HappyNappin said:
Unless you have abnormal massive or tiny hands, your thumb should be roughly an inch wide, and a foot is just that, the length of a man's foot, then yards and miles are ok because we never switched over to metric for those.
Would have ment changing all the road signs so they just left it be.
It baffles me there isn't an imperial/standard measure less than an inch, I'm awful at fractions which doesn't help, I can visualise a ½ or a third fine but wtf is ⁵/16 that's a sum not a size, its 0.03 mm off being ⅓ so why not just use that?
Americans obsession with weighing everything in pounds is bizarre, saying a person weighs 500lbs or a car weighs 5000lbs is baffling when stones or tons would be far more understandable.
Isn't the thumb-inch thing the length from the tip of the thumb to the first knuckle, not the width?
Yeah, sixteenths of an inch can go die in a fire, haha! Of course, thirds are difficult to measure and calculate accurately, and marking a ruler in both quarter inches and thirds would be difficult to do in a way that makes sense and is easily usable (maybe if your thirds were in a different color). You could do half inches and thirds, but that's visually confusing. Thirds aren't bad, visually, just for approximations, but in actual usage, accurately measuring thirds is a colossal pain. Especially without an appropriate ruler, or if you're trying to do things numerically, because things never quite divide into thirds cleanly. There's always an infinitely trailing decimal, and by that logic, a ruler is never going to be quite right, either. I mean, rulers are rarely spot-on to begin with, and if you need extremely precise and accurate measurements, a ruler is not the correct tool, but it's even worse if you're doing it with a loosely-defined unit.
I don't actually see much point in using another unit like stone. It just seems to disconnect the measures. Using the same unit makes everything comparable, at least up to a point, before the numbers get too big. It helps foster a healthy fear of heavy objects ("Oh, that car weighs 25 times what I do, excuse me while I get out of its way"), helps us make sure we don't try to lift things that we shouldn't, and helps with, say, appropriately loading a backpack without having to do extra calculations.
I will say that it's a little silly to measure something in pounds when tons would work just fine (though you can get some confusion over which definition of ton is being used), but that's marketing for you. A really big number is generally more impactful. If you're looking for a big, strong, heavy truck, which figure would grab your attention more, 10,000 pounds or 5 tons? Granted, that may vary regionally. In a country where tons are more frequently used, tons might have greater impact, but in the US, at least...big number is big. The marketing departments are trying to appeal to that basic caveman-style thinking.
You'll find that pattern repeatedly used in marketing when using measurements of any sort. It's not always done, but it's fairly common. Instead of an appropriate measurement unit for the application, they'll often use a smaller unit, so they can have a larger, more attention-grabbing number, that sounds big, and is hard to accurately make sense of in your mind. 10,000 pounds is unfathomably heavy, whereas 5 tons is a plain, simple, and sensible 5 tons. A person may not know what it feels like to lift 5 tons, but they have a good sense of what it is, compared to other objects that are measured in tons. 10,000 pounds is an abstract, distant figure that they can hardly even imagine, or make good comparisons to. The math is easy to do, but marketing folks don't expect you to be doing math. They expect you to try and rapidly process the figures they give you, and fail to do so, before they move on to telling you about the next great feature. It's all about dumbfounding people with big numbers, and then distracting them before they can make sense of those numbers.
