American paper sizes were a mistake
@coldacid why do you hate freedom (units)?
@dave because the 1:sqrt(2) aspect ratio is pure af
@coldacid I agree, our units suck. America needs to join the rest of the civilized world and use the metric system. I just wanted to make a "why do you hate freedom?" joke.
Except it's...not 12s though? A yard is 3 feet. A pound is 16 ounces (unless it's a troy ounce in which case it's 14). A ton is 2000 lbs. A mile is 5280 feet. It's all arbitrary. You can contrast that with the metric system, where each unit is 10 to some power times any other unit. Metric is far more intuitive.
Ask an engineer in the USA whether they prefer designing in inches and pounds or centimeters and kilograms, and almost all of them will say they prefer the latter. There is real value to being able to work with units that operate in consistent factors of 10, rather than a system of units where relative magnitudes from one unit to another are completely arbitrary.
You don't understand the comparison because you're used to a system where your different properties are measured with entirely different arbitrary scales. In metric its all about powers of 10, and once you know the units they apply equally to all properties. Kilo is 1,000 (10^3). You can have a kilo-gram, a kilo-meter, or a kilo-second. Milli is 1/1,000th. You can have a milli-gram, a milli-meter, or a milli-second.
When designing and measuring things, you grow to appreciate that all your properties share the same intuitive system because it's just easier to work with.
@dave
Who cares how many centimeters are in 3 meters?
SI units are only easy to convert using pen and paper-- and it's still easy to do an 'off-by-ten' error. The prevelance in usage of both centimeters and millimeters shows that people want to have their own unit for different tasks, even though the other is perfectly adequate.
@Darcy02 @coldacid
@everlastingrocks People "want to have their own unit for different tasks" because different units are actually appropriate for different tasks. We can't visualize what half a million of something is. We can visualize five of something, though. That's why we say 5km and not 500,000cm. Then of course it's also much easier to say, which is why we say "I ran five kilometers today" and not "I ran five-hundred thousand centimeters today". They're not all "perfectly adequate", and this whole conversation is dumb.
@everlastingrocks @Darcy02 @coldacid
It's not arbitrary. Our counting system is in base ten. Using powers of ten for your units means conversion is easy. How many inches is 3 miles? If you're practiced you can do this in your head, but it's hard and you should probably bust out a calculator. How many centimeters are in 3 kilometers? For this you just move the decimal point over, no calculator needed. It also makes your unit conversions the same process regardless of whatever it is that you're measuring.