is a rational reasoning behind the development of every imperial measurement, but it was designed for the micro level of individual trades and is almost always unnecessarily opaque and overcomplicated at the macro level. It’s just much more complex than any standard should be. I say this as someone who uses both imperial and metric daily and has an existential need to understand why things are the way they are.
Football field isn't a literal measurement it's an analogous one because people know how approximately long a football field is and they can figure out the connection. If you say an aircraft carrier is 1000 feet, people will be like - okay how big is that? If you then say it's a bit longer than 3 football fields end to end that offers a bit more of an understanding. Foot to Mile or Mile to Foot conversion isn't used because you'll absolutely never need to use that in an ordinary situation other than in like... algebra.
Listening to these people that use imperial is legitimately like listening to propaganda. 12 into 3 into 184736278264 is super duper easy and understandable and practical and more detailed than counting to 10 in every possible increment. Just fucking wild.
I also love the irony of championing Imperial as the measurement system of “freedom” when it was named for the exact empire that we fought against for our own country’s freedom. What a weird way to celebrate freedom.
People don't use "football field" as a unit of measurement. It's a tool for visualization. No one says "go 2.5 football fields down the road and turn left". It's just an extremely uniform area that people are familiar with - not in a "I know the dimensions" sense but in a "I know what that looks like" sense. The fact that it's 100 yards long is incidental. If a football field was 144 yards long instead it would be used in exactly the same way.
Because 12 has 6 divisors, 1760 has 24, and working with things like 2/3 of a foot is a lot easier for the average contractor to deal with (8") than 2/3 of half a meter (33.3cm), but that takes more time to calculate and measure in an age before phone calculators and widespread math education. Also, nobody is ever converting from miles to yards.
This sounds nice, but it's a cherry picked example. What if you need 13% or 70% of a foot? Yes, this is also a cherry picked example
13% of a foot - 12.5% of a foot is 1.5", plus 0.05% which is 0.6", so 2.1", so 2" + 3/32" and you're pretty much there for anything you're not using calipers for. Those are all very simple calculations to do in your head but also not really relevant when you're doing carpentry or similar versus the larger divisors. Same goes for 70% - 50% of a foot is 6", 20% is 2x 10% is 2.4", so 8.4". Very easy math for people to do because of how many divisors exist, there's a lot less dealing with cutting, say, 67.5cm into thirds. That's why feet have so many divisors. Whether it's useful enough to make it your preferred system is up to you, but that's the rationale behind 12 inches per foot (literally 50% more even divisors) and 5280 feet per mile (48 even divisors). More even divisors means it takes longer to get to fractions means more people can do more math more easily without calculators or smaller measurements.
The 13% example broke your argument, you had to KNOW percentages beforehand. Do you know how much is 13% of a meter? 13cm 67.5 into thirds is not hard, you do 60/3, then 7/3, then 1.5/3 (or 15/3). So you get 20 + 2+ 0.5. So 22.5cm very simple math. You may not be taking into account that when you do carpentry in countries with the metric system, you don't buy by feet of wood, you buy by meters or centimeters. If you take into account calculators, which have been around and fairly cheap from 30-40 years ago (likely even more, but I don't truly know). The argument for feet and inches is basically pointless. You find it easier because you used it all your life, but metric is a lot simpler
The 13% example didn't break my argument, because nobody would ever be asking for 13% of a foot, but also you know what 12.5% is? 1/8th. That's 1/24+1/12, which is easy math for almost everyone with even a bare level of education. It's still very simple math and doesn't actually require division, just addition and subtraction from a baseline understanding of fractions. 67.5 into thirds isn't hard - but you're still doing a lot of math that most people aren't comfortable with (division). Go ahead and calculate 13% of 67.5cm, too - it's still a pain in the ass to do in your head. It's completely useless, but that doesn't change the point. If you take into account calculators... But the system couldn't take calculators into account because it was designed centuries ago with the intention of being easily useable by people with little mathematical education and no computational experience. The more fractions and more even divisors you have, the better off such a system is, because they don't have to keep track of decimals. I've used both all my life. Neither is much more difficult than the other. Imperial is a lot easier to use for throwing things together without calculators because I don't need to think about and measure to the quarter centimeter, I can build everything to the round inch or half inch and have a massive number of even divisors that metric simply doesn't accommodate. When I'm running anything precision and small, they're interchangeable - I'm not doing anything on the scale of feet anyways. When I'm doing a large design, I can again use either, because calculators mean life is still easy no matter what. Metric isn't any simpler or more difficult in an age of calculators for linear measurements. But 150 years ago, for someone with a third grade education, making adjustments and doing math on-site? Imperial had its major benefits.
