Hasta La Ideas

I hate the imperial measurement system, and can confidently say that anyone who doesn’t recognize the superiority of metric is a freaking idiot. How nice it must be for you Aussies, Germans and Koreans to drill an 8mm hole, realize you need it a smidgen bigger, and yell down the ladder for a 9mm bit. Versus us Yankees drilling a 7/32 hole, then having to do an equation in your head to calculate if you need a 3/16 or a 1/4.

For the non-mathematically-gifted like me, dividing things with fractions is the worst. For example, when doing DIY projects you often have to calculate the midpoint of a particular piece—whether it’s wood, fabric or metal—and I’d be constantly scrawling equations onto the piece of wood I was working and having to sand the marks off afterwards. That is, until I learned this simple tip to easily find the exact midpoint without having to divide fractions.

Let’s say I want to find the midpoint of the board above. We take a tape measure to it…

…and see it’s 17-something. That’s all you’re looking for, ignore the finer gradations.

Then we take note of the nearest even number, whether higher or lower than the actual measurement. In this case the nearest even number is 18.

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