Impetrics

looksee

Not sure if this is the right place to put this but I'll try it.

Can anyone explain how this works? I just saw a room dimensions expressed as 13.63 x 18.27ft. For all practical purposes I can read that as roughly 13 and a half feet by 18 and a quarter feet. But if you want to be accurate you have to have a measure that divides a foot into hundredths? Is there such a thing?

I have seen inches divided into 10ths, it seems to be a USA thing, but a foot divided into 100ths?

Or am I misunderstanding it completely?

Edit, ok I just thought to look it up and right enough there is a thing called an Engineers Measure that divides feet into 10ths/100ths. How ridiculous is that? Why not use metric and be done with it?

looksee

looksee wrote: »

How ridiculous is that? Why not use metric and be done with it?

Buh-cozz...

‘murica. Wupp, wupp!

I watched a review of contractors table saws where the ‘muricans measured runout of the arbor in metric units, because it was too small to measure accurately using the imp. tools they had, then they converted to fractional inches to give the results.

Stoopid is as stoopid duzz.

Prenderb

All of our measurements are pretty arbitrary. Just watch light go by, count to 1/299 752 458 seconds and you measure a metre? Why does that make sense?

Sure, SI units are more convenient, but you can divide anything you want into any number of things you want. Convincing people to use it is the hard part, but in USA, decimalised feet and inches work for them -most of the time. Of course, because it's both SI and imperial sometimes, this means spacecraft don't land on other planets, but hey.

It's a good question but I don't think there's a right answer. I give your question 14/17 for originality.

Roen

I think one of the reasons America didn't adopt the metric system was that the French scientist due to address Congress on the matter was waylaid by pirates.
Must try dig that out.

EDIT: Couple of articles out there.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/19/pirates-yes-pirates-may-be-why-the-u-s-doesnt-use-the-metric-system/

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/28/574044232/how-pirates-of-the-caribbean-hijacked-americas-metric-system

looksee

I had never really 'got' the point about the spaceship that missed the moon (or whatever) - I thought vaguely it was a mix up between metric and imperial, but if it was a mix up between inches that have 12 of them to a foot but 10 divisions to an inch, and feet that are divided into 100 parts then there is no wonder the damn thing got lost. It almost explains Trump being President.

muffler

Most likely someone has a plan in front of them which shows room dimensions in metric and to facilitate people who are more used to imperial measurements (trust me, there are a lot) they quickly convert the metric measurements to imperial but couldn't be arsed doing one more simple calculation which would show the measurements in feet and nearest inch.

13.63 x 18.27 ft. should be rounded off as being 13'-8" x 18'-3"

my3cents

I think its all down to the way people used to draw out scale drawings for say kitchens.

Try drawing out 11 foot 7 3/4inches at tenth scale where a foot is your primary measure (one foot = x number of squares).

Moot point with computers but it all had to be done on paper once apon a time.

Lumen

Mental arithmetic and measurement would be much easier if we used octal, and I guess the reason we don't is because we didn't want our thumbs and big toes to feel left out.

looksee

my3cents wrote: »

I think its all down to the way people used to draw out scale drawings for say kitchens.

Try drawing out 11 foot 7 3/4inches at tenth scale where a foot is your primary measure (one foot = x number of squares).

Moot point with computers but it all had to be done on paper once apon a time.

You'd do it at 1/12th scale though? And when kids were taught in school to do mental arithmetic involving multiplying and dividing £/s/d and measurements of areas and distances it didn't seem that mad. I couldn't do it now mind, give me metric any time!