Damn_Underscore posted...
I hate that deci- (decimeter) isn't commonly used, if centimeters are equivalent to inches and meters are equivalent to yards, then decimeters would be equivalent to feet... but no one uses them
I think the problem there is that it would be more like a
third
of a foot. Which kind of makes it an awkward measurement. So you might as well just jump from centimeter to meter.
captpackrat posted...
And everyone jumps from meters all the way out to kilometers. Nobody ever uses decameters or hectometers. The spell checker in Firefox doesn't even have decameters; it keeps trying to correct it to decimeters.
Yeah, but it's not as if we have anything significant between feet/yards and miles either.
It's almost as if human life experience tends to clump up around certain significant constants, so we rarely need the precise granularity of the full metric system. It's extremely rare that you're going to need to measure much between the major outliers of a given classification (ie, jumping directly from meters to kilometers).
Telling me something is 500 decameters or 50 hectometers away doesn't convey any more useful information to me than just telling me it's 5000 meters or 5 kilometers away.
When I ran track, I never found myself wondering just how long an 800-meter race was because that number was way too large and it would have been so much more comprehensible if someone had told me it was an 80-decameter race or an 8-hectometer race instead.
Though now that I say that, I could totally see some of the scrubs who ran 800m and 1600m races trying to refer to them as 8H or 16H so they could compare them to the much more impressive 5K.
captpackrat posted...
You also rarely ever see anything beyond kilometers like megameters or gigameters.
We don't really have a unique measure for multiples of miles either. Once you hit miles it's just miles all the way up, until it gets so huge that you need to switch to something like light-years.
League
technically
exists, but no one really uses them.
Again, it's mostly a question of need. It's going to be extremely rare that you
need
a larger unit than mile or kilometer to convey a proper impression of distance. So the extra prefixes just sort of become needlessly pointless.