For 12 years of the revolutionary era, France did use decimal time. And the calendar and clocks were organized around a 10 day week and a 10 hour day. But those changes, coupled with the loss of Sunday worship, had other effects on the population.
Here’s an assessment of what was really meant and then lost by the elimination of Sunday:
“‘The elderly ladies took advantage of the long journey (to church) to exchange old stories with other old gossips … they met friends and relatives on the way, or when they reached the county town, whom they enjoyed seeing … there then followed a meal or perhaps a reciprocal invitation, which led to one relative or another….’ But if that was the way it was for the old ladies, what did Sunday mean to ‘young girls, whose blood throbbed with the sweetest desire of nature!’ We can well understand their impatience, ‘they waited for each other at the start of the road they shared,’ they danced.
“Now, however, when the Tenth Day came around, ‘the men were left to the devices they always had:’ the old men went to the tavern, and they bargained. The young men drank and, deprived of their ‘lovely village girls’, they quarrelled. As for the women, they had nothing left to do in village. The mothers were miserable in their little hamlets, the daughters too, and out of this came their need to gather together in crowds. If the need for recreation is necessary because of moral forces… there is absolutely no doubt that village girls find it very hard to bear privations which are likely to prolong their unmarried state: ‘in all regions the pleasure of love is the greatest pleasure.'”
– from The Revolution Against the Church, From Reason to the Supreme Being, by Michel Vovelle, pp 158-159.
Their seconds must have been about 864ms though, otherwise they day is more than 3 hours too long which would be very annoying for any kind of scheduling I’d imagine.
I always think about what a cool adventure it must have been, for Pierre Méchain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre to roam for 7 years, go wherever they need thanks to an official letter, make calculations and come back successful to Paris. To think that they were only off by .2mm !
> (It was later found the astronomers were a bit off in their calculations, and the metre as we know it is 0.2 millimetres shorter than it should've been.)
That's actually impressively good accuracy for the time! Hats off to the astronomers.
I was just about to post same quote but you beat me to it.
I'd go further, I think their work was a remarkable feat for the late 1790s. That they achieved that accuracy given the primitive equipment of the day says much for their abilities and understanding.
Also at the time France was in turmoil, numbers of its scientists were victims of the French Revolution—Antoine Lavoisier, probably the greatest chemist of his time—was beheaded by guillotine in 1794, so the political environment was anything but stable.
Look back 225+ years ago: there was no electricity, no material science to speak of to make precision instrumentation—journal bearings on lathes, etc. couldn't be made with the accuracy of today, backlash would have been a constant worry. All instrumentation would have been crafted by hand.
And the old French pre-metric system of units was an imperial system similar to the British (France even had an inch that was similar in length to British Imperial unit). All instrumentation up to that point would have relied on the less precise standards of that old system.
Traveling was by horse and sailing ship, and so on. Surveying would have been difficult. There wasn't even the electric telegraph, only the crude optical Chappe telegraph, and even then it was only invented in the 1790s and wasn't fully implemented during the survey.
They did a truly excellent job without any of today's high tech infrastructure but they made up for all these limitations by being brilliant.
In today's modern world we often underestimate how inventive our forefathers were.
Here's a completely random anecdote: my mother often told me that her father, my grandfather, born in France in 1899, sculptor, draftsman and general maker of things, had a strong dislike of the metric system. He complained continuously that anything with round metric ratios was "ugly" and that beauty could only be found in more ancient measuring systems.
He died when I was 4 so it's not a first hand account, I'm not sure how much of it is true or what he really thought, but somehow it feels right.
The metric system is incredibly useful and practical (of course) but there's something rigid and unpleasant about it.
I know modern craftsmen* who lament the same. Being able to divide things in 2, 3, 4, 6, or 12 is mechanically more useful than 2/5/10 (the former being achievable by drafting tools more easily).
*Yes, it should be craftspeople, but that doesn't exactly sound like the same thing, and anyway all of them happen to be men.
Having decimal numbers, it’s the best solution. Otherwise you’re bound to make mistakes scaling things up or down.
