I think the two points missing from most debates are
The imperial system does a damn good job at measuring things the way a human would. A foot is roughly the length of a big foot. A single degree farenheit is just big enough that you could guesstimate it with enough practice. If the temperatures are negative, you dump sand on the roads instead of salt.
It’s like seven units of measurement in a trenchant. You never have to convert gallons to cubic miles. You never have to convert from dots to angstoms, and nobody has ever had to convert the surveyors mile to the nautical mile. It feels schizophrenic because claiming it’s one singular system is like saying Italian, French, and Portuguese languages are all regional dialects of Europeanese.
My point isn’t “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”, I’m saying for the average non-scientist there may be a logical reason why we like it so much
I think the two points missing from most debates are
The imperial system does a damn good job at measuring things the way a human would. A foot is roughly the length of a big foot. A single degree farenheit is just big enough that you could guesstimate it with enough practice. If the temperatures are negative, you dump sand on the roads instead of salt.
It’s like seven units of measurement in a trenchant. You never have to convert gallons to cubic miles. You never have to convert from dots to angstoms, and nobody has ever had to convert the surveyors mile to the nautical mile. It feels schizophrenic because claiming it’s one singular system is like saying Italian, French, and Portuguese languages are all regional dialects of Europeanese.
My point isn’t “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”, I’m saying for the average non-scientist there may be a logical reason why we like it so much