• TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          It kinda made sense for a while. Remember we’re looking at this from a modern lense.

          240 is very divisible. It’s similar to why we chose 360° for a circle, or 24 hours in a day.

          It stopped making sense as more and more countries shifted to decimalisation, and machines made extremely quick+accurate division trivial and accessible.

      • mahomz@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        You’re right, but also stones are mostly used as an approximate unit of bodyweight in casual conversation, so people would usually say “I’m about 10 and a half stone”.

        If you’re dealing with bodyweight where accuracy matters, like in a medical sense, it’s metric anyway. Plenty of people here aren’t even sure of how many pounds make up a stone, despite regularly using the latter as a measurement.