Jinx wrote:
>> ok, what's next?
>> imperial measures? resistors scales?,... I think we already talk
>> about that... just in case:)
>>     
>
> I saw an episode of Smash Lab on Discovery the other night. The
> Smash Lab team, American <cough>, were measuring up some steel
> frame and "lumber"
>
>   
[snip imperial/metric stuff]
> Would you rather mentally divide 5ft 11 and 9/32 inches by 3 or
> 1810mm by 3 ?
>
>   

Hi Jinx.

I'm living in Canada now (for 8 years), but born and raised in South 
Africa and then spent many years in UK too. I was raised 'metric'. But, 
now that I have a basement, mitre-saw, table saw, and a wood-framed 
house, I have discovered that imperial is fantastic when it comes to 
measuring things. At least in terms of wood. As it happens, 12 is a 
fantastic 'base' to do maths in. Much better than decimal (10). 12 is 
divisible by 2,3,4,6 wheras 10 is divisible by only 2 and 5. Further, 
with my computer science education, I am very happy with working in the 
'imperial' fractions, where the denominators are powers of 2 (1/2 1/4 
1/8 1/16 1/32 etc).

Bottom line, for common 'construction' challenges, the system works very 
well. Common operations alike dividing a space in to thirds is much 
easier than in metric....

For what it's worth, the problem with the examples you cited with 
5'11"9/32 is that there are one too many units involved. For the actual 
division you really want to convert the 5' to ", and you then have 
71"9/32 which is easy to solve in your head as 69" / 3 + 2"/3 + (9/32)/3 
which is 23" + 2/3" + 3/32", which, you have to know that 1/3 inch is 
approximately 5/16, or more closely 11/32, so, the answer is 23"25/32  
(which has an error of 0.02")

Now, in your head, what is a third of 4m 22cm 5mm ?

You see, multiple units is never a good thing for mental math... but, 
even converted to a single unit 4225 / 3 ?

Rolf
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