Having grown up with the metric system, backwardian is just that, backward. How many inches in a mile? I’d have to convert it to metric and go from that. After asking “which mile?”, of course, because there are at least three in use in the US. Compare how many centimetres to the kilometre? That’s easier, just shift the decimal around a bit.
This sort of thing has cascading drawbacks. Eg. in the US, any serious machine shop needs to have two sets of tools and bits, metric and backwardian. Elsewhere, only specialty shops have the latter. Or try cooking. Tricky baking recipes get lots easier if you measure by weight instead of using cups that might well have a volume not quite entirely what the recipe writer was using.
England isn’t a good example, though. They still think of metric as “hard”, where it’s by now second nature to Australians. And let’s not mention the countries that’ve been fully metric for over two centuries. Not that it matters for the story since, as amazing as it is, metric didn’t exist back in the Neolithic.
Convert inches to miles. Now convert millimeters to kilometers to find out why the metric system is used on a greater global scale. Will’s not a fan lol.
Having grown up with the metric system, backwardian is just that, backward. How many inches in a mile? I’d have to convert it to metric and go from that. After asking “which mile?”, of course, because there are at least three in use in the US. Compare how many centimetres to the kilometre? That’s easier, just shift the decimal around a bit.
This sort of thing has cascading drawbacks. Eg. in the US, any serious machine shop needs to have two sets of tools and bits, metric and backwardian. Elsewhere, only specialty shops have the latter. Or try cooking. Tricky baking recipes get lots easier if you measure by weight instead of using cups that might well have a volume not quite entirely what the recipe writer was using.
England isn’t a good example, though. They still think of metric as “hard”, where it’s by now second nature to Australians. And let’s not mention the countries that’ve been fully metric for over two centuries. Not that it matters for the story since, as amazing as it is, metric didn’t exist back in the Neolithic.
Convert inches to miles. Now convert millimeters to kilometers to find out why the metric system is used on a greater global scale. Will’s not a fan lol.