It's software this time!
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λ the β-Redex Reducer
β-Redex Reducing Member
Metric is superior! Metric grows in multiples of 10 or 1000, while inches grow in random multiples and completely change name, there's no system behind Imperial. The imperial system is made for retards who want to use their thumbs and feet for measuring and do not know that different people have different sizes thumbs and feet. Metric is made by smart people who know that multiplying in the same base that is used for writing out numbers is easy and who know that a system which uses a few rules to create many units by making use of their relations to each other is superior to making a completely arbitrary name for each separate unit.
The only reasons that many USA folk defend Imperial system is because of nationalism, they are too proud to see how retarded their system is. It's OK USA folk, just because your country uses a retarded system does not make you retarded. You can still be smart and use the superior system.
Though of course base 10 is stupid too. It's not a highly composite number and is thus inefficient in how many fractions it can finitely represent. Most notably, it cannot even represent 1/3 in decimal. The superior system is Dozenal which gives loads of fractions for how small a number it is. No smaller number has more fractions. So the really really smart people use dozenal and a metric system using powers of 12 as multipliers. AFAIK no country is that smart as of now.
I hope that one day we wil become enlightened and move to the superior dozenal system. Sexagesimal would be good too. But not decimal. Decimal is for retards who need their fingers to count and are too stupid to even do that properly. (if you use your thumb to point to finger segments then you can count to 12 on each hand. But this is too complicated for base 10 lovers.)
Silent-Hunter
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What about hexadecimal?
Letalis Sonus
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Measurement system =/= positional system. The derailment is getting derailed.
levi
Still fresh, damnit!
Easy; when someone says 3.5" drive, think 14699x10^-2mm by 10185x10^-2mm by 2611x10^-2mm (length, width, then height if mounted horizontally)
And when they say 2.5" drive, they mean exactly 100mm by 6985x10^-2 by one of 5, 7, 95x10-1, 125x10-1, 15 or 19 millimeters
Easier than remembering that a 3.5inch drive is actually 575x10^-2 by 4 by 1 inches, and a 2.5inch drive is actually 3964x10-2 by 275x10^-2 by various heights. The actual platters inside I'd expect to be closer to their indicated designation, but I've never actually measured one.
Confuzzled
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You can count up to 31 on each hand. (Binary). Also, many number systems are vigesimal. The Mayan number system was basically vigesimal, and there are remnants of vigesimal in Danish, French and English counting systems (think of the King James Bible setting the lifespan of a man to threescore years and ten (KJV, Psalms 90 v10)). There are definite (human) advantages to duodecimal/dozenal and sexagesimal counting systems, but the vast majority of arithmetic operations these days are performed in binary, by machines aka computers.
λ the β-Redex Reducer
β-Redex Reducing Member
That's good for systems that are based on some positive power of 2.
Metric system uses multipliers that are integer powers of 10 because we use a base 10 positional system. They're connected. That is what makes the metric system easy to use.
Though in the case of the brain dead imperial system the base of the positional system does not matter. It's always difficult to deal with because it's an arbitrary mess.
You could but you may attract some anger when you reach 4.
Confuzzled
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Unlikely, as I'm not in the USA. On the other hand if I count to 6 holding my palm oriented towards my face, I risk insulting Brits.
Creature XL
Active Member
You should educate yourself instead of rambling on the Internet.
Americans learn and use the metric system, but not officially.
Wanna know why? It is too expensive to change it now. Billions of Dollars for street signs and so on.
There is athe least one video on YouTube, I should know, because I watched it
Americans learn and use the metric system, but not officially.
Wanna know why? It is too expensive to change it now. Billions of Dollars for street signs and so on.
There is athe least one video on YouTube, I should know, because I watched it
Confuzzled
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Stuff and nonsense. Base-10 counting systems were used as far back as the Minoan civilisation (before 1500 BCE), and position-based notation using a symbol for zero was in widespread use in India sometime before the 9th century CE. Scientists certainly used base-10/metric before the French revolution, as demonstrated by Briggsian logarithms conceived by Henry Briggs working with John Napier as an improvement on Napierien logarithms in about 1617, somewhat before the French revolution.
levi
Still fresh, damnit!
I don't care what any of you say; my vote goes for octal.
JDTAY
Half Pepperoni, All Cheese
ible
professional vim user
i used to believe base-12 would be better, but base-6 would have most of its advantages (it's a highly composite number for its size) while having a smaller multiplication table.
i made a joke balanced base 255 number system once, though i've been thinking about it lately (and how i might improve it).
i made a joke balanced base 255 number system once, though i've been thinking about it lately (and how i might improve it).
Confuzzled
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Naturally we should be using base e.
λ the β-Redex Reducer
β-Redex Reducing Member
Metric is good because it's an actual system as opposed to a random collection of units. E.g. if you know what a kilo, mega, and terra is, and you know what a meter, second, and gram is, then you can make 9 units with that. You know 6 things, but get 9 units. In fact, you get n×m units where n is the amount of prefixes you know and m is the amount of base units you know. E.g. AFAIK I've never heard someone talk about a terragram, but I immediately know what kind of unit that is because it follows from the system.Woops! This was a reply to Lambda.
I don't agree with what you wrote here. What you wrote is overly broad and lacks context. Here is what you missed:
1) Imperial == base 12
Base 12 counting is probably something like 10 000 years old, maybe older. The ancients used various types of counting systems but THEY NEVER used base 10.
The reason for that is that base 12 is perfect for low technology and relative precision types of industries and where you simply double numbers or halve them in fractions and that is good enough. So, for example, building ancient roads, ancient bridges and so forth is just good enough for the kinds of tolerences they worked with. Even today, in North America, we make houses to fairly crude tolerences of 1/16th of an inch at the most.
