Comment by PostOnce
19 days ago
There is a counterproductive obsession with powers of 10.
Sometimes, other systems just make more sense.
For example, for time, or angles, or bytes. There are properties of certain numbers (or bases) that make everything descending from them easier to deal with.
for angles and time (and feet): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_highly_composite_numb...
For other problems we use base 2, 3, 8, 16, or 10.
Must we treat metric as a hammer, and every possible problem as a nail?
Now that I think about it, I see KiB and kb all the time but I don't know that I've ever encountered Kib or kB in the wild. Maybe I'm in a bubble? Or maybe we should accept that kb is power of 10 but kB is power of two?
Well I guess we already basically have this in practice since Ki can be shortened to K seeing as metric prefixes are always lower case and we clearly aren't talking about kelvin bytes.
Uppercase "B" stands for byte, and lowercase "b" stands for bit. But it's very common for people to miss the distinction, sadly, even professionals are sloppy.
The bit/byte ambiguity annoys me in real life far more than the 1000/1024 ambiguity.
Agreed. Metric is stupid.
The ancient Sumerians used multiples of 60, as we continue to do for time and angles (which are related) today. It makes perfect sense. 60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, which makes it easy to use in calculations. Even the metric people are not so crazy as to propose replacing these with powers of 10.
Same with pounds, for example. A pound is 16 ounces, which can be divided 4 times without involving any fractions. Try that with metric.
Then there's temperature. Fahrenheit just works more naturally over the human-scale temperature range without involving fractions. Celsius kind of sucks by comparison.
> Same with pounds, for example. A pound is 16 ounces, which can be divided 4 times without involving any fractions. Try that with metric.
Not sure if you're actually serious... 1 kg is 1000 g, dividing with 4 gets you 250 g, no fractions. And no need to remember arbitrary names or numbers for conversions.
> Then there's temperature. Fahrenheit just works more naturally over the human-scale temperature range without involving fractions. Celsius kind of sucks by comparison.
Again, I'm not sure I get it. With celsius, 0°C is freezing temperature of water and 100°C is boiling point of water. For fahrenheit it was something like 32 and 212? And in every day use, people don't need fractions, only full degrees. Celsius also aligns well with Kelvins without fractions (unlike fahrenheit).
> Celsius also aligns well with Kelvins without fractions (unlike fahrenheit).
But Fahrenheit aligns well with Rankine without fractions (unlike Celsius). [Imagine some symbol here indicating humour.]
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re: fahrenheit, it's utility is that 0 and 100 are near the extremes of human comfort. 0 = fuckin cold and 100 = fuckin hot
Whereas in C, 0 is fine and 100 means you died 50 degrees ago.
However, C is much more useful in industry, where boiling and freezing points are more important.
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> Not sure if you're actually serious... 1 kg is 1000 g, dividing with 4 gets you 250 g, no fractions.
Dividing by four is not the same as dividing four times.
> I'm not sure I get it
I'm pretty sure that you don't
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> A pound is 16 ounces, which can be divided 4 times without involving any fractions. Try that with metric.
1000 g, 500 g, 250 g, 125 g
I also don't understand the fear around fractions - we deal with halves, quarters and fifths all the time in the natural world.
> I also don't understand the fear around fractions - we deal with halves, quarters and fifths all the time in the natural world.
Yes, and a certain fast food company found that their 1/3 lb burgers weren't selling well, because their idiot customers can't maff too good and thought 1/4 was bigger than 1/3.
> even the metric people are not so crazy
No, they were absolutely that crazy [1]. Luckily the proposal fell through.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
And 60 can be also divided by 10, 12, 15 and 30.
And you can go with 120 or, better 210 so you get 7 in.
Pure madness.