It’s unfortunate that fractional measurements and the base size of units get conflated.

Maybe metric users do use fractions and I just don’t hear about it. Is that table one and a quarter meters high?

We use millimetres. That table is 1250mm high.

If you're cutting it yourself, a precision of 1mm is finer than your saw blade or pencil line anyway, so it's plenty enough.

When I hear anything past about 1/8th of an inch my brain shuts down, and I give up.

My argument is a mm is too fine in that situation. 1/8ths and 1/16ths are ideal when working at those scales.

In reality I use both systems all the time. It’s situational.

> When I hear anything past about 1/8th of an inch my brain shuts down, and I give up.

Realistically, same. 32nds don’t get used outside of some specialty wrenches. 16ths are a practical limit where other scales start to make more sense. Probably millimeters.

So 3 mm is a weird measure but 1/8 of an inch is just perfect? You are like those guys who say that Fahrenheit is better because it feels "more natural and obvious"

I don’t understand why it has to be one or the other? Working in fractions is nice sometimes. Inches are a useful size for some situations. I find it easier to say that’s three eighths than 9mm because my ruler doesn’t have different marks for the factors of each mm mark.

I use both systems.

I do prefer Fahrenheit for HVAC (and weather) because it’s higher resolution and has reasonable values at human scales. Thermostats that lack half-degrees-c are never quite right IMO.

> I do prefer Fahrenheit for HVAC (and weather) because it’s higher resolution and has reasonable values at human scales.

So you are one of those, lol. There is nothing "less human" about 25 C than say 72 F. Nothing, it just happen to be the scale you are used to.Both are arbitrary.

> Fahrenheit for HVAC (and weather) because it’s higher resolution

99.99% of thermostats and thermometer in C had at least 1 decimal place. At usual "human temperatures" the difference in resolution between the scales is less than 2X, so even assuming only integer values, I am willing to bet against you in a double blind test that you cannot differentiate 68F vs 69F in an statistical significant way.

> I find it easier to say that’s three eighths than 9mm

Just because you are used to. Fractions are more complicated than integers, every elementary school program knows it.

So to summarize, the problem is not with the magnitude of the units which is arbitrary (a degree F and inches are not more human, logical or normal that a degree C or cm)the problem is with the convoluted way of the imperial system for multiples and submultiples of the base unit.

“Human scales” meaning temperatures that won’t burn my skin or give me frostbite. 70 is nice. 60 is cool. 50 is cold. 40 is really cold. 80 is hot. 90 is really hot. 100 is potentially dangerously hot.

I guess 20.5 is nice, 15.5 is cool, 10 is cold, 4.5 is really cold, 26.5 is hot, 32 is really hot and 37.7 is dangerously hot. It’s fine if you are used to it but I don’t really see a benefit.

I was in a hotel room in Japan that only had whole unit adjustments for the A/C. To get 20.5C I had to switch to Fahrenheit. I guess I was unlucky.

I find distances in metric and imperial perfectly usable and use both regularly.

As outlined in detail elsewhere in the thread there are advantages to working in fractions in some situations. Specifically when using a ruler or tape measure with different markings for 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and 1/16. There’s no reason that has to be unique to inches, it just works out well in some cases.

> I guess 20.5 is nice, 15.5 is cool, 10 is cold, 4.5 is really cold, 26.5 is hot, 32 is really hot and 37.7 is dangerously hot.

Or, you know, 20, 15, 5, 30 and 40 instead of the arbitrary decimals you chose to use to prove your point

Sure, you can pick even numbers in either scale that are awkward decimals in the other. I just prefer the ten degree bands of the Fahrenheit scale for these ranges.

> I just prefer the ten degree bands of the Fahrenheit scale for these ranges.

To the identical 5 degrees range of the Celsius scale ?

It's not really identical though. Like I said, Fahrenheit is higher resolution at these scales so that is an advantage. It doesn't mean everyone should convert to F. Just that both systems have benefits. If I changed my perception of the world to C I wouldn't actually gain anything, personally, in the context of weather and HVAC.

If I need to take measurements while boiling water or making ice then I would probably use C.

It's exactly the same. The perception you have on Fahrenheit is exactly the same anyone using Celsius have, with multiples of 5 instead of 10

Five is not equal to ten so no, it is not the same. That's the entire point.

Right.

Interesting comment on Fahrenheit, as I would say it has too much resolution for day to day use. A nice sunny day is in "the low 70s". A cold winter day is in "the high 20s". There is too much precision in the units to give an exact numeric value, so we round it to low/mid/high. That implies that the general unit we should be using is somewhere around 3 times larger than Fahrenheit degrees, because that is the size of the unit we use in speech anyways.

Yeah it's personal opinion. Either scale works. Nobody gives weather reports to the public in kelvin.

People often say something is 1 and a half meters long. I don't understand how people can work with inch measurements. How do you divide 7"3/8 by 5? This seems a major pain.

One and a half seems natural. What about something like a quarter meter? I guess that just becomes some number of centimeters?

> How do you divide 7"3/8 by 5?

Same way I divide 4.7625 cm by 5. With a calculator.

> I guess that just becomes some number of centimeters?

25, yes. It's not too hard to do the math.

> Same way I divide 4.7625 cm by 5. With a calculator.

That's roughly 0.95 right by intuition, but (7"3/8) / 5 doesn't come easy to me.

You multiply 7* 8 then add 3 and put that number over 8* 5, resulting in 59/40, roughly 1.5”.

There's something just right about 1/16th of an inch. About the same as a millimeter, and easy to do math with... it is weird though 1/8th, centimeter is hard to conceive, for me anyway.

When more precision is needed, so easy to go to the 32nd

All you're saying is that inches are what you're used to. Being in the UK I am familiar with both inches and mm, and mm are far easier to work with than 16ths of an inch.