> a liter is not a cubic meter
Well, it’s a dm^3, close enough ;)
Conversion is trivial, 1 m^3 is 1000 l.
A cubic metre is a bit large for everyday use, but it makes sense e.g. when measuring water consumption or larger volumes. The litre also had the advantage of being close to 2 pints, so it already made sense as a unit when it was introduced. Contrary to hours with 100s.
> 'kilogram' is the base unit, not 'gram'
Yeah, this one is perplexing. It’s an annoying inconsistency on an otherwise beautifully regular system.
I don't understand your issue between gram and kilo gram: gram is the base unit and the prefix kilo, meaning one thousand just says that 1 kg = 1000 grams.
It is exactly the same as meters and kilometers: meters is the base unit and 1 km = 1000 meters.
The kilogram is no longer defined by a physical artifact, fwiw.
Anyway, the point is the inconsistency in the system due to the kilogram being the base unit. So derived units are defined in terms of kilogram rather than gram. Say, the unit of force, Newton (N), is defined as kgm/s^2 and not gm/s^2). Or pressure, Pascal (Pa) which is N/m^2 which inherits N being defined in terms of the kilogram). And so on. Anyway, an annoying inconsistency maybe but doesn't really affect usage of the system once you get used to it.
As an American, I finally relented and purchased a Metric measuring tape after the ordeal of trying to measure the dimensions of the rooms in my house. When it comes to interior decorating, trying to figure out how to evenly space items that are sized in feet, inches, and fractional inches is a nightmare. Imagine trying to space objects 2 feet 7½ inches long against a wall that is 13 feet 2 inches long. Now imagine this task with 80 centimeter long objects and a ~400 centimeter wall.
I am angry that IKEA's localization does not allow Americans to view dimensions in metric site-wide. You can still see dimensions in metric but those only appear on the pictures of some items. The webpage still converts all textual measurements to Imperial. You can't sort and search using metric values. IKEA designs everything in metric, using nice, even, whole numbers. Please let me see those. Seeing them converted to the nearest 32nd of an inch feels like vandalism.
As a Frenchman living in the US, my favorite Imperial units are the hand (3 hands to a foot) and the poppyseed (4 poppyseeds to a barleycorn, the shoe-size unit; 3 barleycorns to an inch). 10cm and 2mm.
People stop asking me to convert to Imperial pretty quick.
The US uses the US customary system, not Imperial. [0] US customary and Imperial share some units, and, confusingly, share even more unit names, but they are different systems.
[0] well, really, it uses metric with a redefined version of the old US customary system layered over it to prevent people from noticing, but...
Save your sanity, don't bother learning the conversion factors. Did you know that most of us don't even know how to convert between our own units? I invite you to go around and ask 'how many pints are in a gallon?'.
It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that there are four quarts in a gallon...
I have no such trouble with any SI unit. So with that, I will leave you with this!
"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'The French were right again!'"
If you need to see mention of units of measure to distinguish an American from a Commonwealth dialect, I would suggest further study of either or both; for example, Americans never say "petrol."
Yeah, I know. That's why I make fun of it some times. Not because it is French; though an American I hope I am not a damned ungracious American, and though I believe we may fairly call the original debt squared after Normandy, I recognize and respect the generous Gallic heart from which it sprang.
But "the" metric system, so called, functions entirely on the happy coincidence of macroscopic distance being divisible at human discretion, while the similar and simultaneous effort at decimalizing time foundered on the rocks of how long it actually takes Earth to revolve upon its axis and to circle the sun. Both efforts originate in the same silly hamartiac human desire to prescribe a shape to which reality must conform, and thus may come in for about equal gentle contumely on that score. Especially since, in another example of its designers' foolishly misplaced priorities, metric offers no units at the human scale. They may have prefigured the brutalists in this way.
The point of the SI system is not that one meter is "better" than one foot. It's that we picked one subjective point of reference and then made almost all the other units related to that in a straightforward way and scaled with a common set of prefixes.
