arscott said:
But that makes meters a terrible unit of measurement, at least for human height. Likewise, the next lowest unit in common usage (centimeters) is a poor option, because measurement error is likely to exceed the base unit.
Huh? Over here, decimeters are just as common in everyday speak over here as any of the other divisions of the meter. Like in "He missed the goalpost with just a few decimeters".
As for human height, you simply know that when someone says "he is one-and-eighty tall" or "she is one-and-sixty tall", you are talking about two persons of average swedish height (1 meter 80 cm for males and 1 m 60 cm for females). I kind of fail to see how 5'4" for average height is more "natural" than 1.60...
Some divisions of the meter are simply more common for some dimensions than others because the numbers becomes easier to handle, like meter + centimeter for human height, or swedish miles for city-to-city distances (1 swedish mile = 10 kilometers, i.e. 6 US miles - the pre-metric swedish mile was 10,688 m, so it converted nicely when it went metric in 1889). In the kitchen, deciliters are used for cooking ingredients (1 deciliter of of flour and two deciliters of milk for each egg makes nice thin pancakes!), while for some reason, centiliters are more commonly used for anything you drink, as in the 33 cl bottle and 50 cl can.
Building supplies used to be the last hold-out over here, with an "metric inch" of 1/4 dm = 25mm (as compared to the 25.4 mm US inch), but that one seems to have disappeared from common usage lately. No-one really speaks about that inch anymore, and use millimeters, centimeters and decimeters interchangably instead.
