Not in any functional sense
by ndtnguy (2022-11-28 16:11:16)

In reply to: The metric system is derived from real things too  posted by fontoknow

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The base units are---or were in the first iteration---derived from particular relationships to real-world measurements, but they're abstracted: nobody needs, in a practical sense, to have the earth's circumference be an even number of units, or a unit of mass that equals the weight of water of such and such a volume at sea level. It wasn't as if the people who invented it assigned names to a standardized version of units already in use: they intentionally departed from that kind of system.

Which makes sense, given that the goal was to achieve scalability through decimalization. And that, in its way, is a sensible approach to a system. But it's sterile and inhuman in many ways, too.

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