In everyday life, the metric system offers no big benefit, except for consistency for international standards and trade. But if you're doing anything engineering-related, your life is simpler if you don't need conversion factors to move between liters, meters, joules, watts, amperes, volts, ohms, and so on.
And FWIW, even to the extent that US engineers sometimes use inches and Fahrenheit, almost everything else they do is anchored to SI.
Even when we use inches, they're frequently themselves metricated via division by 1,000 to produce the "thou." This is an extremely strong convention; I have one (inexpensive) digital caliper that can read in fractional inches, but every such tool I own reads in both millimeters and thou.
I do think it's funny all these folks insisting metric is so humanist seem never to have noticed which of their finger joints is an inch long. For me that's the second of the little finger, but I have large squarish peasant hands. As for the rest, treating a centimeter as 10/25 of an inch and vice versa seems to work well enough for measurements not requiring particular precision, or in other words anything I'd be comfortable doing without a caliper. Where's the trouble, really?
I’ve heard this criticism before, but limited to temperature, with people saying they want more increments. I’m not sure why half a degree centigrade is so hateful.
Fahrenheit has finer divisions at the human scale, yes. A scale calibrated to the boiling point of water, at the top end, can tell me nothing useful about my environment beyond the manner in which it has probably killed me.
I'll give you this one, but only with the qualification that inches would be fine too. There's no benefit to the manufacturers in more rational standardization, though. As with women's clothing sizes, why would Levi's (for example) make it easier for me to find something that matches my style and budget, from anyone other than them? Hell, even men's sizes which nominally are in inches do this! I have to go a size up in Levi's vs Wranglers because Levi's size small, the bastards, while Lee mostly run true to size but none of their cuts is really worth wearing. And don't even talk to me about boot sizes!
Inches vs. centimeters? Baby stuff. Get on my level. :D
> But "the" metric system, so called, functions entirely on the happy coincidence of macroscopic distance being divisible at human discretion
What do you mean exactly? Any distance is divisible arbitrarily, it’s a continuous scale regardless of the unit system. We could define the metre as a foot (or rather, as the distance of some physical phenomenon close enough to a foot) and build a decimal system out of it, and it would have the same advantages as the metric system.
> while the similar and simultaneous effort at decimalizing time foundered on the rocks of how long it actually takes Earth to revolve upon its axis and to circle the sun
The fact that there are 60 seconds in an hour and 24 hours per day has absolutely nothing to do with how quickly the earth revolves. Your argument works (kinda) for the number of days in a year, that’s all.
> Both efforts originate in the same silly hamartiac human desire to prescribe a shape to which reality must conform
No, this is completely backwards. This effort originates from the idea that we should observe and understand nature, and build a rational society based on this understanding. The original metre was a fraction of the length of a meridian for a reason. They did not change the size of the Earth to conform to an arbitrary unit. Instead they came up with a unit that made sense to them, for both philosophical and practical reasons. They did the opposite of what you say.
> Especially since, in another example of its designers' foolishly misplaced priorities, metric offers no units at the human scale
The metre is about 2 thirds of an average human height (give or take, the average also changed with time). How is that not a human scale? If you want to go lower, to the scale of something you can hold, you have centimetres. If you want to go larger, to the scale of a distance you can walk, you have kilometres. And all conversions and comparisons spanning the 5 orders of magnitude relevant to our daily lives are seamless and make sense. What is your problem with this system?
> They may have prefigured the brutalists in this way
That is actually hilarious. The enlightenment philosophers and humanists who came up with the metric system are polar opposites of the brutalists. They rationalised our understanding of the world around us. They did not rebuild it square.
Another fun fact dating from French revolution is the 10 hour-day, each hour had 100 minutes and each minutes 100 seconds : https://historyfacts.com/world-history/fact/france-had-a-cal...
Fun fact... or not so fun?
For 12 years of the revolutionary era, France did use decimal time. And the calendar and clocks were organized around a 10 day week and a 10 hour day. But those changes, coupled with the loss of Sunday worship, had other effects on the population.
