There's actually quite a lot of advantages the US could have in math education if we properly harnessed both unit systems. Becoming fluent in both and regularly doing conversions would give students a lot of real world application and simple math practice.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (2 children)

A good software developer can also work with any language, but if you're going to use Javascript to build an enterprise level software you are guaranteed to have a bad time.

You use what is best for the job and from my understanding there's really no benefit to using imperial measures over SI, beyond the familiarity of growing up with them. If you were taught SI units from the very start you wouldn't ever use imperial.

[–] assassin_aragorn 3 points 7 months ago

There are actually reasons to use imperial, but it's all inertia. Industry has a bunch of controls and correlations and empirical equations that use imperial, so the inputs all need to be imperial too.

Of course, you could always do it in metric and then convert at the end. That's one approach to unit systems.

[–] force 2 points 7 months ago

if you're going to use Javascript ~~to build an enterprise level software~~ you are guaranteed to have a bad time

ftfy. also applies to Python for any code you plan to use for more than 1 day

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Or you end up doing what I do to troll my friends, and mix the styles the systems like.
"This post should be 5/16ths of a decameter" The rational numbers you find in imperial are helpful for dividing things compared to decimals, but everyone gets all weird when you do fractional meters or kilograms.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

I like to measure the area of rooms in foot-metres. Square foot-metres is a great unit for volume.

Today I unironically described the length of something as "about 1 centimetre less than a foot".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

And I just understood why that’s the case. Most of the old units used highly composite numbers as factors, which have an incredibly high number of divisors. We still widely use such factors for time and angles.

4: 1, 2, 4
5: 1, 5
6: 1, 2, 3, 6
10: 1, 2, 5, 10
12: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12
20: 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20
24: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24
50: 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50
60: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60
100: 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, 100
120: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 24, 30, 40, 60, 120
360: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180, 360
840: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 20, 21, 24, 28, 30, 35, 40, 42, 56, 60, 70, 84, 105, 120, 140, 168, 210, 280, 420, 840
1000: 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 20, 25, 40, 50, 100, 125, 200, 250, 500, 1000

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Some metric system just don't offer a single benefit compared to others