cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/28876486
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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Nautical miles. The mile that's actually useful.
Today I learn that Americans do not even use the nautical miles. You are not happy to have an imperial ton of non divisible units you also need to have fucking homonyms?
There's a lot of miles in this world...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile_(disambiguation)
Also see the comparison table in the main entry
I assume americans in the navy use nautical miles.
Imagine using nautical kilometers, road kilometers, space kilometers, imperial kilometers, protestant kilometers...
Now please tell me there are no nautical feet, yards, inches and furlongs
I think the most insane combination of units can be found in aviation. They use feet for altitude but nautical miles for distance, then they use knots (nautical miles per hour) for horizontal velocity, but for vertical velocity they use feet per minute.
Just last week I found this unit right here and I still haven't stopped chuckling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-candle
Well, and then you need a US customary mass unit when you're designing the things.
Introduce the slug, not to be confused with a pound-mass (lbm), which is distinct from pound-force (lbf).
And then you can start building inertial moments in slug-ft^2.
The nautical mile comes from the measure of 1 second of arc (Β°,mn,s) of longitude over the earth. Hence British nautical and French nautical mile conversion were slightly different as they were not defined at the same latitude.
I did not know their origin, that's hilarious.
That explains why the people who designed the meter found it logical for it to represent a portion of Earth's circumference (1/10 000 000 of the equator-pole distance)
There is the imperial/customary/international foot defined as 0.3048 m, and the surveyor's foot defined as 1200/3937 m (aka .304800609601219202438404 m)
source
Well, to be fair, there has been, the surveyor's foot was deprecated in 2023.
No, but there are fathoms and leagues