I especially love it when they use the weight of an airplane as a comparison. “It’s as heavy as a Boeing 747”. Even if someone had an intuition about the weight of something that large, they would probably be wrong because aircraft are relatively light for their size, it helps when you need to fly. Everything in a plane is made to be as light as possible, so nothing on board of it would weigh as much as the non-aircraft equivalent you’d be familiar with.
A base-12 metric system would be absolutely gorgeous. Geometry and trigonometry would be greatly simplified with a duodecimal unit circle. Our 360-degree circle is a truly ugly hack to make geometry play nice with a decimal number system.
Our base-10 number system would be as ugly to a duodecimal society as a base-7 system would be to us.
Base-6 wouldn’t be bad at all. “100” in base 6 is 36 in base 10. Their metricated unit circle would have three times as many “degree” divisions as we have hours on a clock.
Base 7 or 14 would require something akin to the sexagesimal abstraction layer we use to make base-10 play nice with angles.
I mean we really should be using Mayan numerals. Switching to a base 12 numerical system would simplify using the Imperial measurement system. /s
but why? you’ll still measure things in football fields, elephants or “large boulders” so it won’t affect you much
Rest of the world: meters, cm, mm
The US: gerbil teeth, lark tongues in aspic, toenail clippings on fire
Pretty sure king crimson are English, still pretty accurate tho
Hm see, we don’t have aspic, and I don’t know what a lark is. But I definitely use bananas for scale
Metres*
Meter is a measuring device (like a rain meter)
Metre is a unit of measurement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre
Meter is seemingly the american spelling, it’s also spelled meter in many european countries e.g. germany, netherlands
Metr in Czech.
We just have to be special. :-D
Nah, it’s like that on most (all?) Slavic languages. It’s метр in Russian for example which is exactly metr just in Cyrillic.
But well he translated the rest of his post into English
Why would we use the American spelling if they don’t like the unit
I especially love it when they use the weight of an airplane as a comparison. “It’s as heavy as a Boeing 747”. Even if someone had an intuition about the weight of something that large, they would probably be wrong because aircraft are relatively light for their size, it helps when you need to fly. Everything in a plane is made to be as light as possible, so nothing on board of it would weigh as much as the non-aircraft equivalent you’d be familiar with.
Excuse me but the correct SI units for length and area are double-decker buses and Waleses respectively ☺️
A base-12 metric system would be absolutely gorgeous. Geometry and trigonometry would be greatly simplified with a duodecimal unit circle. Our 360-degree circle is a truly ugly hack to make geometry play nice with a decimal number system.
Our base-10 number system would be as ugly to a duodecimal society as a base-7 system would be to us.
On the last point, a better comparison would be base 6 or base 14.
10 = 2 × 5
6 = 2 × 3
14 = 2 × 7
Or maybe a better way of thinking about it is the percentage of numbers that divide nicely in the base, as a percentage.
Base 10 has 2, 5, 10 = 30%
So maybe base 3 is the closest, at 33% of numbers being easily divisible.
Either way, 7 is a significantly worse base than 10.
Base-6 wouldn’t be bad at all. “100” in base 6 is 36 in base 10. Their metricated unit circle would have three times as many “degree” divisions as we have hours on a clock.
Base 7 or 14 would require something akin to the sexagesimal abstraction layer we use to make base-10 play nice with angles.
You’re not alone, but the idea of a movment to duodecimal hasn’t had traction in a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal#Advocacy_and_“dozenalism”
Also, ancient Egypt was hip to his idea: https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/2881
Fun fact, you can count from 1 to 12 on one hand by touching your thumb to count your finger bones, as there are 12 of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger-counting#Asia
duodecimal is a decimal based name, I propose “dozecimal”