Brian was talking about decimal odometers: >".....now 4/10th of a kilometer is 400 meters. 6/10ths is 600 meters...and so on. Wanna tell me how many feet are in 6/10ths of a mile?" "But why would you ever want to do that?"
The point isn't that people have been wondering how many feet are in 6/10ths of a mile. It was a surprise to me to suddenly have more understanding of what 6/10ths on the odometer is when I switched it to metric. The benefit is in something you gain that you didn't even think you wanted. In other words, the person you talked to may have been unimpressed with the explanation because it was an attempt to show how confusing and difficult feet and miles are, when the person had grown accustomed to using them. I think in that situation I would acknowledge that you probably wouldn't try to figure out how many feet are in 6/10ths of a mile, but that if you were using kilometers, it would be so obvious how many meters were in 0.6 km that it would give a higher level of comprehension that you just didn't get with miles, and didn't realize you were missing. Carl
