• johnthedoe@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    When I find a wood working video on YouTube from the states it blows my mind how anyone can not just adopt metric “This is 5” 4/57 and we need to cut it to 5” 5/45 and a half” bzzzzzzz.

    • PRUSSIA_x86@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I may be biased, but I think it kinda makes sense. All the fractions are really just powers of two:
      One half
      One quarter
      One eighth
      One sixteenth
      One thirtysecond
      etc.

      • CapraObscura@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Oh yeah, totally makes more sense to say “it’s 3/64ths of an inch” than “it’s 2 millimeters.” Completely reasonable.

        So reasonable, in fact, that in most manufacturing that still uses imperial measurements they long ago abandoned fractions and moved to decimal inches.

        Which leads to unholy abominations such as the wood shop sending over “cut off 3/64ths” and the metal shop cutting off 0.046875".

      • Kethal@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And all of the fractions in metric are just powers of 10: one tenth, one hundredth, one thousand. Powers of two are great when you’re working in base 2. It’s a big hassle when you’re working in base 10.

        Everyone also gravitates to length and how fractional powers of two are sensible. I’ll grant that they’re at least sensible although awkward in base 10. But what about every single other thing? For lengths greater than one inch, there’s no consistent pattern. For volumes there’s no pattern - mass, weight, etc. The thing is a monstrosity. People pick out one part that’s halfway acceptable and act like that’s a defense of the rest of the pile of garbage.