Well, my index fingers are very close to 100mm long, little fingers about 10mm wide at the tip. If I stick my arm out to one side and turn my face away, the dist from the tip of my middle finger to the end of my nose is close to 1m.
I don?t believe that was significant. Calculating with metric units is easier for humans, if perhaps more prone to slipping into the wrong band of unit, but that?s a problem with the naming system rather than the relative sizes of the units.
Eh? Trivial job to use a calculator etc with metric systems. Different matter with yards feet and inches.
You'd be amazed how many 'average' people don't seem to be able to differentiate between mm and cm. Don't remember so many getting confused between feet and inches and fractions of an inch.
The thing that annoys me is medics using 'mcg' for microgrammes instead of 'ug' (or µg if that works out). I wonder how many massive over or underdoses have been covered up.
It also annoys me that they use 'fluid' instead of 'liquid', but there's less scope for harm there. 'No fluids' would be a tough one.
Cheers
Try 'nil by mouth' with extremely blocked sinuses.
Or New Scientist confusing metres and kilometres, in their recent spam
Probably no more than any other possibility to be confused by units. If that is the convention in a particular field then it's fine.
My wife is doctor, but I've no idea what she does re this.
Ever considered being less annoyed ;-)
For measurements I agree with you that imperial is more 'human' and easier to get right. But for physics and engineering calculations SI units are far more straightforward.
There were no computers in Napoleon's time.
The metre is (was) one ten-millionth of the distance from pole to equator.
Robert
Same here. Even although I use both - and have done for ages. Someone brought up on metric is unlikely to know the advantages of imperial for DIY around the house.
Quite.
But there were when the UK changed to metric.
Which means precisely nothing to a human, in terms of relating to it. Might as well be the distance to the moon.
Given the accuracy of its day, being 2km out in 10,000km can't be bad!
They must have had a very long piece of string.
...
Accuracy was probably not helped by the surveyors regularly being arrested and their white flags removed. Revolutionaries didn't take kindly to people planting flags in the Royalist colours on hill tops.
I remeber when a calculator came out that could do fractions.
Maybe true but them cm isn't a true SI unit.
Probbaly due to a few generations practising, but my mum could never work out what a third of anything was. And as for fluid ounces and hectares to fathoms on to grains and troy anouces. How about short tons and long tons ?
Nor is the gramme, but a 1,000g is!
Talking of accuracy you do know that tomorrow just before midnight time will be frozen for one second to add a leap second. So make sure you're sitting down, but not on the toilet as that could be painful. ;-)
Why would anyone measure it with their face turned away. Facing forwards (makes much more sense), makes it more like a yard nose to finger tip. And a yard was supposed to be the Roman soldier's stride, and a foot is oddly enough the length of your foot.
And, en plus, the French word for inch translates back to English as thumb. You can figure out for yourself why that might be.
or off by orders of magnitude, more like. As it is the metric system is entirely arbitrary, based on the km being 1/10000 of the equator/pole distance.
Or the Times in a recent article saying " ... a temperature increase of
0.2C (33F) ... "
How long is a leap second? (g)
It was a measure used by cloth merchants and turning their face away avoided accusations of giving short measure. For the size of people at the time, this made it about three feet, which became known as the cloth yard since the Saxon yard was four feet long.
The Roman pace was standardised by Agrippa at five Roman feet.
Looking at the multitude of different versions of the length of the foot across Europe, people in ancient times obviously did not have a standard size of foot.
There are no advantages for either metric or feet and inches. You use either or both.
If you are a size 12! Shoe sizes: 12 inches to one foot. size 12 is 12 inches. But shoe sizes are in barleycorn units (1/3 of an inch) so a size 9 is 11 inches.
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