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translated in american (thelemmy.club)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/funny@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (18 children)

As an American mechanical engineer, i do more unit conversions between metric and standard/ uscs than many people do in a lifetime

Hell just today I designed a custom spring in both as i need it asap and have to settle for the inch

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  • [–] 18 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    We occasionally get engineering diagrams from clients in the US and they're always going on about screws that are 2/3 of an inch long. It's not just that you're not using metric you're using a weird fraction and not a decimal.

    It's super confusing when you get into high precision stuff because then they start going on about 128th of an inch. Just tell me how big you want it, stop telling me what fraction of a different measurement it is. Surely there is something below inch that you could use. I still wouldn't know what you were talking about, but at least it would look less stupid when you wrote it down.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Isn't the UK just as bad? You have a zoo of units over there. Stone, miles, pints, etc.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    The US is the only country that uses non-metric units when doing anything industrial though. I might buy a pint of milk but I'm not going to measure in anything but metres and centimetres.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (10 children)

    Canadian engineer here. Although we use the metric system in principle, in reality we use feet and inches for everything. There are lots of benefits to using base 12 for measurements.

    The number 12 has six factors, which are 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12. It is the smallest number to have six factors, the largest number to have at least half of the numbers below it as divisors, and is only slightly larger than 10. (The numbers 18 and 20 also have six factors but are much larger.) Ten, in contrast, only has four factors, which are 1, 2, 5, and 10.

    I get the Europeans hate it though because only the people who live near Chernobyl can count to 12 on their fingers.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago*

    The thing is, we just use whole numbers. If you get under 1, then you move down by one SI prefix et voilà, you have whole numbers again

    I've never thought of counting on fingers as a good reason for using it for units. But since our numeric system is base 10 (likely because of having 10 fingers indeed), it's easier to have our unit systems as base 10 too. If we all learned to think in base 12 from ground up, having base 12 units would make a lot more sense too

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago

    Btw you can count to 12 on your fingers with one hand. Starting from the end of the index finger tap each segment of the "remaining" four fingers with your thumb.

    I heard someone claim that's how Babylonians invented and used the base 12 system in the first place.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    The thing is that outside of North America people aren't terrified to death of decimals. We actually use them and find the process simple. So those factors of yours are completely irrelevant to us.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    There are lots of benefits to using base 12 for measurements.

    12 is better than 10, I'll give you that. But 100 is better than 144, and 1000 is way better than 1728.

    And that doesn't even get to 0.1 versus 1/12, or 0.01 versus 1/144.

    So 12 might be a better standalone number, but it's a terrible base to work in.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    But 144 is better than 100, for the exact same reason that 12 is better than 10?

    There's a reason measured angles go to 360ths, then subdivided by 60 or even by 60 again.

    100 is as terrible a base as 10, and you run into it all the time if you're designing something in metric; you can't divide by 3 evenly.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    If you look at your hand when it is wide open and palm up you can use the tip of your thumb to touch any of the 12 (four fingers each with three) sections of your fingers. Counting in 12 might be very intuitive for early humans - or might not. Who knows.

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