Things You Never Noticed VII: Wait, This Isnt the MitD Thread?

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Grey_Wolf: one commenter in this thread just gave 4 times the real volume for the cylinder, another commenter offered a cone that's two inches wide on its wider side as a shape that's no wider than one inch. Most people couldn't do the calculations that you mention anyway. I'm not saying that Americans are stupid or that their educations are bad, most Europeans who grew up here with the metric system also can't do those calculations, and will commit stupid mistakes.

Let's say those are universal mistakes (I disagree, but I'll grant you the point because I don't care). My point was that if you use metric, you realise that you made a mistake so much easier because the numbers convert and scale up so well. And therefore it is one less point where errors can occur. A metric user might still forget to divide the diameter by two when calculating the area of a circle, but they are not going to, say, transpose the digits of the conversion factor between cm3 and litres because there aren't any digits to transpose. The one mistake that can be made due to the unit of measurement in metric is the number of 0s, and the error size when that happens is literally in the orders of magnitude scale, and thus trivially noticeable.

Grey Wolf