The use of knots exposes the Achilles Heel of the metric system. The numbers don't mean anything. They are all in the wrong ratios to each other to conveniently describe the relationships of natural objects, which perversely cling to proportions like 1/3 or 1/5, how many sides on a snowflake? Bet it isn't ten.
But the knot is a great unit because it has a relationship to a degree of longitude anywhere or a degree of latitude at the equator. There are 60 nautical miles to a degree. It is no coincidence that there are 60 minutes in a degree as well, is it? This has connections with our measurement of time, distance and angles. Now toss a metric measurement in there and all those obvious relationships just get entirely covered up in nonsensical decimal places of numbers in the power of 10. Nice even, obvious proportions hidden by the use of inappropriate units.
For instance, let's pick on the famous three minute rule we use in targeting. The number of hundred yards traversed by the target in three minutes is its speed in knots. Why? Because we have chosen to define the units to all have even relationships as shown above! The units make sense.
Of course we can do the same thing with the metric system in meters, we just have to pick the units to show the result, so we end up with the number of hundred meters traversed in three minutes and fifteen seconds is the speed in knots. Why the odd number, 3:15? Because the units have no relationship to each other. We've concealed a very important relationship between distance, time and angles. How many people have had to ask the question "Why 3:15?" They can't see the relationship. Inappropriate units hinder understanding of reality.
Even the Germans had the sense to use knots. There's a message there. (I'll bet the French aren't smart enough to use knots. They're the prime sponsors of the metric system.)
As much as anything else, the metric system is a proclamation of the political system of Revolutionary France in the first decade of the 19th century. Yes, they tried to make 10 hours per day, 10 days per week and have a metric year redefining the month and wiping out the relationships between lunar and solar movement in telling time. After all, man's stupidity is the measure of the universe. Be damned with real relationships, ease of calculation will be king even if the resulting numbers no longer calculate anything.
From now on all families are required to have ten children. Triangles must have ten sides.
You know I did find just one just about perfect decimal relationship. When a mixture of gas and air ignites in the engine of your car it expands almost exactly 1000 times. All together now:
Metric System! This is too much fun! I hope I'm being entertaining as well as thought provoking. This kind of contention should be fun.
Actually the gist of my argument in favor of the appropriateness of the English system of measurements with all its charmingly archaic units is that they, like the natural world, tend to be proportioned by the ratios of small prime numbers or the products of small prime numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12. Isn't it interesting that the number 5 rarely occurs? 1/5 is also a rare relationship in the natural world. Of course these relationships weren't chosen purposely in the way we think of selection. They came from simple observation of the proportions primarily of the human body. Of course the proportions of the human body are echoed in the rest of creation as well, but they had no way of knowing that. They just did what worked. There's an honesty to that. And a potential tragedy if in the name of ease of calculation we obliterate the wisdom contained in those units.