"redbelly" wrote in
ups.com:


Puckdropper wrote:

That's one of the problems with metric. There's no analogue to the
foot. I look around me, and I see all kinds of things that are a just
a few inches shorter or longer than a foot.

If they had made the centimeter twice as long, then a dekameter (10
cm) would mean something. Now it's one of those unneeded units that
no one uses.

Puckdropper

I don't think you're looking very carefully. In less than a minute,
I'm able to find 3 common items that are within 1 or 2 cm of a
dekameter: coffee mugs, CD's, business cards.

Let me try to explain the arguement a little better: The dekameter is a
unit that's too small of a difference to mess with. Sure, there's all
kinds of things that's close to a dekameter, but you'd spend too much
time wondering "dekameter" or "centimeter" when eyeball-measuring
something.

However, whenever I hear about the "convenience" of a base-10 system,
I'm reminded of the time my mother went to a fabric store in Denmark
(we're American), and asked for 1.5 meters of fabric. The clerk asked
her how much that is in centimeters, because her tape measure was in
cm and she didn't know how to convert!

The question becomes "Is it 10, 100, or 1000?" I screwed up a Physics
Lab calculation last week and was off by a factor of 10. Luckily, it
didn't screw everything up...

Mark


Puckdropper
--
Wise is the man who attempts to answer his question before asking it.

To email me directly, send a message to puckdropper (at) fastmail.fm