That's just arbitrary because we're accustomed to it. There's no Holy Writ in the stars suggesting that we need sixty divisions in hours and minutes.
And yes, I hate all the different definitions of the word ton.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The Sumerian system isn't base-60. Sumerians didn't actually have a concept of numbers as independent entities; they had different words for the same number of different things so, for example, "six bowls" and "six goats" would use different words for the number 6.
Something similar actually exists in modern Irish - there is a whole separate set of words for the numbers 2 - 10 which are only used when counting people. There are also two different words for 1 - aon refers to the number one itself and is also the positional number, while amháin is used to refer to one thing.
The Akkadians (Babylonians and Assyrians) adopted Sumerian cuneiform to write with, but separated the concepts of number from the things being counted, so there was just one word for 6. The Akkadian system also wasn't really base-60 - rather, it was dual-base. It has distinct symbols for units, tens, and sixties, and people mostly counted in tens. (A symbol we would think of as zero was later added, but the Akkadians didn't think of 0 as a number; their symbol really meant null, and was used to explicitly show that there was nothing in that position).
Relevant Numberphile:
The Maya used a similar system - a dot represented 1, a line represented five, and a shell represented 0. A shell with a dot represented 20 - that is 0 units and one 20.
Base-10 is the standard across the overwhelming majority of cultures - it is the system used by the Indians, Chinese, Quechua, Egyptians, and Arabs, and was the part of the Akkadian dual-base system. Numberphile also has a video on Quechua quipus:
Those who did not use base-10 tended to use base-20, such as the Muisca; the Maya, as mentioned, used 20 as part of their dual-base counting system. This makes sense, since most humans have 10 fingers and 10 toes. I am not aware of any culture that used any form of base-12; every base-12 system I've come across has been an artificial counting system devised by people who think it would be better to count in dozens and build their system around that.
And contrary to what Imperial advocates claim, the Imperial system(s) is not based around the number 12. Liquid volume, for example, is based on powers of 2. There may be 12 inches to a foot, but the inch's subdivisions are powers of 2, and there are only 3 feet to a yard (seriously, why does the foot exist? What does it give you that yards and inches don't?) And then there are 25×5×11 yards to a mile, which is nothing to do with 12 and isn't a proper power of 2 either.
But mass is the worst. There are 14 pounds to a stone, 8 stone to a hundredweight, and 20 hundredweight to a ton. Going the other way, the number 12 finally reappears, as a pound consists of 12 ounces... as long as you're measuring a rock. If you're not measuring a rock, a pound is 16 ounces, which is another power of 2. Oh, and the pound used for measuring rocks is smaller than the pound used for measuring things that aren't rocks, so in the Imperial system, a pound of feathers is actually heavier than a pound of coal by 81 grams.
It's pretty weird that Imperial boosters keep bringing up the neat divisibility of 12 when the system is built far more on powers of 2.
Edited by VampireBuddha on Oct 20th 2022 at 9:59:49 AM
Ukrainian Red CrossThat's false. There's two (statute and nautical), and the nautical mile doesn't count. It's defined in meters, and it's based on the circumference of the earth. (It's one arcminute of a spherical earth.) It's in broad international use, too, so the only confusion to be had is that if you don't specify that it's nautical you wouldn't know. But everyone specifies that it's nautical, so they do know.
There's confusion about normal and surveyor miles, but there's actually not a meaningful difference, the surveyor mile is a historical measurement that's been phased out. It's only a tiny fraction of a percent different (1/8 inch larger), due to a quirk of the redefinition of the yard solely in ACU in the 19th century.
The only reason anyone would need to know about a surveyor mile's tiny difference from a normal mile is if they're converting units in large-scale historical land surveys.
Also no one's used Stone, Hundredweights, or subdivisions of inches since the 19th century.
(and to be fair powers of two are pretty good too. They're fairly consistently divisible by more numbers than 10.)
