Woops! This was a reply to Lambda.
I don't agree with what you wrote here. What you wrote is overly broad and lacks context. Here is what you missed:
1) Imperial == base 12
Base 12 counting is probably something like 10 000 years old, maybe older. The ancients used various types of counting systems but THEY NEVER used base 10.
The reason for that is that base 12 is perfect for low technology and relative precision types of industries and where you simply double numbers or halve them in fractions and that is good enough. So, for example, building ancient roads, ancient bridges and so forth is just good enough for the kinds of tolerences they worked with. Even today, in North America, we make houses to fairly crude tolerences of 1/16th of an inch at the most.
So, just consider that base 12 is designed for the kinds of normal things ancient and current people build, used by people whose kings and queens had less education than our grade 4 students.
On top of that, you have to consider that the upper bound for the amount of things that most regular people needed to count up to was 60 and base 12 fractions and multiplies nicely up and down 0 to 60 at reasonable and easy to understood tolerences that allowed ancient people to build small buildings, roads, houses, castles, roman bridges and even the pyramids without any education whatsoever. You can train someone to use base 12 with no knowledge of numbers or reading in a few hours because it is intrinsic to how use the tools them selves. You cannot do that with metric.
Imperial really is an amazing counting system.
2) Metric == base 10
What most people don't know is that metric WAS NOT created because 1234567890 and just add a 0 to get a multiple is easier. Metric WAS NOT CREATED BECAUSE IT WAS BETTER. Metric was created in France as a POLITICAL STATEMENT as a result of all of the historical events leading up to the end of the French revolution and the overthrow of French aristocracy.
Metric is a political statement by the unedcuated masses of the French of that period rebelling against all systems imposed on them by a 1000 years of French aristocracy with some bullshit mixed in by the various movements that were around that time like the Enlightenment.
Add to that that NO ANCIENT HUMAN CIVILIZATION ever invented base 10 because base 10 naturally imposes arbitrary levels of decimal pracision for most calculations. So, beyond the basic counting up and down by one or a multiple of 10, most of base 10 is not easily divisible without introducing arbitrarily large decimal precision.
3) At high enough levels of precision, neither metric nor imperial make any difference. I worked as a machinist when I was young. I could mill and lathe anything of almost any shape (except organic shapes you can now do easily with cad based systems) to 2 / 1000s of an inch. We often did military work and they would sometimes require 2thou or 3 thou precision which was pretty fucking silly as most work was between 5thou and 10thou (10 thousands of an inch).
But, if I was working in metric, it made no difference because the measuring tools provided the readouts to the x.xxxxx mounts of precision and calculators did the calculation.
In the modern world where high precision engineering is a huge part of our economy, base 12 is fine and base 10 is fine. Base 10 only has one advantage in that the rest of the world is standardized on it, I am fine with ingoring the rest of the world.
4) People who think that Americans don't want to switch to metric for political reasons have no clue what they are talking about.
Imperial is the measuring system of ancient tradition of craftsmen and users who have a noble and practical need to make normal life things and keep politics out of the trades while metric is EXPLICITLY created for political reasons and ONLY political reasons.
Did you guys know the French tried to make the daily clock a base 10 clock and throw away the base 12 clock that we use now? This did not happen because normal people rebelled and nearly killed those that tried to impose it BECAUSE they realized that a base 10 clock is stupid.
Summary: The French are dumb (tm).
Hehehe!
