Comment by ekelsen
5 hours ago
During the French Revolution, they tried to make a right angle have 100 degrees and even recomputed all new trig tables for this new standard. It obviously did not catch on :)
5 hours ago
During the French Revolution, they tried to make a right angle have 100 degrees and even recomputed all new trig tables for this new standard. It obviously did not catch on :)
There's no reason you can't have 400 degrees in a circle and therefore 100 for a right angle.
It's a degree scale: you can choose any number you want.
Indeed, gradiens are a scale where a circle is divided into 400 equal parts. Really fucked me up a few times when I got a new calculator and wasn’t paying attention to what the little “grad” meant.
But I can't subdivide 400 in to as many ways as 360. Think about the pie industry. They could be put out of business!!
I usually want to cut pies into 14 pieces. Some might want 11 or 13. (17 is just too many.) I demand that we implement a system where a circle is 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 7 * 3 * 11 * 13 = 360360 degrees, so that we can cut pies evenly at anywhere from 2 to 15 slices. If my baker cuts a slice at 25739 degrees, I want a refund! (I'll keep the pie, because the pie is obviously useless.)
(720720 might be OK too so we can cut 16 pieces, but honestly, if you're cutting 16 pieces, you're not going to measure. You're just going to divide pieces in half until you have 16. 360360 is the future.)
Of course that's true, that doesn't mean you should.
Some pocket calculators from not too long ago supported this unit for some reason, along with radians and degrees. That's the third option on "DRG" button.
The Indiana pi bill mandated certain mathematical values be changed to the wrong value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
“The bill, written by a physician and an amateur mathematician, never became law.”
Whenever I'm late to a meeting I blame it on the french revolutionary calendar.