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In the USA I'm going to start asking mechinists and mechanics "Do you use the royal feet or scientific meters?"... maybe that will finally get people offended enough to switch to metric :)
@freemo meh, plenty of us are proud to use royal feet over scientific meters because they just make more sense for the particular application.
We proudly use the better tool rather than following the crowd!
@volkris There is no application where it makes better sense unless you mean something that already uses that and therefore youjust dont have the choice (often the case)
@freemo as we apply measurements, we disagree :)
We find that, for example, inches are scaled far better for so many projects than cm or mm, in the same way that degrees F are scaled better for human application than degrees C or K.
When it comes down to something ranging in size from around a baseball up to a table leg--roughly human sized things--the royal feet units are simply more practical, so we prefer them.
They make more practical sense.
@volkris As someone who has used inches his whole life I cant say I agree... they are big, bulky, and divided in an awkward way. There is literally no application they are better suited for that I can think of.
how are they more practical? Im not getting it.. Even at that size, cm and mm give you the proper precision and grading. If you need something closer to feel you have dm which is a perfect size for something where a foot woould be appropriate. Not sure I get how inch is somehow more practical? How, why?
@freemo you say proper precision and grading, but that's the whole point: in so many real world applications we find that the precision and grading isn't the most convenient for the work in front of us.
Say you're aligning a platform by eye, see that you need to raise it by about the length of your thumb, so you call out to the lift operator to raise it by a quantized amount.
"Two inches" happens to be a pretty convenient call out rather than "five centimeters" or, heaven forbid, "fifty millimeters."
It's simply more intuitive at common human scales.
Or, to put it another way, they're big and bulky, which is perfect for dealing with big and bulky human scale tasks!
@volkris I would say that 50 mm is equally intuitive. Its just more verbose than you need because you dont need that level of precision. In fact in this case I would use 1/2 dm myself.
@freemo Well, would you agree that 2 inches or even 5 cm is more intuitive than 50 mm? Many of the same reasons, I'd say.
One is a matter of scaling of error. If your perception of any unit is off by a bit, then the more of the unit that you stack up stacks up those errors too.
You might intuitively know about how big a cm is and about how big an inch is, but once you start stacking them, the errors add up.