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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2213 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 22, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Use metric for making vaccines and building jumbo jets. Use it when extremely precision is necessary.

Use base 12 for every day human stuff like buying stuff from the drugstore or measuring a table leg. I like dealing with 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. I don't like dealing with 0.3333 or 0.25. You get used to it but it's unnecessary and slower.

I'd love using base 12 for everything. Unfortunately, imperial is stuck with mixed base 10-12-2n instead. Dividing one foot into thirds is easy. Dividing 28' 3 5/16" into thirds is a nightmare. Also, decimals are better for offsets: I'd rather deal with 0.51 than 33/64.

(also, there's nothing wrong with thousandths of an inch. Lots of machining is done to very high precision using the imperial system.)

I've generally heard it described as "imperial units are superior for human-scale measurement; metric is superior for much larger or much smaller scales."

base 12

*base 6

I would also accept this.

base 6

*base 60

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