Here’s an assessment of what was really meant and then lost by the elimination of Sunday:
“‘The elderly ladies took advantage of the long journey (to church) to exchange old stories with other old gossips … they met friends and relatives on the way, or when they reached the county town, whom they enjoyed seeing … there then followed a meal or perhaps a reciprocal invitation, which led to one relative or another….’ But if that was the way it was for the old ladies, what did Sunday mean to ‘young girls, whose blood throbbed with the sweetest desire of nature!’ We can well understand their impatience, ‘they waited for each other at the start of the road they shared,’ they danced.
“Now, however, when the Tenth Day came around, ‘the men were left to the devices they always had:’ the old men went to the tavern, and they bargained. The young men drank and, deprived of their ‘lovely village girls’, they quarrelled. As for the women, they had nothing left to do in village. The mothers were miserable in their little hamlets, the daughters too, and out of this came their need to gather together in crowds. If the need for recreation is necessary because of moral forces… there is absolutely no doubt that village girls find it very hard to bear privations which are likely to prolong their unmarried state: ‘in all regions the pleasure of love is the greatest pleasure.'”
– from The Revolution Against the Church, From Reason to the Supreme Being, by Michel Vovelle, pp 158-159.
If you’re interested in a what an analog clock in decimal time might look like: https://decimal-time.netlify.app/
Ahah nice one, thanks for sharing !
I hadn't heard of this and it's fun to think about.
It's 100,000 s/day as opposed to our current 86,400 s/day which is not far off.
Hours, however, were twice as long.
They had time pieces that displayed both together.
What about 90° per right angle and not 100°?
It made sense to keep some things like angle measurement and time as disruption was too great for very little practical benefit.
It's called a "gradian", and it's 1% of a right angle.
It's still used in some industries, where convenient.
Still France and French revolution context : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian
Their seconds must have been about 864ms though, otherwise they day is more than 3 hours too long which would be very annoying for any kind of scheduling I’d imagine.
Yes. Obviously.
Or more to the point: since they had no use for milliseconds at that time, their milliseconds would have been 86.4% of standard milliseconds.
Sadly, the 100 day year never worked quite right.
inb4 we still have the 8 hour workday
I always think about what a cool adventure it must have been, for Pierre Méchain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre to roam for 7 years, go wherever they need thanks to an official letter, make calculations and come back successful to Paris. To think that they were only off by .2mm !
> (It was later found the astronomers were a bit off in their calculations, and the metre as we know it is 0.2 millimetres shorter than it should've been.)
That's actually impressively good accuracy for the time! Hats off to the astronomers.
I was just about to post same quote but you beat me to it.
I'd go further, I think their work was a remarkable feat for the late 1790s. That they achieved that accuracy given the primitive equipment of the day says much for their abilities and understanding.
Also at the time France was in turmoil, numbers of its scientists were victims of the French Revolution—Antoine Lavoisier, probably the greatest chemist of his time—was beheaded by guillotine in 1794, so the political environment was anything but stable.
Look back 225+ years ago: there was no electricity, no material science to speak of to make precision instrumentation—journal bearings on lathes, etc. couldn't be made with the accuracy of today, backlash would have been a constant worry. All instrumentation would have been crafted by hand.
And the old French pre-metric system of units was an imperial system similar to the British (France even had an inch that was similar in length to British Imperial unit). All instrumentation up to that point would have relied on the less precise standards of that old system.
Traveling was by horse and sailing ship, and so on. Surveying would have been difficult. There wasn't even the electric telegraph, only the crude optical Chappe telegraph, and even then it was only invented in the 1790s and wasn't fully implemented during the survey.
They did a truly excellent job without any of today's high tech infrastructure but they made up for all these limitations by being brilliant.
In today's modern world we often underestimate how inventive our forefathers were.
Here's a completely random anecdote: my mother often told me that her father, my grandfather, born in France in 1899, sculptor, draftsman and general maker of things, had a strong dislike of the metric system. He complained continuously that anything with round metric ratios was "ugly" and that beauty could only be found in more ancient measuring systems.
