Calculations. In 240 BCE, Eratosthenes used a stick. He basically found a place where the sun was directly overhead, and measured the shadow from a stick a known distance to the north of that location. He approximated the circumference of the earth to be 25,000 miles, which was off by 99 miles.

Lots of triangulation and extrapolation

https://en.wikipedia.org/...

I reckon if took every turd I'd ever caused and laid them (both senses) end-to-end it would be more than 2km, for context.

Earth squeezes and stretches and wobbles & rotates.

Sort of, yeah, Earth is a bit wider around the equatorial axis than around the polar one.

Time as we know it changes in length because it is the common nature of “time” to become chaos which then becomes order. Hylomorphism or Impermanence is to Entropy as measurement is to the fundamentals of size. Who is to say that the distance between two points should be constrained to the barriers of human existence & understanding. All we have is pictures & words, maybe a few trinkets that will become dust that becomes something else that attempts to quantify reality.

This reads like an unfortunate confluence of psychosis, psychoactive substances and LLMs.

To agree on a unified measurement system for things like engineering, science and commerce across nations and cultures is a question of practicability though, not pseudophilosophical ramblings.

Earth squeezes and stretches and wobbles & rotates.

Don't we all, Earth, don't we all...

No. It is pushing by 1 metre with a force of 1 newton.

I have two bathrooms and do both.

The real question is; which do I use for my personal lou or WC or wash closet or bathroom or powder room or shitter?

Looks at comment history

Oh wow, yeah you did! Great minds think alike, I guess!

It would have worked so well. 2 digit timestamp gives you 15 (old)minute accuracy which is just perfect for appointments and organizing your day. Digital minutes would be a bit longer than old minutes which is fine for bus/train times etc. Digital seconds a bit shorter than old seconds which is great for timing things. I always thought a second was a wee bit longer than it ought to be anyway.

I don't think anyone can in good conscience say that inches scale to small measurements. Sure, you can use them, but subtracting 8/1000 out of something that is 1 5/8 and noting the final length is just unwieldy.

You don't need to get super existential about it, imperial was invented before we invented 0 and the decimal system and it shows. Sure the difference in basic units is irrelevant, no one cares what the meter or inch is defined as, the "superior" one is just what you're used to and have an intuition for. But having units that relate to each other in round ways and can be easilt rescaled to the precision/range required can be nothing but a benefit

Without metric inch is arbitrary unit, can be anything.

I'm on the phone with them.

They said they'll do it after France or Canada does first. Not sure if they got the memo, or if they are just being silly again.

Got two letter 'e's in it, and they're both pronounced differently. To be fair, it's far from the most divergent spelling-to-saying word in English. Some wrong-looking abomination like 'meetir' would be even better.

*aluminium

Technically you can say that, I just don't remember ever hearing it in any context, not even space travel.

Woah

Maybe you should learn a bit more about them because that was a terrible attempt.

Honestly, humans are pretty damn lucky when it comes to cosmic coincidences.

Thinking about you, moon and Jupiter.

Which makes a nanolightsecond almost one foot (with less than a 2% margin of error)

All measurements are arbitrary

Perhaps in a perfectly rational world, but humans are silly creatures. The human brain evolved to deal with small numbers. Distinguishing one vs two lions is important, but distinguishing 14 vs 15 lions is not, so our brain immediately recognises numbers up to about six and has to rely on conscious counting for anything larger. If I told you that "This dog is two ducks tall" you'd have a pretty good idea of how big the dog is, but if I said it was "20 mice tall" you might have trouble visualising, or worse "450 ants tall" at which point I would have no idea. Our brains don't innately have the ability to accurately conceptualise large numbers, which is why the metric prefix system works so well - it keeps numbers relatively small. I think the same logic applies to decimals and fractions. Simple fractions like halves through to perhaps fifths can be visually conceptualised at a glance, but beyond that it requires calculation.

