I don’t believe you. Any time you’re looking at an apartment or house and don’t have a floorplan or a 10’+ tape measure, you walk the length of each side of a room side heel-and-toe to get a rough idea. The deviation of the length of your foot from 12 inches isn’t material in this situation.
And if you’re really struggling with this, a room with a 10’ side would be about ten small steps across, a bit more than three strides.
I know intuitively how long my foot is and how long my stride is. I don’t know intuitively what the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second, where the second is defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium.
Any time I’m looking at my house I’m either in a situation where someone’s just asking how big something is, at which point I say “I dunno, maybe 10 feet?” or, more likely, I need to actually know the size, so I say “lemme check!” and pull out my measuring tape. My desk is just barely smaller than the width of my room, and it’s too big lengthwise by about 2 inches. The reason I know that is because I didn’t rely on the general size of my own foot when I was deciding where to put my desk, and actually took legitimate measurements. Because it mattered. If it didn’t matter, I would’ve guessed.
It would take me longer to take 10 steps and calculate how far off my own foot is from a foot than it would be for me to just measure 10 feet, even if I already knew my own foot size off the top of my head, which I clearly don’t. The reason you know the length of your own stride and feet is because you use them for measurement; that’s very strange, but regardless, I can’t believe it would have been any more difficult for you to memorize the same measurements in another system.
Anything worth trying to measure is worth measuring accurately, and anything else isn’t worth measuring. I agree that making things easy to measure improves day-to-day interactions with the things around us, but that’s why I recommend getting a small tape measure you can carry everywhere, not just guessing by the approximate size of people’s body parts that grow to completely different sizes.
I don’t believe you. Any time you’re looking at an apartment or house and don’t have a floorplan or a 10’+ tape measure, you walk the length of each side of a room side heel-and-toe to get a rough idea. The deviation of the length of your foot from 12 inches isn’t material in this situation.
And if you’re really struggling with this, a room with a 10’ side would be about ten small steps across, a bit more than three strides.
I know intuitively how long my foot is and how long my stride is. I don’t know intuitively what the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second, where the second is defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium.
Any time I’m looking at my house I’m either in a situation where someone’s just asking how big something is, at which point I say “I dunno, maybe 10 feet?” or, more likely, I need to actually know the size, so I say “lemme check!” and pull out my measuring tape. My desk is just barely smaller than the width of my room, and it’s too big lengthwise by about 2 inches. The reason I know that is because I didn’t rely on the general size of my own foot when I was deciding where to put my desk, and actually took legitimate measurements. Because it mattered. If it didn’t matter, I would’ve guessed.
It would take me longer to take 10 steps and calculate how far off my own foot is from a foot than it would be for me to just measure 10 feet, even if I already knew my own foot size off the top of my head, which I clearly don’t. The reason you know the length of your own stride and feet is because you use them for measurement; that’s very strange, but regardless, I can’t believe it would have been any more difficult for you to memorize the same measurements in another system.
Anything worth trying to measure is worth measuring accurately, and anything else isn’t worth measuring. I agree that making things easy to measure improves day-to-day interactions with the things around us, but that’s why I recommend getting a small tape measure you can carry everywhere, not just guessing by the approximate size of people’s body parts that grow to completely different sizes.