Re:Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes vote...
by aidenn0 on Friday November 18, 2022 @05:16PM
(#33663181)
> Well, isn't that by definition true for any system of measurements? I mean, as long as we're talking about a simple straight-line distance in some real-dimensional space, it's going to be possible to measure that distance in meters (or yards, or whatever). Yes I know about fractal lengths, coastlines and so on.
The US yard is exactly 0.9144m such a short decimal expansion is highly unlikely when selecting two random units of measurements. It is short because we defined the modern yard in terms of meters, selecting a short decimal expansion that was still "close enough" to the old definition to allow tooling to remain the same.
Re:Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes vote...
by anonporridge on Friday November 18, 2022 @06:55PM
(#33664766)
No. It's true because 1 inch is explicitly defined by the governing body as 2.54 cm, whereas one meter is defined as "the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre
The units of the metric system are defined by physical properties that appear to be constant throughout the universe.
The units of the US customary system are defined as some exact number of equivalent metric units.
I think the point is that the US customary units are typically used in a very different way, with fractions being way more important than in metric. See the image in this [1] article that talks about drill sizes for DIY use, for instance. You guys go like "oh no the 5/16:ths hole is too small, I'll step up to 19/64ths that should do it". Over here in metric-world we go more like "oh no the 7.9 mm drill was too small, I'll step up to 8 mm".
Again, the fact that it's easy to convert the 5/16:ths to 7.9375 mm is not the point, the point is how the decimal/metric units are used in practice.