| > When you say "people are better at estimating", are you adjusting for the reduced precision? No, I wasn't thinking about it that way. I was imagining a task where you get people to estimate the length of various objects by looking at them, and just take the mean error. So the size of the units wouldn't matter. If someone wanted to say 1.33268 inches, I'd let them. Concerning divisability: it depends on how you think about it. Many people found dividing in half, and half again, etc. to be intuitive, and it is intuitive in e.g. woodworking (because physically dividing in half is easy), but yeah...in a lot of applications I just want to be able to move decimal points around. For volume in recipes: you're right. I think the problem with the U.S. here is that we use volume in recipes at all. Weight! Use weight! Flour is many different densities...
But yeah, recipes are in general trash. For your case, you'll usually see cups and tablespoons (...lol) like "1 cup plus 2 tablespoons". For distance: "about an inch" makes a lot of sense to people raised with inches. It doesn't strike me as weird at all. Concerning awkward 3 fifths: imperial wouldn't use fifths, it'd be divisions by two. So half, quarter, eighth, etc. There are some specific cases, like a bottle of liquor is often called a "fifth" because it's approximately a fifth of a gallon, but that's specific to that application. |