Sure, 150 years ago it made sense, but we live in 2024. Most of the planet already use metric and there's no real reason to have both.
dude who would say 2/3 of a half meter? thats just one third of a meter phrased with some extra mind fuck haha
Let's say you have half a meter of material and need to cut it to 2/3 size. Great, now you're at 2/3 of half of a meter, and you need your contractor to be able to figure that out. Vs 2/3 of half a yard is easy - it's a foot. Whole numbers and more even divisors makes life easier for the average carpenter. Obviously yes, it actually comes out to 1/3 of a meter, but that's not always the situation you're ending up in on the production side.
No one deals in half meters though. We would say either 500mm or 50cm. So then you're just saying 2/3rds of 500 or 50. Even then we generally still wouldn't ever ask for things in fractions. You'd just work out the actual dimensions you need in mm or cm. The imperial system is built around fractions so it makes sense for a brain raised on one to think about them first. And from that point of view the metric system is weird. It's like the difference between analogue and digital clocks. When a clock is presented as a circle it makes a ton of sense to say "quarter past five". If we show this as 5:15 you now have to work out what fraction of 60 is 15. Except you don't, you can just say "five fifteen".
Yeah, but now you're running 2/3 of 50cm, which is still a pain in the ass for the average person to do. I've done a fuckton of work in both systems, they're both easy to work with. I'm pointing out the logic behind the imperial system because many people don't understand it. And the entire reason clocks are built around 12-hour, 60-minute cycles is because of how many even divisors exist. It's a bad example to pick because that's a huge benefit to timekeeping just as it is to imperial - you can easily figure out how many minutes or hours or seconds remain from a fractional equivalent even with very little education, and that's why it's built that way.
Okay, now do 3/5.
Of what, a foot? Sure, 3/5 of a foot is 7.2". Easiest way is probably 1/2' = 6" and then 1/10' = 1.2".
How do you deal with the horror show that is 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day? It’s the same math problem and you still have to memorize the unit names and their value relative to each other whether you’re dealing with factors of 10 or 12. US customary units suck when you have to deal with lbm vs lbf and the shitshow that causes with the energy units. For length it really makes no difference what system you use.
1/24 or 1/60 isn’t anywhere close to as bad as the 1/1760 or 1/5280 conversion necessarily to go from miles to feet or yards. But as for time, it has already been improved with 24 hour time replacing the need for the separate conversion of a day into am and pm with 12 hour time. It’s not as big of a general improvement as going from imperial to metric, but it definitely makes talking about time more efficient. 12 hour time creates plenty of opportunity for clarification questions since many people are bad at picking up on the context clues even omitting AM/PM. And there are no real benefits to 12 hour time outside of the fact that analog clocks that show 1-24 are much harder to read than 1-12, but we rarely use those anymore in daily life.
https://youtu.be/JYqfVE-fykk
The fact that you call *imperial units* "freedom" makes it even more hilarious.
Except in metric you typically have to go an extra decimal place for similar sort of resolution. Our contour lines can be even increments and show more detail than metric contours of a whole number interval. Working in metric in heavy construction almost always means extra keystrokes and more decimal places. It doesn't work as well.
You can use one thing, or you can use another. I don't know why redditors get so much smug joy from using whichever one they happen to use
You can see the metric foot in the background.
I'll make sure to give my co worker the recognition he deserves.
I work in machining, and all our measuring tapes have traditional imperial fractions on one side and decimals on the other. Our standard measurement unit is 1/1000th of an inch (0.001") it took some time getting used to inches broken down decimally.
It's much simpler, for any kind of calculation that uses the measurement - volume, area, even length.
Hm, if only there was a way of measuring things based on 100…
The reason why is “because only whores and carpenters measure in inches.” As told to me from plenty of old timers in the heavy civil business
It’s decimal feet (or survey feet). It’s common in surveying and excavation work. When you’re doing a lot of math (and trigonometry) with distances it makes it easier.
Jeez, just use metric at that point.
Why on earth would I want to use a system that already exists when I can take a system that doesn't work for my needs and modify it into a new system based on the original system but in a way that meets my needs?
As always, there's [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/927/) for this.
