throw5959 2 days ago

Who cares? It's what the indicator says, I don't need to visualize feet to do calculations and talk to the tower about them.

If you can see a 1x1m tile from the cockpit, you're dead.

Dalewyn 2 days ago

If you're an amputee I truly am sorry for you and hope the handicap hasn't disrupted your life too much.

Jokes(...?) aside though, your absolute deference to precision is an example of why metric flies over people's heads. Feets, Tokyo Domes, arguably even nautical miles and so on are relatable at a human level unlike metric which is too nice and clean.

  • notahacker 2 days ago

    This sort of argument is odd to someone in a country which uses both, where a yard is intuitively "a bit smaller than a metre", a pint corresponds to a pint glass or "about half a litre" rather than anything meaningful and I'm aware that a rod and a furlong are things but have absolutely no idea what they correspond to. A foot is comfortably bigger than the average foot size, and an inch really isn't an easier unit to approximate than a centimeter

    • avmich 2 days ago

      The SI was specially aimed to reduce such meaningless discussions, yet we steel have big endians and little endians comparisons, long after the dust settled.

      • HPsquared 2 days ago

        Now I'm wondering if right-to-left languages (e.g. funnily enough, Arabic) write the least significant digits at the left or the right.

        EDIT: numbers in those languages are the same way as in English, the "ones" are at the right. Kinda strange!

  • Thlom 2 days ago

    One meter is about one long step for an adult. To approximate the length of a field, you just walk along it with big steps and count. It will not be correct, but pretty close. A cm is a little bit smaller than the width of your index finger. It's all bout what you are used to. Metric doesn't "fly over people's head" where metric is the standard way to measure things, but inches, feet, gallons, pounds, miles fly over our head because we are not used to it so don't have any frame of reference.

HPsquared 2 days ago

A foot is about 1 sheet of metric A4 paper :)

  • avmich 2 days ago

    A meter is _exactly_ square root of area of A0 paper.

    • HPsquared 2 days ago

      Yes and a blank 80 gsm A4 sheet weighs exactly 5g, if you need a weight reference!