But with the metric system you only really get cm (too coarse) and mm (too fine) but you don't get something like 9/16 so you can't "work in 16ths" and have everything be whole units again.
Adjusting HVAC in degrees-C is infuriating to my Fahrenheit sensibilities. 20C is cold, 22C is hot. 21C is probably ok but really I want something like 20.5C. The comfortable range for a room is 3-5 whole units of F, but requires a bunch of fractions in C that you may not even have available on your thermostat.
Sure, converting between units is easy in the metric system. That doesn't make it the best thing to use all the time. Hell, the idea of thousandths of an inch is used commonly, so even the imperial system is base 1000 in some cases. But I've never seen anyone utilize the fractional scale with metric units, probably because the units are the wrong size for that to be useful.
People who use metric units are perfectly happy rounding to the nearest 0.5cm or 0.25cm if that's what's needed, exactly as people do with inches. Why on earth would you imagine people use mm if something doesn't call for them?
Presumably someone who uses Imperial would say 5/128th inches if they wanted to describe something that's equivalent to 1mm?
25mils ~ 1mm
Or 1/16in as others have said.
1000 mils / 25.4 mm = 39.3
This simple fact still seems wrong to me somehow.
Maybe metric users do use fractions and I just don’t hear about it. Is that table one and a quarter meters high?
If you're cutting it yourself, a precision of 1mm is finer than your saw blade or pencil line anyway, so it's plenty enough.
When I hear anything past about 1/8th of an inch my brain shuts down, and I give up.
In reality I use both systems all the time. It’s situational.
> When I hear anything past about 1/8th of an inch my brain shuts down, and I give up.
Realistically, same. 32nds don’t get used outside of some specialty wrenches. 16ths are a practical limit where other scales start to make more sense. Probably millimeters.
I use both systems.
I do prefer Fahrenheit for HVAC (and weather) because it’s higher resolution and has reasonable values at human scales. Thermostats that lack half-degrees-c are never quite right IMO.
So you are one of those, lol. There is nothing "less human" about 25 C than say 72 F. Nothing, it just happen to be the scale you are used to.Both are arbitrary.
> Fahrenheit for HVAC (and weather) because it’s higher resolution
99.99% of thermostats and thermometer in C had at least 1 decimal place. At usual "human temperatures" the difference in resolution between the scales is less than 2X, so even assuming only integer values, I am willing to bet against you in a double blind test that you cannot differentiate 68F vs 69F in an statistical significant way.
> I find it easier to say that’s three eighths than 9mm
Just because you are used to. Fractions are more complicated than integers, every elementary school program knows it.
So to summarize, the problem is not with the magnitude of the units which is arbitrary (a degree F and inches are not more human, logical or normal that a degree C or cm)the problem is with the convoluted way of the imperial system for multiples and submultiples of the base unit.
I guess 20.5 is nice, 15.5 is cool, 10 is cold, 4.5 is really cold, 26.5 is hot, 32 is really hot and 37.7 is dangerously hot. It’s fine if you are used to it but I don’t really see a benefit.
I was in a hotel room in Japan that only had whole unit adjustments for the A/C. To get 20.5C I had to switch to Fahrenheit. I guess I was unlucky.
I find distances in metric and imperial perfectly usable and use both regularly.
As outlined in detail elsewhere in the thread there are advantages to working in fractions in some situations. Specifically when using a ruler or tape measure with different markings for 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and 1/16. There’s no reason that has to be unique to inches, it just works out well in some cases.
Or, you know, 20, 15, 5, 30 and 40 instead of the arbitrary decimals you chose to use to prove your point
To the identical 5 degrees range of the Celsius scale ?
If I need to take measurements while boiling water or making ice then I would probably use C.
> How do you divide 7"3/8 by 5?
Same way I divide 4.7625 cm by 5. With a calculator.
25, yes. It's not too hard to do the math.
> Same way I divide 4.7625 cm by 5. With a calculator.
That's roughly 0.95 right by intuition, but (7"3/8) / 5 doesn't come easy to me.
When more precision is needed, so easy to go to the 32nd
That's not realistic, obviously, so we just pick one. The units in the system are arbitrary, really.
In reality regardless of the system you choose every calculation is going to end up with fractions of something. You aren't just going to do it in your head.
For example, you could define mars units where the gravitational acceleration on mars is 1. Now your velocity in freefall is just equal to the time you've been freefalling! You don't even have to do a calculation!
(note: Don't actually do this. Gravitational acceleration isn't a constant when you're doing orbital mechanics.)