Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
Amazing.
How many sextants are used to fly an aeroplane from London to New York?
None - but if your computer breaks in the middle of the Atlantic and your pocket calculator falls overboard you'll be cursing the metric system whilst you're there with charts and tables, repeatedly carrying the one.

The point is, all he did to "rubbish" the Imperial system was reel off all the different sub-divisions, he spent no time talking about why they all exist. That could have been a really interesting video.

For example, a Nautical Mile is is 1/60th of the distance between two line of latitude, or one navigational Minute, this is then divided into 10 cables, Cables being a usable measure at see. So, if you know the location of one ship and then run a cable to another ship, and take a bearing, you can likewise detmine the location of the other ship even without making any observations from it. This has navigational implications with regard to undersea hazards and is generally useful.

By contrast, the Statue mile is 1/3 of a League on land, which is the distance a man can walk in an hour. One explanation for the variation of the length of a mile is the difficulty in traversing the ground (and therefore the time taken) in different parts of the country.

The point is, for many day-to-day activities Imperial works better than metric, it arguably even works better when you're building a house, say, because Imperial works on multiples of 12 and so do degrees.

But no, he just rubbished the system by referring to a medieval English Statue that defines an incg in relation to three dry barley corns.