Curated Tumblr

5067 readers

340 users here now

For preserving the least toxic and most culturally relevant Tumblr heritage posts.

Here are some OCR tools to assist you in transcribing posts:

web
iOS
FOSS Android Recs per u/[email protected]: 1 , 2

Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Apytele

[email protected]

661

Hungry 9 (lemmy.likes.cat)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/curatedtumblr

133 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 2 points 7 months ago

Yup. The reason I went with yards was because I knew 1760 was closer to a nice multiple of 3 than 5280 (neither 5200 or 5300 is a multiple of 3; I'd have to go to 5100 or 5400).

But yeah, imperial works pretty well for multiplication and division, it's just not intuitive for figuring out the next denomination. Why is a mile 1760 yards instead of 1000 or 1200? Why is it 5280 feet instead of 6000? Why is a cup 8 oz instead of 6 (nicer factors) or 10? Why is a pound 16 oz instead of 8 oz like a cup would be (or are pints the "proper" larger unit for an oz)?

The system makes no sense as a tiered system, but it does make calculations a bit cleaner since there's usually a whole number or reasonable fraction for common divisions. Base 10 sucks for that, but at least it's intuitive.