The UK is completely metric apart from distance/speed (road signs in miles) and, bizarrely, pints for milk and beer (by law). Scales have dual measurements, so an older person can buy two pounds of meat, for example. However, the label produced will show the amount in metric.

Not quite Napoleon, the metric system was adopted during the French Revolution

hey, i thought its made clear that it was invented by some drunk mathematicians rolling a dice!?

Metric measurements need measuring devices. Imperial and all the old Imperial, Germanic, Arabic, Russian, Jewish, and etc. systems were all related to physical measurements - like hand / finger / feet / stride / span. If metric people are so keen, why haven't they metricate time? 100 seconds =1 minute. 100 minutes = 1 hour. 20 hours = 1 day.

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You’re on the right track. 12 was the number of apostles, so held special meaning to people whose lives were ruled by religion.if Jesus had two fewer friends, it would’ve been 10, just like the metric system.

Oh my goodness thank you for sharing this bit of information. As someone who grew up in a farming community, that just made so much sense to me.

interestingly the old indo-eu word for field was acre/ager/or similar, compare agriculture.

Then some ba***rd hooked up two horses to his plough and did his acre an hour faster and invented 'Daylight Saving".

1/3 is 3.3, 2/3 is 6.6, 1/4 is 2.5, 3/4 is 7.5 All no problem. But do you know what really, really works without problems in the metric system? Scaling

But how important is it for the number to have more factors?

Thanks

I thought it was the king's foot.

Hey, did you know there are different foot and shoe sies?

And you get to think about horses, always a bonus!

One American bill is 6 in.

The US tried to switch in the 1970s and there was such an uproar that they switched back. The only thing to stick were liters of soda.

well we were going to, except pirates happened!

I absolutely disagree. The decimal system is definitely superior. The US quickly modernised to decimal currency once they became independent from Britain. Pounds, shillings and pence was as ridiculous as pounds and ounces and feet, inches and yards and 100 degrees to boiling point makes much more sense than 212 degrees.

The cool thing about the imperial system is that for all its irregularities, it’s got a surprising historical background. This is the system people have been using since they needed to measure things. Feet were used for distance because everyone had them around and it’s easy to pace off a certain number, a yard is the average step length, an inch is the distance between one knuckle to another, and I’m pretty sure a mile has something to do with walking distance in some time frame. I do know 20 miles was the distance a horse could travel in a day, because that’s the distance that missions and churches were often placed apart from each other. The imperial system is only impractical now because people needed to be more specific and standardized, so it’s less convenient.

But still visible in our geometric measurements, clocks, and to a lesser degree, calendars.

Actually the uk currency made perfect sense in context. It was a non decimal system, which was amazing for certain things. Like say you need to split $10 between 3 people. Thats basically impossible via the current money system, but the British system had an easy time with stuff like that. I wont try to explain it in detail, i cant off the top of my head, im not British, suffice to say, its intuitive if you are used to using it, and was a superior system for when you were doing stuff like buying chickens at the market lol. Its a bit of a mental lurch switching to the modern system though, if youre not used to it. But yeah, it had its advantages in context.