[lug] Fwd: Pi Day is coming

[Bear Giles]

Also... the earliest(?) number system after fingers was either base 60 or
base 360. (I can't remember which.) Like you pointed out it's easily
divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6.

IIRC an article I read years ago the notation was based on remainders. That
is, you didn't have 60 distinct symbols, you had what we would now call a
tuple of (a, b, c) where a is remainder 3, b is remainder 4 and c is
remainder 5. The rules look a little weird to us but they're not hard to
learn. In a non-technical society most things are under 60, esp. once you
use different scales. (e.g., the difference between a bottle, keg and
barrel).


On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 12:46 PM, Bear Giles <bgiles at coyotesong.com> wrote:

> As I get older I think the problem is that we're trying to shoehorn
> everything into a single system. There's no reason why we can't use
> different systems for different scales.
>
> The best example is temperature. Fahrenheit didn't make any sense until
> someone pointed out to me that in Germany the temperature was usually
> between 0F and 100F. That's an easier range to work with than, um, call it
> -15C to 40C.
>
> Likewise it's easiest to work with factors of 2 or 3 when cooking - it's
> easy to divide things into equal piles. It's a lot harder to do that with
> 10 since the only factors are 2 (easy) and 5 (hard).
>
> Distance is similar. It's easy to factor 12" and integral multiples of it.
>
> At the same time there's no question that when you're talking about things
> outside of immediate human scale then you need to go metric. There's also a
> lot of times when you can use either system and there's no cost in going
> metric - 2 liter bottles of soda, metric nuts, etc.
>
> BTW a mile is 1000 Roman paces. In fact that's the basis of the name mile.
> (mil = 1000).
>
> BTW 2 I don't know anyone who does the translations outside of elementary
> school (or an engineering environment). You just know them. Quick, show a
> cm between your finger and thumb. Do you just do it or do you start with an
> inch and then try to guess 40% of it?
>
> Bear
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 12:27 PM, Stephen Queen <svqueen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> When my wife bakes a pie (ref back to pie day), she just eyeballs all of
>> the measurements anyhow. She never cooks or bakes the same thing twice. I
>> usually only estimate things too. When I went for a walk, it was about 2
>> miles. When I was in the service, the M16A1 rifle was about 39 inches long,
>> so when I think of a meter, I think about the length of that rifle I had to
>> carry. I can't really envision 1000 rifles lined up butt to barrel any more
>> than I can envision 5280 of my feet toe to heel.
>> I do enjoy asking someone raised outside of the US whether they think
>> that nut is 1/2" or 9/16". ( I can't usually tell either, but I've met
>> people who could see metric and US.)
>> Now if you want to talk about things that confuse me, lets talk about all
>> the different datams that my GPS allows me to select from. What is that all
>> about?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Davide Del Vento <
>> davide.del.vento at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> > I've always preferred the US system of linear measurement over the
>>> metric
>>> > system. You can divde 10 by 1,2,5,and10. You can divide 12 by
>>> > 1,2,3,4,6,and12. Also "1/3" is more accurate than "0.333...". I always
>>> found
>>> > it easy to think of a section of land, 640 acres to be 1 square mile.
>>>
>>> Ok so you like 640 better than 1000. You must have been involved with
>>> the design of those PC's and their weird 640kB of memory (just trying
>>> not to be too much off-topic :-)
>>>
>>> But how about these: How many square inches are in a acre? How many
>>> cubic inches are in a gallon? How many cubic inches in a fluid ounce?
>>> How much does a fluid ounce of water weight? I could go on forever and
>>> it get worse when you have compound units such as PSI and the likes.
>>> The equivalent questions in the metric systems are *all*
>>> straightforward and all power of ten. I would be ok if all the
>>> imperial units would have been consistent among themselves say with
>>> *all* power or 2 or *all* power of 60 (like we do with time for the
>>> very reason you mention), or whatever. Instead no, sometimes is power
>>> of two, sometimes is 60, sometimes is 12 or whatnots. There is so much
>>> to remember and so much to get wrong.
>>>
>>> In fact I learned all the metric equivalences in third grade and loved
>>> these homeworks since then: they were super easy. And with a few
>>> additional tricks they taught me in college with Physics 101, I could
>>> do *any* metric computation without calculator nor paper nor pencil,
>>> from astrophysics to particles. Impossible to do that with Imperial
>>> units (and in fact Physicists in the USA use metric system too).
>>>
>>> > Just some idle thought,
>>> Ditto :-)
>>>
>>> Have a nice weekend (I'll test all the suggestions about feed readers
>>> and email program)
>>> Davide
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>>
>>
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>
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