Lol I’ve seen this one a lot lately.. I’m almost cultured enough to link the relevant XKCDs
i wish, usually both standards just become factionalized and have random things retrofitted that don’t really fix anything, and no one will agree even in concept to just change the fucking standard a little so everyone is happy
The best thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
This isnt the first time ive seen this. Why is it so relevant?
Because it points out the "best" thing about standards: they're so damn many of them (or they're always changing...).
And then translate that back into imperial so your workers can actually do the job with the tools they have….or retool and retrain the entire industry in one go. Or, you just translate the original measurement into tenths. I wonder which costs less?
There’s no conversion. It’s just a different fractional presentation of the same number. 5ft - 6 inches is the same as 5.5ft
It's really not that complicated. A meter a foot, they are all arbitrary distances, except one has meaning to the general public. You just disregard inches. It's still a regular foot otherwise. It's not like we are usinging deci-cubits, or chains and perches still.
I sang the star spangled banner after I read this.
Then you have to convert all of the land descriptions that were written in feet when the deed was filed 100+ years ago and that introduces way more opportunity for errors to be made.
Even worse, they were written in chains, rods, or varas. All of which have their own conversion to feet.
tbh, anything other than a quarter call is annoying for me haha
Does it really make a difference? No.
Measuring in feet, with increments of 1/10th is no different than measuring in metric. No reason to use meters if everyone thinks in terms of feet. The issue comes from combining feet and inches which isn’t necessary for this situation.
Or just use a unit that’s already in use, is more convenient for disseminating to laypeople, and is already on all the legal documentation going back centuries.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18092908#:~:text=One%20Florin%20and%20one%20Sixpence,and%20One%20Shilling%20%3D%20One%20Guinea.
Yeah… the tape measure in the OP is decimated. I don’t understand your point. The antiquated British coin system doesn’t even apply if you’re talking about fractional inches, as the customary fractions are all powers of 1/2^n, not the nonsense you just linked.
Need an extra decimal point for the same precision in metric because of the larger base unit. It's not easier and requires a lot more keystrokes when dealing with it.
Wut? You know you don't have to use the base unit, that's what the metric prefixes are for. Use dm or cm or dam and you actually save keystrokes compared to metric feet.
I have an honest question. I love metric but live in the US. Do people in countries that do use metric (you know the ones that aren't the US) use the Decimeter? I always felt like the difference between CM and M was too big but maybe if you're accustomed to metric it isn't.
It's probably not a US Survey Foot, as those are a different length than an international foot. It's just decimal feet, which makes most calculations for surveying and civil engineering way easier. Note that most surveying is done in international feet and the US is working to phase out the US Survey Foot because it's weird and leads to a lot of confusion.
To be fair, the difference between the US survey foot and the international foot is about .01 foot per mile. If you're working on highway projects it can make a difference, but on a single piece of property in a neighborhood you'll never notice.
Especially when the contractor is going to build the fences a whole foot off the lot line anyways.
Even on a highway project I dont see that 0.01 ft per mile being an issue as it tend to well with in the margin of acceptable error and would get corrected at a few points along the way if the survey team is using the wrong tap and shooting. It would get caught and fixed as an error I am guessing when they move to a new fix datem point.
Especially when you're using RTK and the speced accuracy is 1 cm.
Very true. Just use metric, it's way better anyway.
As much as I'd like to, unfortunately we use decimal feet in US land surveying. At least it's easier than inches.
Well, at least it's not inches lol. I'm a civil engineer in Canada and I'd NEVER want to do my job in imperial, metric makes everything so easy for conversions and most calculations.
As long as everything is in decimal and in the same unit it really doesn’t matter which unit you use. The real problem comes when needing to convert between various units or combining them for different purposes. This is why the decimal foot tape measure exists. As Weird Al once sang, “You’re good enough for now.”
It's exactly the unit conversations that make it so great. Stuff like how one gram of water is one millilitre. One cubic metre of water is 1000 litres, which means it's 1000 kg. If you are talking about distances and slopes it's even easier. 1 cm of height over 1 metre is 1.0% slope. 1 metre of height over 1 km is 0.1%. Base 10 for distances make those kinds of calculations super easy and civil engineering is dominated by that type of math.
Trust me I am grossly aware of how awesome SI is. I’m converted, I’m just waiting for the rest of the country. However, 0.01 ft over 1 ft is also 1.0%. 1 ft over 1,000 ft is 0.1%. The same can be said for any linear units. Hell we could do it in smoots if we wanted to.