He died when I was 4 so it's not a first hand account, I'm not sure how much of it is true or what he really thought, but somehow it feels right.
The metric system is incredibly useful and practical (of course) but there's something rigid and unpleasant about it.
I know modern craftsmen* who lament the same. Being able to divide things in 2, 3, 4, 6, or 12 is mechanically more useful than 2/5/10 (the former being achievable by drafting tools more easily).
*Yes, it should be craftspeople, but that doesn't exactly sound like the same thing, and anyway all of them happen to be men.
Things that annoy me about the metric system: base-10 numbering system, a liter is not a cubic meter, and 'kilogram' is the base unit, not 'gram'.
That last one is what I have the biggest problem with. When you are doing anything with derived units, 'kilo' suddenly disappears.
> base-10 numbering system
Having decimal numbers, it’s the best solution. Otherwise you’re bound to make mistakes scaling things up or down.
> a liter is not a cubic meter
Well, it’s a dm^3, close enough ;) Conversion is trivial, 1 m^3 is 1000 l. A cubic metre is a bit large for everyday use, but it makes sense e.g. when measuring water consumption or larger volumes. The litre also had the advantage of being close to 2 pints, so it already made sense as a unit when it was introduced. Contrary to hours with 100s.
> 'kilogram' is the base unit, not 'gram'
Yeah, this one is perplexing. It’s an annoying inconsistency on an otherwise beautifully regular system.
I don't understand your issue between gram and kilo gram: gram is the base unit and the prefix kilo, meaning one thousand just says that 1 kg = 1000 grams. It is exactly the same as meters and kilometers: meters is the base unit and 1 km = 1000 meters.
In SI, kg is the base unit, and g is a derived unit.
I think they mean that the gram is defined as 1/1000 of a kilogram. With a kilogram having a definition based on physical constants.
The kilogram is no longer defined by a physical artifact, fwiw.
Anyway, the point is the inconsistency in the system due to the kilogram being the base unit. So derived units are defined in terms of kilogram rather than gram. Say, the unit of force, Newton (N), is defined as kgm/s^2 and not gm/s^2). Or pressure, Pascal (Pa) which is N/m^2 which inherits N being defined in terms of the kilogram). And so on. Anyway, an annoying inconsistency maybe but doesn't really affect usage of the system once you get used to it.
Why is base 10 annoying?
Too few divisors of place values. The idea you would pick something that isn't evenly divisible by at least 3 or 4 was a mistake.
This one isn't metric's fault to be fair. That's just what you get for inventing numbers before inventing math.
Makes me wonder what would have happened if 'French numbers' in base 12, 36 or 60 were introduced at the same time.
People got used to working in octal.or hexadecimal in the past for computers, doesn't seem like it would have been as big of a change as you think.
>evenly divisible by at least 3 or 4
Irrelevant with a decimal system.
Irrelevant if you are working with computers and digital equipment.
Highly relevant if you are using T-squares, compasses, and dividing calipers.
It's not irrelevant, you can choose something like 12 to make all your factors out of. It's a particular strength of working in feet and yards.
Still, wouldn't base 12 be better than base 10 ?
Pretty much everyone born from -2,500 BCE to ~1800 CE would agree, and a significant of those born since.
As an American, I finally relented and purchased a Metric measuring tape after the ordeal of trying to measure the dimensions of the rooms in my house. When it comes to interior decorating, trying to figure out how to evenly space items that are sized in feet, inches, and fractional inches is a nightmare. Imagine trying to space objects 2 feet 7½ inches long against a wall that is 13 feet 2 inches long. Now imagine this task with 80 centimeter long objects and a ~400 centimeter wall.
I am angry that IKEA's localization does not allow Americans to view dimensions in metric site-wide. You can still see dimensions in metric but those only appear on the pictures of some items. The webpage still converts all textual measurements to Imperial. You can't sort and search using metric values. IKEA designs everything in metric, using nice, even, whole numbers. Please let me see those. Seeing them converted to the nearest 32nd of an inch feels like vandalism.
