• Bye@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    And in the sciences and drug dealing and the military, we use metric exclusively.

    But for some idiotic reason, construction engineers often use imperial units and I have no idea why. Like buildings are built in pounds and feet and stuff, with half inch bolts and 2x4 (ish) lumber and half inch plywood. It’s idiotic.

    • randomwords@midwest.social
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      11 months ago

      I don’t generally defend imperial, but feet and inches are actually really useful in construction. Base 12 is easily divisible by 2, 4, and 3. You often need to divide architectural elements in thirds.

      • GrumbleGrim@discuss.tchncs.de
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        11 months ago

        As a former structural engineer who lived on a Jobber 5 all day, that’s still pretty niche overall. Easier because it’s what your used to maybe, but outweighed by situations where it’s not. Try doing trig with fractions and then tell me imperial is better.

        • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          Trig is literally the math where you start dividing a circle in fractions and doing the math in base 360.

          What the hell are you talking about?

          • GrumbleGrim@discuss.tchncs.de
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            11 months ago

            I’m talking about trig using feet and inches. You know, rise, run, slope… Have you ever used trig outside of school? I don’t understand what you’re confused about.

            • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
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              11 months ago

              right now i use it for waves and reflections. that’s all fractions and degrees. before it was machining and tbh for me that was faster to go to the book for the answers than calculate everything out.

              truly trigonometry is a land of contrasts.