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Base 10 is not a good base
February 17, 2024 I thought of another reason I don’t really like the metric system: Base 10 is not a good base. You want your base to either be a power of 2 so that you can keep dividing by two (like a gallon has 128 fluid ounces) or have a bunch of useful factors (like a foot has 12 inches, so you can easily get ⅓ or ¼; and a minute has 60 seconds).
You want your base to either be a power of 2 so that you can keep dividing by two (like a gallon has 128 fluid ounces) or have a bunch of useful factors (like a foot has 12 inches, so you can easily get ⅓ or ¼; and a minute has 60 seconds). Base 10’s factors are not great; you rarely want to divide anything by 5. Metric’s entire foundation is a bad base.
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