What that means to me is that ideally your measurement unit should be big enough to be able to measure most things you deal with on a daily basis using no more than say 10 units (arbitrary, I could be persuaded down to 6 or up to 20), and still measuring most things without going smaller than about 0.2 units. As an example, consider human height (after all, what could be more a more human measurement?). The average person is between 1.5 and 1.9m tall, which is not a great start since we're riding close to the 0.2 'lower resolution' just describing the whole range. You could use centimetres but then you're looking at 150 or 190 which is much too large to visualise nicely. Decimetres is better but not great. Feet is a pretty good fit for this, since that'd be about 4.9 to 6.2 ft. We haven't violated either the max or minimum requirements and we still have a decent resolution within the range too.

having easy conversions is much more useful than a "natural" base unit.

I agree, but my whole point is that we didn't have to choose!

Nice try! I live in a metric country and use exclusively metric units.

No, I'm not. I live in a commonwealth country that transitioned to metric well before I was born. Recently I've had to work with American companies as part of my job.

Don't get me wrong, the imperial system is horrible, I just wish the metric system had a unit closer in length to feet or inches. Yards would be an annoying unit for human-scale measurements too. Even the name implies it's usage - it's for measuring (small) areas of land, which are usually much bigger than humans after all. That's not a problem in imperial though since no-one would say 'my pen is 0.1 yards long', they'd measure in inches instead because it comes out as a nice, human brain-friendly small number like 4 or 6.

That's not the point I'm trying to make. You can derive a length from any number of physical constants to make it reproducible, but considering the divisor of exactly ten million suggests the metric committee were far more interested in making something 'clean' than something human-friendly. They could have basically done what they do with the modern redefinitions of the metre - the distance travelled by light in 1/299792458 ths of a second. Obviously they chose that number to keep the definition in line with the original, but they could have done that with the original definition to make the metre basically any length they wanted, but they didn't.

Don't misunderstand me, imperial sucks. I just wish the metric system had defined the metre to be smaller, that's all.

See my other comments in this thread. I think most people would prefer if the common measurements they made with common units landed in the number range of about 0.2-10-ish. The human brain is good at visually estimating small groups so any unit system should try to lean into that and put the scale of commonly measured values in that range. Obviously as things get bigger you end up with tens or hundreds of units which start to lose semantic meaning, especially for quick estimations or relative comparisons, so you should start thinking of switching units at this point. Likewise when values get below about 0.1 they get hard to visualise, so most people switch units here.

My point being - I think the base unit of one metre is too large for most daily tasks - most things that are around a human scale end up being less than one metre, and I think the centimetre is too small - most things on the human scale end up being dozens of centimetres at least. Both fall outside that ideal range of 'a small handful' which the brain is good intuitively and subconsciously working with.

You're right, I have no interest in sports. Though in that case under this modified metric a decametre would be approximately on the same scale as the previous metre.

Don't get me wrong, imperial sucks, but the scale of the typical measurements with typical units lands nicely in what the human brain is good at visualising - small groups of up to about 10 (see my comments to other people in this thread). I think most people would prefer when the common measurements they make with common units end up in the range of 0.2 to 10-ish. Centimetres are too small for that and you measure using dozens or hundreds of them, which starts to lose semantic meaning, which makes visual estimation a bit trickier, especially with comparative distances. You start thinking in terms of tens or hundreds of cm visually to keep it under control which is just another layer of cognitive load. I think the perfect unit system would avoid this as much as practical. The existing metric metre is fine for outdoor activities, but I would argue most people aren't out measuring fields all day, they're looking at things on the same scale as their own body for the most part. Metres are a bit big for that.

Or my favourite ratio, 1l of water is 1kg and it's close to that for most food grade liquids.

Dimensional analysis is really neat

"Freedom units" is a satirical term implying a system of measurement used by Americans

Whatever USA decides to use to measure something, whether its inches & feet, bananas, football fields, or other randomly decided units of measurement.