Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain
Generally speaking, Imperial is good at division, metric is good for multiplication.
For instance in imperial, one pound goes down to ten shillings, to five shillings, to two shillings and sixpence, one shilling and threepence, to ninepence, to four and a half pence, to two and a quarter, one and a half, three quarters and then it breaks at the next level of division.
with metric, you got from £1 to 50p to 25p and it breaks at the next level of division because you don't have a halfpenny now in metric. (although they did issue one initially)
Pretty much the same story applies to measurements. Imperial is also the king of scarily accurate approximate eyeball measurements simply because so of the building trade is really in Imperial even when it's nominally in metric measurements. If you want the length of an office then counting the number of two foot square ceiling tiles in a row and doubling it to get the length in feet is quite a bit simpler than doing the same with 0.6096 meter tiles, even if it's been metricised by taking it to 0.6m.
It should be noted that I have never formally been taught imperial, but think that certain things should actually be taught to people; both systems actually have their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, when I have done scale drawing for office plans for wiring etc my favourite scale is one inch to the meter, simply because it's large enough to see without a bloody magnifying glass; one centimetre to a meter is simply too small and an architect who used my office plan knew the scale for that off the top of his head, so it's obviously not particularly uncommon!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