Meh, I think we're beating a dead horse. Measurement systems are incredibly arbitrary, most arguments against ACU measurements involves digging up obscure measurements and claiming they're part of the "standard system" because they're on some huge chart of conversions which includes weird measurements like "butts", "hundredweights", and {squints} "kilograms" because they're including all (European) forms of measurement.
Much like any form of religion, I'm cool with people who want to evangelize metric or ACU measurements, but of course I believe that my own arbitrary system is best, and I'm skeptical of anyone who claims that the world would work better if we made one world religion that just happens to correspond to theirs.
This discussion reminds me a bit of the discussions I sometimes have with my co-workers about what is the best computer operating system, text editor, programming language, etc... I guess after a while what you are accustomed to becomes normal and whatever else seems horribly unpractical.
I do stand by however the argument that the metric system ties neatly to the decimal system (apart from time - for the record, there was an attempt to make decimal time measurements around the French Revolution when the metric system was devised, but it did not catch on), and the Celsius scale is tied to common physical phenomenons.
But I guess it's a also matter of habit and that with some practice maybe I would not become confused when a GPS suddenly switches from a fraction of mile to what seems to me an arbitrary number of hundreds of feet.
Whatever your favourite work is, there is a Vocal Minority that considers it the Worst. Whatever. Ever!.I'm pretty sure I've seen educational films from the 1960s that give people's weight in stones.
But on the subject of French numbering, all I'll say is four twenties, ten and nine.
Fresh-eyed movie blogWell, most people are between five and seven feet tall, which is more intuitive IMO than either “a bit less or a bit more than two yards” or “between five and seven dozen inches.”
And who uses yards outside of gridiron football, anyway? Feet are more common in practice.
I will note that slugs are used as a mass unit in US engineering, or at least were in my undergraduate courses - although a large fraction of the time we just used "pound-mass" (lbm) instead, since slugs are still weird. There's also the lovely mash-up unit "ksi", kilopounds per square inch, or thousandths of an inch (mil/thou) ... the engineering scales with decimal inches are a particularly interesting departure from standard rulers.
A majority of people today, at least in my country, give body mass in stones. Fractions of an inch are widely used in screw and screwdriver sizes. And my sister an I both have jobs that involve measuring things in thousandths of inches; they're commonly called thous, but since that sounds like taus to me, I call them mlllinches.
Re feet: Whenever I hear someone describing human height in Imperial units, it's almost always "n feet k inches". Since you're using inches anyway, why not just use inches?
It's interesting that French Revolutionary time ended up being quite similar to how time was measured in ancient Egypt, entirely by accident.
Ukrainian Red Cross
That sounds like a problem in your presumably metric country. No ACU country uses stones in common conversation. (granted there's only one and technically a few sort-of-countries that use ACU but nonetheless)
As for fractions of an inch, yes. They get used, but the named units that are smaller than an inch, I've never heard used outside of weirdly specific word problems.
As for the feet and inches thing, it's presumably the same reason that people don't describe dollars in terms of cents. "oh I paid eight-hundred-ninety-nine cents plus tax for a fancy top at the Top Museum Gift Shop" sounds ridiculous.
Essentially, yes. I suppose, as in every aspect of this conversation, the feet-and-inches thing comes down to "we grew up doing it this way and we're used to it," but inches are for small things. No one thinks in groups of inches more than twelve. 72 inches is not an intuitive measure, even though it's precisely six feet, which is. So we measure in feet and add a few inches on the top as needed. It allows all the numbers to be nice and small. I'm five-foot-eight. I know that. Were I to describe myself as 68 inches tall I'd have less of a mental picture of how much that is.
But when you work in meters and centimeters (and no one bothers with decimeters), that sounds like a silly half-measure.
On the other hand, I am so, so glad I work in millimeters in my professional life (measuring facial widths and heights to center spectacle lenses in frames), instead of fractions of an inch. Ugh, that sounds so imprecise. And the actual power of a lens is measured in diopters
(reciprocal meters) instead of anything derived from ACU, though what that means beyond a number on a screen (and how it impacts factors like lens thickness and recommended material) is a bit removed from my day-to-day.