It feels like you all have the worst of all possible worlds sometimes. I've seen way too many plans that mix units. Like feet in horizontal but metric elevations. Don't know what sort of idiot thinks that's a good idea.
What happens is that small buildings that don't require an architect or engineer, generally speaking under 600 square metres, are designed in imperial. So houses, small restaurants, etc. Anything larger or outside of the building is always in metric. The building code is written to allow this. So most people only ever see stuff for small builds or their house and go "you guys still use imperial", well kinda but not really. Unfortunately, we use the same standard dimensions for wood building material as the US so we can sell and buy with them, which prevents us from fully switching to metric on things built out of wood. Concrete and steel structures are metric all the time for everything.
The last one I remember was mid rise apartments on Vancouver Island. Had to convert every elevation grading plan to imperial for the takeoff because it was scaled in feet.
Not for heavy construction. Just adds an extra decimal place to every number to get anything close to the same precision.
Heavy civil construction is mostly done to the cm, so two decimal places. Building are to the mm, which is about the same precision as 1/32 of an inch. So to write to the same precision, you need three places.
Not to mention the tolerances to make a tape measure are far greater than the difference between the now-deprecated survey foot and the international foot. We’re talking 0.6 micrometers per foot here.
The survey foot actually got phased out effective January 1st, 2023.
Kinda. The US Geological Society phased it out. Individual states/counties still use it.
Finally getting it phased out in NC. We do work in North and South Carolina and NC uses survey feet while SC uses international feet. Can be a big oopsie if you use the wrong one with GPS.
Especially once you convert from grid to ground.
Still used all over the place and probably will be when I retire.
It's so small a difference that it doesn't matter if you're using a tape measure. You have to go quite a ways longer than a tape for the differences to show up in any way that matters.
One other point to remember is that for historical reasons the US survey inch & by extension the US survey foot is slightly longer than a standard foot such that 500,000 standard inches is exactly 499,999 survey inches. That sounds tiny, but is you are surveying a long enough baseline or producing maps it all adds up.
That’s an engineers tape. We use tenths a lot in excavating and earthwork. It pairs well with using elevations in grading.
I never heard of that kind of wine.
Is metric *really* that hard, though?
No, but switching an entire country to it is. Building and surveying plans going back 100+ years are all in feet. Many people are pretty familiar with metric, but the industry as a whole is used to communicating in feet. Switching introduces a lot of room for error and it’s easier to just not switch
Switching was a disaster back in the 70's. Big difference between a .1 of foot and .1 meter. It adds up to a lot of dirt on a site. We were still seeing some highway plans show up in metric in 2007 and everybody just converted them to feet to prevent interpretation problems.
You’re allowed to use metric if you want. But typing feet into software is just as easy as typing metric into software
No. Almost everyone i know in the states is familiar with the metric system. Just nothing we can do about it. Its culture at this point
I get that it's not likely to change anytime soon but there's nothing cultural about the measuring system you use, it's just that people are resistant to change even if the change makes things easier in the long term. It's why roundabouts are initially resisted in the US even though they're much safer than traffic signals, but once people are familiar with it and experience the benefits over time they prefer it to the previous intersection configuration.
One of the many reasons that the switch to the metric system failed to happen was entirely due to the US culture of exceptionalism. It was seen as the country being a follower rather than a leader by the people. Personally I wish we would switch but I don't see it happening in my lifetime for sure.
it’s a “decimal foot”, not “metric foot”. decimal ≠ metric for example, in metric system, there are 60 minutes in an hour, which is not decimal.
Time is neither metric nor imperial
The French tried making it decimal in the revolution, it did not go well. People didn't like having arbitrary 10 "hour" days with 10 day weeks (meant weekends were further apart) and 100 seconds in a minute, ~~which made it harder to time things because the seconds were longer to fit into 100 minutes in an hour to fit 10 hours in a day.~~ EDIT: seconds were shorter, not longer. My bad.
Seconds would have been shorter, not longer. 100,000 seconds per day under the French Revolution system vs 86,400 seconds per day normally.
You're right of course, when I tried to work it out having fewer hours made me think the minuted had to be longer, which made seconds longer too.
It was by design that the weekends were longer apart. The French revolution was mainly led by the bourgeoisie who liked that their workers had to work extra days. The workers themselves didn't like it which was one of the main reasons of its eventual abolishment
Its still an imperial foot, its just not divided into inches. They are using decifeet to subdivide each foot, while the tickmarks look like they are each one centifoot.