So, just consider that base 12 is designed for the kinds of normal things ancient and current people build, used by people whose kings and queens had less education than our grade 4 students.
On top of that, you have to consider that the upper bound for the amount of things that most regular people needed to count up to was 60 and base 12 fractions and multiplies nicely up and down 0 to 60 at reasonable and easy to understood tolerences that allowed ancient people to build small buildings, roads, houses, castles, roman bridges and even the pyramids without any education whatsoever. You can train someone to use base 12 with no knowledge of numbers or reading in a few hours because it is intrinsic to how use the tools them selves. You cannot do that with metric.
Imperial really is an amazing counting system.
2) Metric == base 10
What most people don't know is that metric WAS NOT created because 1234567890 and just add a 0 to get a multiple is easier. Metric WAS NOT CREATED BECAUSE IT WAS BETTER. Metric was created in France as a POLITICAL STATEMENT as a result of all of the historical events leading up to the end of the French revolution and the overthrow of French aristocracy.
Metric is a political statement by the unedcuated masses of the French of that period rebelling against all systems imposed on them by a 1000 years of French aristocracy with some bullshit mixed in by the various movements that were around that time like the Enlightenment.
Add to that that NO ANCIENT HUMAN CIVILIZATION ever invented base 10 because base 10 naturally imposes arbitrary levels of decimal pracision for most calculations. So, beyond the basic counting up and down by one or a multiple of 10, most of base 10 is not easily divisible without introducing arbitrarily large decimal precision.
3) At high enough levels of precision, neither metric nor imperial make any difference. I worked as a machinist when I was young. I could mill and lathe anything of almost any shape (except organic shapes you can now do easily with cad based systems) to 2 / 1000s of an inch. We often did military work and they would sometimes require 2thou or 3 thou precision which was pretty fucking silly as most work was between 5thou and 10thou (10 thousands of an inch).
But, if I was working in metric, it made no difference because the measuring tools provided the readouts to the x.xxxxx mounts of precision and calculators did the calculation.
In the modern world where high precision engineering is a huge part of our economy, base 12 is fine and base 10 is fine. Base 10 only has one advantage in that the rest of the world is standardized on it, I am fine with ingoring the rest of the world.
4) People who think that Americans don't want to switch to metric for political reasons have no clue what they are talking about.
Imperial is the measuring system of ancient tradition of craftsmen and users who have a noble and practical need to make normal life things and keep politics out of the trades while metric is EXPLICITLY created for political reasons and ONLY political reasons.
Did you guys know the French tried to make the daily clock a base 10 clock and throw away the base 12 clock that we use now? This did not happen because normal people rebelled and nearly killed those that tried to impose it BECAUSE they realized that a base 10 clock is stupid.
Summary: The French are dumb (tm).
Hehehe!
With the imperial system each unit has to be learned separately. You only know need to learn m units to know m units. There's nothing more to it. In addition, when you move up a unit it multiples by random amounts. 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 yard = 3 feet = 36 inches, 1 mile = 1,760 yards = 5,280 feet = 63,360 inches. There is no rhyme or reason. And multiplying by amounts that are not the an integer power of the base that you're using is more time consuming than multiplying by some number that's an integer power of the number base that you're using.
It's not even about the specific units and prefixes. It's having separate base units and prefixes that can be combined and being consistent with multipliers that's so great about the metric system. The imperial system has no thought behind it, it's just a few random units and that's it. It's simple and inefficient and it's only advantage is that it can be created without putting any thought or coordination into it.
In addition, with the exception of mass it's always obvious in the metric system what derived units are based of. E.g. Watts are not based on kilometres, but on metres; and not on nanoseconds, but on seconds. The standard unit that's used to define compound units is almost always just the unit without prefix. That's easy. The only exception is the kilogram which makes no sense and IMO was a mistake.
theredbaron
Very Active Member
Exactly.You should educate yourself instead of rambling on the Internet.
Americans learn and use the metric system, but not officially.
Wanna know why? It is too expensive to change it now. Billions of Dollars for street signs and so on.
There is athe least one video on YouTube, I should know, because I watched it
As well as, technically, the USA is on the metric system. We just have an abstraction layer on top of if. All our measurements are difined via the metric system.
The people here know both too, at least at a base level. When I was in school we learned both via a meter stick, and a yard stick, though miles are the standard (though pogo actually got people understanding kilometers more now
) . We have gallons of milk, but soda and water bottles are in liters. We weigh most things in lbs, but all our medical stuff is in grams (as is our none medical drugs).We see the good side of going metric, but understand that there are issues too. Namely money, but also mind share. We "could" do a hard and fast switch. That would cost alot of money thouw, as well as just be hard. Relearning things isn't easy, especially for our southern folk (
), and for no actual benefits. So instead we are having a slow roll out, just get everybody to understand it all as a background process. Once everybody already is use to the metric system, then we wiill go all in. Till then, why bother? As I saId, we are already technically on the metric, so all the good is done. The rest is just ease of upkeep, which we are working on,but not a big deal.
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levi
Still fresh, damnit!
For one thing, it's spelt 'teragram', or possibly 'teragramme' in French and older English.
If in doubt, think about hard disk sizes; they used to come in megabytes, then gigabytes and now terabytes. It's the same SI prefix, unless that is you insist on using mebibytes and all that.
This is something i also have to ask ^^
Make Pyra Assampled Again (MPAA)
Make Pyra Assampled Again (MPAA)
