Re:In a remote corner of Romania, neighbours kill each other...
by tdsamardzhiev on Friday November 20, 2015 @05:08AM
(#10600487)
The 10cm unit actually even has a name - a decimetre :)
Re:In a remote corner of Romania, neighbours kill each other...
by fsloth on Friday November 20, 2015 @10:24AM
(#10601589)
Yes, but that's not what we use in vernacular (in finnish, that is) :)
Re:In a remote corner of Romania, neighbours kill each other...
by mc32 on Friday November 20, 2015 @11:09AM
(#10601907)
The imperial system is better positioned for those who are not exposed to maths. These systems developed before literacy and don't require literacy for its fundamentals.
Of course it's a moot point these days, but this is why it's a more humanist system of weights and measures.
The imperial system gives you more humanist whole units. Inches, yards, furlongs, miles, leagues, not to mention the less usual (today) digit, finger, palm, barleycorn, etc. Pounds, stone, hundredweight, woolsack, tonne, etc.
Re:In a remote corner of Romania, neighbours kill each other...
by fsloth on Saturday November 21, 2015 @03:33PM
(#10607928)
It's probably a matter of familiarity rather than of humanity. I fail to see how numerically illiterate would fair better using rulers with imperial units rather than metric ones.
"There is, for instance, effectively no unit between the metre, which is more than a yard, and the centimetre, which is less than half an inch"
Between the metre (100 centimetres) and the centimetre there is the "ten centimetres" - which we use extensively.
Human hand is pretty good even in metric system. My thumb is 2 cm wide, and if I extend my hand the distance between the tops of my thumb and pinky is roughly 20 cm.