It was a joke actually. In all seriousness I am actually really good with my indicators, especially as I have 2 sons who have either recently got their license or are working towards it. They are more than happy to point out even the slightest error.
The only time I’ve ever seen it used was practice questions from my thermodynamics textbooks when Imperial units were used (alongside the wonderfully awful to use BTU which doesn’t translate well with anything).
I’ve never seen Rankine actually used anywhere otherwise.
My feet are certainly not a feet long. More like 25 cm or so. But as another commenter already said, I can measure ~175 cm using my arm's reach easily, matchboxes are standardised as 5 cm long, the width of my palm is about 8 cm, distance from my fingertips to my elbow is around 50 cm and the distance from ground to approx. my navel is 1 meter.
Plenty of ways to get an approximate metric measurements without a ruler or measuring tape.
And it's much easier to convert from cm or mm to m (or vice versa) than to convert between ft and inch or ft and 1/8 of an inch or whatever weird measuring standards the US-ians use.
It’s really easy to learn the size of your body. My span is around than 20 cm. 5 of them is 1 meter. the width of my pinky is 1 cm. You can learn how to step 1m distance, for me it’s a bit longer than a normal step. I can measure with my body between 1cm and several meters. So it’s really easy to overcome this small limitation of the metric system.
It’s as easy as getting comfortable with the usual measures of your body. I also know how much is a kilogram because I can lift a big water bottle which also is a liter. Really, the way all of the units are built more or less around water can give you a pretty accurate instinct.
This just made me think, why haven’t those damn commie Europeans with their fancy metric system come up with a better system for measuring time yet?
People like to talk a lot of shit about how subjective the definitions for an inch or a mile are, but I never hear complaints about how a second or an hour are antiquated and based on things that only make sense from an Earth-centric point of view.
I just feel like someone be mad at Americans for still using hours (ugh, trivially decided on the amount of time it takes the Earth to rotate) and not something like the amount of time it takes for 1 kilogram of water to decay via natural radiation when under a vacuum.
By the way, before downvoting, this post is heavy with /s in case it wasn’t obvious.
Edit: I just looked up the formal definition of a second and it is “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom”.
It’s all so arbitrary is funny. People get so passionate, but then I’ll bring up,“Why aren’t we using Swatch Time?” Or, why don’t we have 13 months of exactly 28 days (With a bonus vacation day or two)?
They’ll usually fall back on what people are used to or tradition or something that just supports staying on imperial measurements. To be clear, I don’t give a shit what measurement system is used. It’s not like it takes a big brain to figure out what is going on when you travel.
In most cases, the American spelling of English words compared to the rest-of-the-world spelling is pretty much a wash. A matter of personal preference.
But “metre” is a hill I will die on. “Metre” and “meter” mean different things, and by spelling them both “meter”, as the Americans do, you’re just making communication worse.
I think the biggest place it has genuine benefit would be for something like deeds to homes, titles for cars and stuff like that. A permanent, auditable and public system for tracking the transfer and ownership of things.
Unfortunately it comes with its own caveats, such as “what if I lose the wallet containing the deed to my home, and I want to sell it?”
I never really understood the whole thing about picture based NFTs though.
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