It seems the Canadian site gives both sets of units: https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/brimnes-cabinet-with-doors-whit...
I guess they thought the mere sight of metric would offend the Americans. :)
Maybe the product ranges between the countries is close enough that the Canadian site is an alternative?
>I am angry that IKEA's localization does not allow Americans to view dimensions in metric site-wide.
Change to the IKEA site of a different country (via what comes immediately after `ikea.com/`).
> I am angry that IKEA's localization does not allow Americans to view dimensions in metric
I’m not American and laughed at this.
Welcome to the other side. Also, here in New Zealand people seem to do everything in metric, except their height and the weight of their baby. Why?
As a Frenchman living in the US, my favorite Imperial units are the hand (3 hands to a foot) and the poppyseed (4 poppyseeds to a barleycorn, the shoe-size unit; 3 barleycorns to an inch). 10cm and 2mm.
People stop asking me to convert to Imperial pretty quick.
The US uses the US customary system, not Imperial. [0] US customary and Imperial share some units, and, confusingly, share even more unit names, but they are different systems.
[0] well, really, it uses metric with a redefined version of the old US customary system layered over it to prevent people from noticing, but...
We've made an inconsistent and confusing system even more inconsistent and confusing. How apropos!
Save your sanity, don't bother learning the conversion factors. Did you know that most of us don't even know how to convert between our own units? I invite you to go around and ask 'how many pints are in a gallon?'.
It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that there are four quarts in a gallon...
I have no such trouble with any SI unit. So with that, I will leave you with this!
"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'The French were right again!'"
The US doesn't and never has used the imperial system, as it did not participate in the unit reforms of 1824.
5 us gallons is about 4 imperial gallons.
[flagged]
> Easiest way to spot non-american author.
Or the .com.au domain so you don't even need to read the article.
If you need to see mention of units of measure to distinguish an American from a Commonwealth dialect, I would suggest further study of either or both; for example, Americans never say "petrol."
[flagged]
Yeah, I know. That's why I make fun of it some times. Not because it is French; though an American I hope I am not a damned ungracious American, and though I believe we may fairly call the original debt squared after Normandy, I recognize and respect the generous Gallic heart from which it sprang.
But "the" metric system, so called, functions entirely on the happy coincidence of macroscopic distance being divisible at human discretion, while the similar and simultaneous effort at decimalizing time foundered on the rocks of how long it actually takes Earth to revolve upon its axis and to circle the sun. Both efforts originate in the same silly hamartiac human desire to prescribe a shape to which reality must conform, and thus may come in for about equal gentle contumely on that score. Especially since, in another example of its designers' foolishly misplaced priorities, metric offers no units at the human scale. They may have prefigured the brutalists in this way.
The point of the SI system is not that one meter is "better" than one foot. It's that we picked one subjective point of reference and then made almost all the other units related to that in a straightforward way and scaled with a common set of prefixes.
In everyday life, the metric system offers no big benefit, except for consistency for international standards and trade. But if you're doing anything engineering-related, your life is simpler if you don't need conversion factors to move between liters, meters, joules, watts, amperes, volts, ohms, and so on.
And FWIW, even to the extent that US engineers sometimes use inches and Fahrenheit, almost everything else they do is anchored to SI.
> And FWIW, even to the extent that US engineers sometimes use inches and Fahrenheit, almost everything else they do is anchored to SI.
Inches are defined relative to the SI as well.
As are Fahrenheit degrees.
I don't know why people seem to think this is an "own."
Even when we use inches, they're frequently themselves metricated via division by 1,000 to produce the "thou." This is an extremely strong convention; I have one (inexpensive) digital caliper that can read in fractional inches, but every such tool I own reads in both millimeters and thou.
I do think it's funny all these folks insisting metric is so humanist seem never to have noticed which of their finger joints is an inch long. For me that's the second of the little finger, but I have large squarish peasant hands. As for the rest, treating a centimeter as 10/25 of an inch and vice versa seems to work well enough for measurements not requiring particular precision, or in other words anything I'd be comfortable doing without a caliper. Where's the trouble, really?
