I will agree that one of the few places that the imperial system is hands down better than metric is that on the highway it's roughly 1 mile per minute. That and it's just barely possible to run a mile in under 4 minutes, so makes for a nice clean time barrier. But these are just coincidences and are the exception not the rule
IMO the imperial system is full of these coincidences, and if you look at history, you can see how they emerged: from historical people changing the size of the units until they had enough useful coincidences.
A mile is about 1000 steps for a marching army, about 20 minutes of walking, or about 1 minute by car. Comfortable Farenheit temperatures roughly run from 0 to 100. A foot is about the length of a foot or a forearm, and an inch is about the length of the top joint of a thumb. 1/1000th of an inch (a "mil") is roughly the smallest discernable difference in size of objects when you look closely. People are about 6 feet tall. People weigh 100-200 lbs. The "lucky coincidences" continue. They do because they were evolved, not because they were accidents.
Contrast that with the metric system, which was built around properties of water and powers of 10 (which are not obviously better than the powers of 2 and 3 that the imperial system uses - next time you need a 1/3rd recipe you can see what I mean). It is not an accident that a day is 2x2x2x3 hours and an hour is 2x2x3x5 minutes (attempts to adopt metric time were proposed, but rejected). Neither is it an accident that a foot is 2x2x3 inches, and a mile is 2x2x2x2x2x3x5x11 feet (although I have never divided anything by 11 recently). Imperial volumetric measurements are basically binary fixed point: 1 gallon is 16 cups, and 1 cup is 16 tbsp. There are lots of historical names for the intermediate units, like quarts and furlongs, but those have evolved over a longer period of time.
For scientific use, the metric system is obviously a lot easier, and order of magnitude matters a lot more than easy divisibility and "feel" of a unit. For everyday use, I am not sold on it.
There are a few coincidences in the imperial system that make life easy. That highway driving speed is around 1 mile per minute is a pure coincidence.
Most/all of the other examples you list are pretty useless to me for daily life:
- A mile is closer to 2100 paces for me, a 6’2” guy
- 20min/mile walking is just as useful as 12min/km which is about equivalent speed
- Temps, sure it’s a nice 0-100 witch is symmetric but not much else
- 1/1000th of an inch doesn’t impact my daily life
- height and weight are similar to temperature. A pleasant range that doesn’t make anything in my life easier
- imperial volumetric measurements are actually insane and actively make my life worse. It doesn’t matter that they’re readily divisible by common numbers bc it’s impossible to remember what number to divide by to go between them.
They are coincidences since these units were created well before modern cars, but they seem to have been created with reasonable relations to human constraints, instead of water.
Everything you said about temperature is 100% true. Fahrenheit is simply better for day to day use.
I disagree with you about distance measurements. I think the relationship between millimeters, centimeters, and meters is so much better than the relationship between 1/8th inch, an inch, and a foot, that it makes up for the convenience of traveling roughly one mile per minute on the freeway.
I'm "split" on small lengths. Inches and feet were designed to divide nicely into many things, like 1/3, but the conversion is a little bothersome. Sub-inch measurements are usually expressed in fractions instead of decimals. Decimal inches are an option, but I guess that doesn't match the theme. So it's a matter of whether you want to do things in fractions or decimals, and one is probably better, but I can't tell which.
