For people who don't get any of this, Americans use:
* Inches and fractions for "small" things: 7½ inches, 15¾
* Feet and inches for "large" things (like more than 2 feet): 6 feet 2 inches, 30 feet 7¼.
* Thousandths of an inch for tiny things: 38 thousandths, off by a 'thou.
* 1 foot 3 3/8 inches is valid but uncommon, people typically just say 15 and 3/8ths
* 5.91 inches is weird, converting from millimeters (not hundredths of a mm) you probably best round to 5 and 15/16ths which at least is on a tape measure
* 0.79 feet is just malarkey
In England we measure speed with furlongs per fortnight.
It's a rather bizarre mix of units here - the transportation systems interchangeably uses kilometers and miles, some shop owners by principle refuse to use kilograms and insist on "pounds" (without realising a "pound" is defined in law using grams and that there was like a dozen of "pounds"), fuel efficiency is measures in miles per gallon, but it's a different gallon from the one used in the US. In general, the whole units situation is nothing but a confusing dick contest.,,
So at the end of the day, while some people in the UK do use imperial units just as some of them use separate taps for cold and hot water, and come with various more or less consistent excuses for that, they rarely realize the "traditional" units is also a result of one king's decision to scrap all previously used "traditional" units and declare a single "standard" one..
It's only because Mastodon doesn't allow me to post more than 500 characters.
> isolated environment though
I didn't mean the US, I meant specific sectors of economy such as plumbing or car mechanics...
> Tell a carpenter
...or carpentry.
I don't do wood work, but I do 3D cases or PCB occasionally and can't imagine doing that in fractional inches.
> 3/16” and 11/16”
Then maybe it's optimised for human memory operations.
Thanks for letting me know aobut the 500 characters, kravietz.
If messages are too long for Mastadon's prototcol, do you know if they get truncated or if they just don't show up?