I was with you until you said the foot is no less arbitrary than the meter. The foot is just a useful size and changed depending on whenever the king decided. The meter was defined by the French using Earth. To say they’re both equally arbitrary is untrue.
Imperial units are nice to work in when accuracy is more important than precision. Want a third of a foot, that’s four inches exactly. A third of a meter is 33.333 cm repeated. It really depends on the situation which is more useful, but metric is more often than not the useful choice.
All the original metric definitions (except seconds I think, but guess what imperial shares exactly) were extremely arbitrary, either relying on assumptions later shown to be false (such as exactly how earth curved) or varied enough to make the units imprecise during sensitive enough measurements (every definition that included water). Those problems have since been corrected, but imperial has also since been defined in terms of metric so the same can equally be said of it.
I was with you until you said the foot is no less arbitrary than the meter. The foot is just a useful size and changed depending on whenever the king decided. The meter was defined by the French using Earth. To say they’re both equally arbitrary is untrue.
Imperial units are nice to work in when accuracy is more important than precision. Want a third of a foot, that’s four inches exactly. A third of a meter is 33.333 cm repeated. It really depends on the situation which is more useful, but metric is more often than not the useful choice.
All the original metric definitions (except seconds I think, but guess what imperial shares exactly) were extremely arbitrary, either relying on assumptions later shown to be false (such as exactly how earth curved) or varied enough to make the units imprecise during sensitive enough measurements (every definition that included water). Those problems have since been corrected, but imperial has also since been defined in terms of metric so the same can equally be said of it.
Nothing stopping you from just saying 1/3rd metre. Fractions still work!
But then you lose a good 99% of what makes metric great, which is the trivial decimalization of it.
Sure. It’s an option though, works fine.
I just don’t think it’s a valid criticism to point out that infinite numbers exist.