John,
it's only because your mind has been trained with imperial units.
Nothing at all getting to 166cm from 500cm. Except it's actually 166.7.
(166cm, +7mm)

Yeah it's a pain if you're using a yard stick, but they do make tapes
in cm/mm.   Much easier to measure something in mm than in 32nds or
64ths of an inch. Have you tried to count off 45/64ths on your ruler?

  Two chairs and a sofa and the length of your wall are the same size
whether you describe them in inches or cm or cubits.   Cm just happens
to work better on graph paper.

On Wednesday, February 1, 2006, at 02:37 PM, Automatic digest processor
wrote:

> The other thing about most people's mundane lives is that we don't
> generall=
> y
> deal with  things that vary by orders of magnitude. Physics
> calculations,
> sure. Dividing 16 feet into three equal bits, not so much. It's much
> quicke=
> r
> to get to 5'4" from 16' than it is to get to 166cm from 5m. It's just
> the
> way the systems are constructed. Decimal systems like metric are
> optimized
> for science and engineering, but feet and inches are optimized for
> figuring
> out if two chairs and a sofa will fit against the wall.
>
> --
> John Bange
> '90 Vanagon - "Gelds