Americans use the imperial system, yet claim not to be imperialist. Curious ๐ค
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Well, the time for eath rotation isnt a constant, it will slowly decelerate and days will be longer.
Using multiples of 10 for time was considered, but was a shitty option compared to the current deal. Months should all be 30 days and then have a free week at the end of the year tho, egyptian style.
Parties during that week would be unreal
they were, in ancient egypt. They were supposed to be dangerous days, because religion wanted to keep control of the people on the days they werent tied to the regular schedule, by scaring them.
Hot take: imperial units are fine for normie stuff (as in, not engineering or math or whatever)
They come in useful sizes! Feet are handier than meters and gallons are better than liters. And unit conversion between feet and miles, pounds and tons, etc. isn't something that ever happens in day-to-day life. It sounds silly to say that a mile is 5280 feet but I'm pretty sure that ratio was decided retroactively for the sake of making the system consistent. As in, no one knows or cares about converting between the two because we already know how long a foot is and how long a mile is. Also no one uses the obscure units like gills and barleycorns.
Feet are handier than meters and gallons are better than liters.
Wrong, youre just used to them. I roughly know what a liter of something weights, usually around a kg. A gallon tho? wtf i would know? I can easily compare meters of length to my arms or height, but i need more complex divisions for feet
A foot is as long as my forearm and a little longer than a literal foot, unless you've got big feet. An inch is as wide as my thumb which I have used to measure things cuz it's pretty exact. You're right that I don't know how much a gallon is in pounds though. It's like... more than a bag of apples but less than a box of soda
Brazilian here. You're just used to it because objects around you are imperial sizes. I live in a metric country so objects around me are metric sized. So I can easily eyeball metric units.
- 0.5 cm is the width of a pencil
- 2 cm is the size of a small coin (the American penny is roughly 2cm wide, BTW)
- 1 meter is roughly a long step
- 1 km is the distance you walk in roughly 20 minutes
- 1 liter is easy because in any metric country it's the volume of a standard soda bottle
- 1 kg is the weight of a small bean, rice or sugar bag, or the weight of a soda bottle, or the weight of a good sized cabbage.
Haha yeah in case it wasn't clear from my other comments, I don't actually think imperial is a better system. I just don't think it's as bad as everyone says it is. Like you said, you understand the size of these units relative to things irl and can just intuit them.
Converting between units doesn't come up often because like, when are you gonna need to know distances in coins? I mean it's cool that you can easily do that in metric but I couldn't care less that I can't switch between feet and miles.
P.S. do beans weigh as much as cabbages in Brazil? :0
Hahahhahaj, you were victim of my bad English. I meant a bag of beans! Hahahaha.
I was just giving an example of how you could have an intuitive idea of metric units by the using objects around you if you eventually need it.
Haha no problem, your English is waaay better than my Portuguese! I understood what you meant and that's the point I was trying to make too. I don't need to do any conversions to figure out what a mile, gallon, etc. is because I already know, just like you already know what a kilometer and liter are.
12 hours in half a day is fine for me. 12 can be divided into halves, thirds, quarters and sixths. That's useful for planning out a day. Time is one of the applications where I don't have a complaint about using base 12.
Exactly why there are 12 months and 24h a day, for easy divisions.
I think the 12 months thing is more due to the cycle of the moon being about 12 per year right?
Yeah, 12.4 moon cycles a year.
The real confusion is when you count the days in a month, or year...
I've heard of a suggestion of using 13 months of 4 weeks each.
It adds up to 364 days.
The remainder day is a new type of annual leap day and you get the additional normal one every 4 years.
One can reach twelve joints on a 4-fingered hand with the thumb. That's the basis of the base-12 counting system.
Writing this in 634.023.M3 Imperial Calendar i agree we should change it to juche
What is juche time though?
Calendar used in DPRK, basically normal gregorian but the dates are counted from 1912 as Juche era, in a combination of european system and partially Korean system.
Today date is: 19.08 Juche 112