Edited by HeraldAlberich on Oct 20th 2022 at 12:45:36 PM
I think the one thing we can all agree on is that conversions between the two systems are a frigging pain.
Whatever your favourite work is, there is a Vocal Minority that considers it the Worst. Whatever. Ever!.![]()
Agreed. If only the metric system hasn't chosen such an arbitrary base set of measurements...
Personally, one of my big math annoyances is the use of sin, cos, etc without parentheses. Blame it on me being a programmer, but it seems like a good way to lose an i through differing interpretation.
Metric is by far the handiest for calculations like area or volume, and for conversions between units (e.g. 1cm squared = 1 mL), but imperial’s more intuitive for a lot of everyday things.
My measurements are a mix. I know my height in feet and inches, my weight in pounds, and I cook with cups and tablespoons and teaspoons (but all the measures also have mL on them, so you can use either). But I buy bulk food in grams ($/100g is way easier to calculate the approximate price of something, and I have no idea how much an ounce is) and I know long distances in kilometres, not miles (decimals are way easier than miles + yards).
I have no intuitive sense of how large either acres or hectares is, but hectares I can at least relate easily to other metric values (okay, it’s 100m x 100m).
Edited by Galadriel on Oct 21st 2022 at 5:02:05 AM
{nods} Both metric and ACU measurements can use decimal numbers and fractions. 3.2 miles is valid, as is a third of a kilometer. As was noted before, people generally glaze over the idea that there are other units involved in actual use, so you don't say that the exit is in 3 miles and 1000 feet, or that your house is 333 meters and 333 millimeters away from the fire hydrant. I will admit that the whole mess of cooking measurements tripped me up for a while. Converting between teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups is a mild pain (technically speaking, I also wind up dealing with pints, gallons, etc, but just like metric measurements, those are usually listed with a sensible measurement in parentheses beside them), and I suspect that keeping track of 5 ml, 15 ml, and 45 ml measurements would be handier if I grew up with those being what I was using (assuming, of course, that the recipes weren't simply written to round things off to nice round numbers since, again, arbitrary measurements, and using 50 ml isn't really that much different from 45 ml given we're discussing recipes that talk about rounded versus flattened tablespoons and most people simply quickly scoop up dry ingredients rather than ensuring they're settled, etc, not to mention cheap measuring cups may not even be quite the right size, or have the actual size designated by a line rather than the lip of the cup).
Cooking measurements are just a concession to the idea of providing recipes. Cooking is not an exact science, so these measures are not to be taken as precise to begin with. A teaspoon of sugar is meant to mean "about this much", and a good cook will be able to judge whether it should be a little more or a little less.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesAs someone who grew up considering a weighing scale as a standard kitchen equipment, I have always found the uses of tablespoons and cups horribly imprecise (yes, there are French recipes that use those too, especially the older ones), especially when there are references to "a small glass of water" or "a good spoonful of sugar". True, as my experience as a cook grows I have come to realise that a 1 gram difference won't make the recipe fail, but I still prefer to have quantities in terms of grams and litres (apart possibly from pinches of salt) so that I know what the scale must display.
Edited by C105 on Oct 21st 2022 at 7:07:07 AM
Whatever your favourite work is, there is a Vocal Minority that considers it the Worst. Whatever. Ever!.

I like metric, but metric can't be the perfect system. Why? Because time mucks things up.
Sure, you could extend seconds such that you measure larger amounts of time in kiloseconds or megaseconds, but no one does that in practice. Meaning that whenever time enters the equation, and it's being measured in a unit larger than seconds (minutes, hours, or even years), you then have to bring in conversions that aren't based on 10.
Edited by IrishZombie on Oct 20th 2022 at 1:24:55 AM