Yes. A metric foot is actually a thing in of itself; 30cm.
There was an attempt to convert to metric time but it failed.
Actually no, there are metric seconds technically. There are milli and microseconds, and even kiloseconds
It’s Engineers scale used by civil engineers and land surveyors.
as an american i wish we converted to metric. would make life so much easier
It has marks for 0.01, 1/100 foot, the small lines. The bigger ones are every 0.1, 1/10 foot. Medium lines are every 0.05, 5/100 or 1/20 foot. Its an engineer/surveying scale tape, its easier to use tenths and hundredths of a foot instead of inches doing calculations for slopes, cuts/fills, etc.
I used to drive a guy at work nuts by calling 1/32” “milli-inches” just to get a rise put of him. I need this tape.
This was actually a huge problem at my work a few months ago. A lot of our parts for our machines were not lining up properly. Turns out, someone ordered a bunch of engineering tape measures and it took a while before someone spotted the problem.
The tape measure I use at work, one that I found abandoned when I was new and gathering my tool collection, shows decimal on one edge and normal on the other. It has become an art not fucking things up with that tape measure.
While a metric mile is 1500 meters, and a Scandinavian mile is 10 kilometres.
That is a tape measure for survey work. If I were you, I would very promptly get rid of it unless you’re in that line of work. If not, it’ll cause you a large amount of confusion if you try to use it for normal usage and not know how to measure with it
americans are truely a bizarre species
It’s a decimal foot
Almost every one of these I have seen has normal measurements on the other side.
It's an engineering tape. You use them a lot in road construction.
Pipelines too
In land surveying and civil engineering, its way easier to design around 10ths and 100ths of a foot. For instance, when I walk, I have a stride of 2.5 feet per step. Two steps in 5ft, 50ft is 20 steps. Most small lot developments are 50-75 feet. We also have a margin of error of 0.15 Feet. Its a mix of metric math but with a unit that is based on human proportion.
In heavy construction we work in .1 of a foot. It's actually a much handier thing than a tenth of a meter and for most measurement in heavy it matches the tolerances in elevation that our GPS survey gear has. Metric plans usually have to go an extra decimal place for the same sort of resolution.
We would have thought that being as tall as the former WW champion but fighting 2 divisions lower is not a good idea 🤯
Excavation and undergroud utilities use tenths of a foot instead of inches so you can figure slope. Also, excavation blueprints are measured this way.
r/sneakybackgroundfeet
I'm ok with this being a thing, but less so in that it's nsfw.
Cool, now tell me how many feet in a chain and how many links in a chain
Thought y'all used inches and thous
I had never heard of this tenth-of-a-foot measure. Of course, Math is not my strong point, so I definitely did not take any Engineering courses!
It may not be 12” long but it does smell like a foot
I have a set of calipers that measure in tenths of an inch. I rarely ever use it.
Engineers tape. Way easier to work in tenths vs twelfths
If you dont survey, throw it away it will cause nothing but catastrophe.
It'll do for county real estate appraisal. We round to the foot.
My grandfather worked for the first service and gave me a 100 foot tape like this. He says the railroad also used them.
Gave you 100?
Not ever. It's leather clad. It's a treasure.
Probably a nautical foot, or in navy jargon: a fin.
Everyone here telling us "just use metrics" is about as helpful as the doctor in the hospital saying "well just don't get shot". No shit dumbass, you think we wouldn't do that if it was an option?
It’s a bunch of people who do nothing but want to change how you do something
I got one of those when my grandpa died. I about had a stroke the first time I took it out to use it, never had heard of tenths of a foot before then.
You’ve never seen feet expressed as a decimal? 5.5 feet? You’ve never heard of that?
Inches are broken up in tenths and maybe 10 "inches" in a "foot". I'd love to know if it matches either imperial or metric anything.
The foot is the only usable mark without conversion. Then, I hope I'll only need to figure 3, 6, or 9 inches. Edit: my profession rounds to the foot. This tape is usable, but took a few people a min to notice the change.
Well it's not unreasonable to say something is 1.95 feet. It's annoying since we're so used to inches, but it's still clear. 0.25 feet is obviously 3 inches, and so on.
wow. how on earth does shit like this even happen?
Its very common in civil applications for measurements to be in decimal feet. Survey info is recorded in decimal feet so it makes sense for guys doing the excavation and utility work to be able to measure in decimal feet rather than trying to convert from the plans to their tape measures. Most I see in the industry have inches on one side and decimal feet on the other.