You're right about meters not being as good a "human scale" measurement as feet. The idea of average height being 1.8 m is pretty awkward on its face. Turns out, though, the metric world has settled on starting with centimeters, though. But it's not clear that this is better, because now you end up throwing around high magnitude numbers like "183 cm" rather than "6 ft".
Given that we're clearly comfortable going with a diminutive unit (viz. cm vs m), I've always thought it would be better for the world to settle on the decimeter as the reference unit instead. It's larger than a centimeter but smaller than a meter, which is what we're after, and it's about the width of one's hand, which is arguably a more natural choice for something "human scale" than the foot. The snag is that "foot" still rolls of the tongue a lot more easily that "decimeter". So we go ahead and say 1 dm = "1 hand". It's a great unit, because if we want, we can scale up or down to meters and centimeters with (base 10-derived) constant factors, which is so easy that anybody can do it in their head.
The only snag left is that "hand" is already in use as a unit. This turns out to be less problematic than it sounds, because the legacy hand is an obscure unit really only used in horse breeding. And we're in luck, because as its name suggests, the imperial "hand" is named after the span of one's hand (with fingers extended), so they're roughly the same—it's not as if you end up with one name for two wildly differing sizes. This is the same kind of "conversational equivalence" we get with a ton and a metric tonne. That is, in conversation you're basically never reduced to needing the speaker to clarify which it is that he or she means, because you just don't need that kind of precision—a ton and a tone are both two very large masses that are in the same ballpark as one another.
Perhaps most importantly, the transition from feet to hands is fairly straightforward in conversational use, because end up saying that "1 ft" equals "about 3 hands".
People make a big deal about pi versus tau, but getting widespread adoption of the "hand" as a unit seems to me to be a much more worthwhile cause, because it would have a much bigger practical impact on everyday life than tau ever would.
Or the length of one's foot, even.
You're right about meters not being as good a "human scale" measurement as feet. The idea of average height being 1.8 m is pretty awkward on its face. Turns out, though, the metric world has settled on starting with centimeters, though. But it's not clear that this is better, because now you end up throwing around high magnitude numbers like "183 cm" rather than "6 ft".
Given that we're clearly comfortable going with a diminutive unit (viz. cm vs m), I've always thought it would be better for the world to settle on the decimeter as the reference unit instead. It's larger than a centimeter but smaller than a meter, which is what we're after, and it's about the width of one's hand, which is arguably a more natural choice for something "human scale" than the foot. The snag is that "foot" still rolls of the tongue a lot more easily that "decimeter". So we go ahead and say 1 dm = "1 hand". It's a great unit, because if we want, we can scale up or down to meters and centimeters with (base 10-derived) constant factors, which is so easy that anybody can do it in their head.
The only snag left is that "hand" is already in use as a unit. This turns out to be less problematic than it sounds, because the legacy hand is an obscure unit really only used in horse breeding. And we're in luck, because as its name suggests, the imperial "hand" is named after the span of one's hand (with fingers extended), so they're roughly the same—it's not as if you end up with one name for two wildly differing sizes. This is the same kind of "conversational equivalence" we get with a ton and a metric tonne. That is, in conversation you're basically never reduced to needing the speaker to clarify which it is that he or she means, because you just don't need that kind of precision—a ton and a tone are both two very large masses that are in the same ballpark as one another.
Perhaps most importantly, the transition from feet to hands is fairly straightforward in conversational use, because end up saying that "1 ft" equals "about 3 hands".
People make a big deal about pi versus tau, but getting widespread adoption of the "hand" as a unit seems to me to be a much more worthwhile cause, because it would have a much bigger practical impact on everyday life than tau ever would.