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by xamolxix 4213 days ago
> Using bases divisible by both 3 and 4 makes mental calculation quite quick.

Easier than base 10?

1 comments

Half a foot, six inches. Third of a foot, four inches. Quarter of a foot, three inches. Sixth, eighth, and twelfth also go into whole inches.

For bigger projects, yards are fairly easy to decompose too, into whole feet and inches.

It's a good system for projects of human or slightly super-human scale using low resolution instruments and mental math. It's rotten for high precision computerized tasks of widely varying scales.

I can't recall the last time I needed a third. Halves, quarters, tenths, hundredths...