Metric is for when you've made a mess of things and have completely given up on having nice round integer values
EDIT: This comment has been timed to coincide with when Americans wake up to defend me :) ~ USA! USA!
Which is probably the same way you'd do it if it was a 3.28ft-long sandwich instead.
There are 100 gradians in 90 degrees, does that count? They're probably supported on your calculator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian
Even that comic you linked drives this home. None of them are referenced to humans. They are things we mostly know, sure. But they aren't based on a human. (Well, I suppose the mass ones have an amusing set of people listed.)
And this avoids the measures that, for my memory, just haven't made it to metric yet. Acre, Astrological Unit, Knot, etc.
Um, okay...
Just casually browsing HN, this solves a problem that's been bugging me for months in my game: The world is scaled in feet/inches, while WebXR uses meters/cm to set ICD (virtual camera distance)! I think- based on my getting unusually nauseous.
I thought the solution was to scale the world, but there's more to it - and I think the solution is to reduce camera translation motion by the scale difference:
> Specifically if you translate your head sideways by the distance of your IOD, your left eyeball should now be seeing what your right eyeball was seeing. If it doesn't, the brain worries that something bad has happened, and makes you feel bad about it.
> Note that if you scale BOTH – you move the virtual cameras closer together, AND you reduce the in-game motion of the cameras due to head motion – everything is totally fine! The world just grew or shrank magically, but it all still works and you don't get nausea.
You may wonder why in hells a programmer would use imperial units instead of metric. It's to give the game a sense of being human-scale and pre-civilization. Why not just use metric and then convert everything to imperial for display purposes? Because then during debugging, units in logs constantly have to be converted to units shown, and the conversion isn't identical. It never bit me until VR!