Where does the ‘humanist’ bit end?
Should we go back to fathoms, furlongs, chains, drams and bushels?
This was settled a long time ago for the vast majority of the word.
If we should find they serve us better, why not?
> metric offers no units at the human scale.
How do you apply this to the imperial system?
I’ve heard this criticism before, but limited to temperature, with people saying they want more increments. I’m not sure why half a degree centigrade is so hateful.
Fahrenheit has finer divisions at the human scale, yes. A scale calibrated to the boiling point of water, at the top end, can tell me nothing useful about my environment beyond the manner in which it has probably killed me.
You mean like my feet aren’t a foot long, my thumb isn’t an inch? Ironically, my pinky is a centimeter thick and a meter is when I take a long step.
The width of my palm (with my thumb, tightly pressed to it) at its widest is 10 centimeters, which is quite handy.
Oh, and my "inch" is almost exactly 3 centimeters.
There's a couple of convenience approximations I use to work with US Imperial..
30cm is a "metric foot" (it's actually even closer to 1 light nanosecond which is kinda cool for thinking about distances at computer speeds)
250ml is a "metric cup"
Speaking of feet - I got irritated when buying shoes and trying to convert shoes sizes.
It turns out that UK/US sizes are based on the length of a barley corn.
Quite why it isn’t just in centimetres is baffling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe_size
I'll give you this one, but only with the qualification that inches would be fine too. There's no benefit to the manufacturers in more rational standardization, though. As with women's clothing sizes, why would Levi's (for example) make it easier for me to find something that matches my style and budget, from anyone other than them? Hell, even men's sizes which nominally are in inches do this! I have to go a size up in Levi's vs Wranglers because Levi's size small, the bastards, while Lee mostly run true to size but none of their cuts is really worth wearing. And don't even talk to me about boot sizes!
Inches vs. centimeters? Baby stuff. Get on my level. :D
And now the famous triviality of order-of-magnitude and unit conversion goes entirely out the window...
> But "the" metric system, so called, functions entirely on the happy coincidence of macroscopic distance being divisible at human discretion
What do you mean exactly? Any distance is divisible arbitrarily, it’s a continuous scale regardless of the unit system. We could define the metre as a foot (or rather, as the distance of some physical phenomenon close enough to a foot) and build a decimal system out of it, and it would have the same advantages as the metric system.
> while the similar and simultaneous effort at decimalizing time foundered on the rocks of how long it actually takes Earth to revolve upon its axis and to circle the sun
The fact that there are 60 seconds in an hour and 24 hours per day has absolutely nothing to do with how quickly the earth revolves. Your argument works (kinda) for the number of days in a year, that’s all.
> Both efforts originate in the same silly hamartiac human desire to prescribe a shape to which reality must conform
No, this is completely backwards. This effort originates from the idea that we should observe and understand nature, and build a rational society based on this understanding. The original metre was a fraction of the length of a meridian for a reason. They did not change the size of the Earth to conform to an arbitrary unit. Instead they came up with a unit that made sense to them, for both philosophical and practical reasons. They did the opposite of what you say.
> Especially since, in another example of its designers' foolishly misplaced priorities, metric offers no units at the human scale
The metre is about 2 thirds of an average human height (give or take, the average also changed with time). How is that not a human scale? If you want to go lower, to the scale of something you can hold, you have centimetres. If you want to go larger, to the scale of a distance you can walk, you have kilometres. And all conversions and comparisons spanning the 5 orders of magnitude relevant to our daily lives are seamless and make sense. What is your problem with this system?
> They may have prefigured the brutalists in this way
That is actually hilarious. The enlightenment philosophers and humanists who came up with the metric system are polar opposites of the brutalists. They rationalised our understanding of the world around us. They did not rebuild it square.
> They rationalised our understanding of the world around us. They did not rebuild it square.
This is a distinction without a difference. Read James C. Scott, for pity's sake.