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A comment on Pianists for Alternatively Sized Keyboards. Parent comment

Re:Pianists for Alternatively Sized Keyboards by tempestn on Monday November 23, 2020 @04:53PM (#25192375)
The metric system, since it's all based around base-10 counting, tends to operate in decimals. So you wouldn't normally talk about for example a quarter cm; rather you'd have 25mm. In the imperial system working in fractions is much more common, so you have quarter inches, eighth inches, etc. Halving is more intuitive using fractions since it amounts to multiplying the denominator, rather than dividing.

Anyway, I'm not really arguing for the imperial system, just saying that aside from legacy use, that's the one advantage I see for it vs metric. But a metric system based on base-eight... that would be beautiful.

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Re:Pianists for Alternatively Sized Keyboards by edanm on Monday November 23, 2020 @04:58PM (#25192441)
Oh interesting, you're saying it's not about the specific conversion factors, but rather the idea that people tend to subdivide units into halves/quarters/etc in imperial, whereas they don't in metric.
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