Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
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Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
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Re: Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
#2Yes, the successor to the 5000-foot Roman mile should have been 5040, but 5280 isn't bad for something that arose organically out of various unit systems' needs.
Re: Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
#3Yes, the successor to the 5000-foot Roman mile should have been 5040, but 5280 isn't bad for something that arose organically out of various unit systems' needs.
It's not great. We have a base 10 number system so everything should be in powers of 10. Not too familiar with my 528 multiplication tables.
Re: Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
#4I grew up in a metric using country, I didn't learn imperial until I had to for a job. I came to appreciate the way being broken into 16ths, 8ths, 4trs, and halves really worked well for hands on practical things.
Unfortunately, I had to work in decimal inches a lot and had to convert back and forth between metric and that's where the arbitrariness of the imperial system began to make my brain hurt.
1.181 inches will forever be burned in my mind as the near almost but still not quite exact equivalent of 3cm...and the day the customer took out a measuring tape and lost their mind because we gave them something 3cm, what it was sold as and agreed upon by them as, and not the 1.25 inches they expected. The material we produced with came in 3cm not an inch and a quarter. For some reason, the customer believed they were getting inch and a quarter material despite it never being listed anywhere in any plans or marketing they received from us and despite the material not being manufactured in any thicknesses other than 2cm or 3cm. They literally threw the measuring tape at my coworker over those .069 inches...
Re: Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
#524 days ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24327740
Re: Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
#6Yes, the successor to the 5000-foot Roman mile should have been 5040, but 5280 isn't bad for something that arose organically out of various unit systems' needs.
It's not great. We have a base 10 number system so everything should be in powers of 10. Not too familiar with my 528 multiplication tables.
How often are you converting miles to feet?
Re: Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
#7Yes, the successor to the 5000-foot Roman mile should have been 5040, but 5280 isn't bad for something that arose organically out of various unit systems' needs.
It's not great. We have a base 10 number system so everything should be in powers of 10. Not too familiar with my 528 multiplication tables.
> We have a base 10 number system
You hit the nail on the head. Bases 12 amd 60 are much handier as they have more factors.
Re: Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
#8Are there any liquid measures (or volume units in general) odder than acre-feet, whose unit parallelepiped is furlong x chain x foot?
Re: Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not great. We have a base 10 number system so everything should be in powers of 10. Not too familiar with my 528 multiplication tables.
How often are you converting miles to feet?
When I'm cycling I'm comparing metres to kilometres all the time; in imperial you'd presumably have to do the same with feet to miles (or maybe yards, but they seem to be a more obscure measurement - e.g. people talk about speed in feet per second but not in yards per second).
Re: Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not great. We have a base 10 number system so everything should be in powers of 10. Not too familiar with my 528 multiplication tables.
How often are you converting miles to feet?
Giving road directions, especially if you are sitting in the passenger seat navigating for someone, is an example that comes up in my life fairly frequently. It gets awkward to talk about things that are between 0 to 1/2 mile so I find myself trying to do the mental math to convert to feet for someone else. These days I usually give verbal directions in meters. Most people in the United States seem to have some conceptualization of what a meter is so it usually works quite well as it’s also easier for me to estimate meters instead of feet.