If your starting position is that eggs must be sold in sets of 12 only, then buying 1 will of course be more complex when using a base-10 currency.
But in the same way that we can't switch to driving on the other side of the road over the space of a week, the UK can't spend a half century or so half-arsedly failing to commit to the metric system, and then complain that things don't make as much sense as they seem to in 95% of the world.
Btw, is your foot precisely 12 inches, or is your shoe? I wonder, because it sounds dreadfully inconvenient to have to take your shoes and socks off when you want to measure a field. (I measure large distance by paces, which for me are roughly a metre.)
I know that my hand span is 22cm, which has occasionally been quite handy when I'm without a tape or rule, and want to roughly measure something -- but that's not a compelling reason for me to advocate a base-11 measuring system. : )
> Btw, is your foot precisely 12 inches, or is your shoe?
It doesn't matter because I'm not looking for a high level of precision when I do that kind of measuring, I'm looking for good enough not perfect. If physicists can handle this notion[1] even when they're the ones tasked with producing SI units I'm not sure why it's not applicable for the rest of us.
> APPROXIMATIONS
> Even though physicists usually try for a high degree of precision, there are times when only a close approximation is neeed. Physicists some times make rough estimates for making tentative decisions.
Sounds like a decent principle to me.
> then complain that things don't make as much sense as they seem to in 95% of the world
It's not Brits that are complaining as we get to choose the measure that suits the aims at the time. If centimetres are appropriate then use centimetres. If feet and inches are better, use that. Do you write all your software in C? Better hope WASM takes off or your competitor using that nasty Javascript will remain ahead.
No, it's the "95%" measuring their height in centimetres (why not millimetres?;) or buying litres of milk that inconvenience themselves while complaining about measures they don't understand because they blind themselves to the advantages. Good sold in Britain have both measures on everything, we're committed, just not dogmatic about it.
a) physicists are not 'tasked with producing SI units'
b) you can have a non-high level of precision with metric as easily as with imperial
c) corollary: metric is not perfect - no one is trying to assert that
d) 'we get to choose the measure that suits the aims at the time' - yes, that sounds like Britain. Let's see how that plays out over the next 5 years.
e) 'if feet and inches are better, use that'. Better?
f) actually, this needs fully quoting:
> No, it's the "95%" measuring their height in centimetres (why not millimetres?;) or buying litres of milk that inconvenience themselves while complaining about measures they don't understand because they blind themselves to the advantages. Good sold in Britain have both measures on everything, we're committed, just not dogmatic about it.
Let's recalibrate:
i) it's not "95%" -- it's 95%. 7.59b people on the planet and 320m in USA, 4m in Liberia, 50m in Burma -- you could throw in the recalcitrants in the UK, but we're still rounding to about 5% of the planet that isn't on metric.
ii) people that use metric are allowed to use centimetres and millimetres .. and metres, decimetres, kilometres. All is good, sensible, easy to transition between by shifting the decimal point. I'm 187cm / 1.87m / 1870mm tall. With shoes on, add 2cm (but no need to adjust the length of the field I'm stepping out).
iii) I don't get the inconvenience of buying a litre of milk ... ?
iv) committed but not dogmatic - what a wonderfully British phrasing. We kind of get it, but we demand to reserve our right to randomly claim exceptionalism, for reasons that can't be described, defined, or defended.
This whole thread is an exercise in pedantry - and that's okay, we tend to revel in analysis of the minutia here.
Whether a holder of a British passport could be called xenophobic about the British, especially when making a comment about the regrettable decision by the British to remove themselves from the EU - well, it seems a bold claim to make.
I genuinely am wildly fascinated to see what happens as the Brexit catastrophe unfolds.
I'll admit that I was mildly frustrated by your apparent unwillingness to engage on the much more interesting discussion to be had around the flaws in your argument.
I've once heard the base 12/base 60 system is derived from how people used to count with their fingers long ago:
1 hand has a thumb and four other fingers, each consisting of 3 parts. So you point with your thumb to one of these 3 times 4=12 parts.
If you run out of numbers, you take your other hand an put up a finger, then start counting from 1 with the other hand again. 5 fingers give you 5 times 12=60 possible combinations.
No idea why they didn't do the thumb + 12 positions stuff with the other hand, which would have given 12 times 12=144 possibilities. Speculation: Maybe there was no need as such high numbers didn't appear in practice?.
Base 60 was used by the babylonians. They were big into astrological observations, and so I think their influence affected time and angle calculations.
The numbers 12, 60 and 360 that occur in our time and angle calculations are interestingly factorials divided by 2. (4! = 24, 5! = 120, 6! = 720).
Since larger factorials have both 2 and 4 as factors, they have 2^3 as part of their factorisation, and by the time you get to 6! you introduce another factor of 2, so it's not a big loss dropping one of those power of 2, you still have a huge range of factors and hence ease when working with fractions with these numbers.
Attempts to replace degrees with base 10 (gradians) appears to be slow on the uptake, with radians being a more natural measurement (but who wants irrational angles in everyday life) so I think we're stuck with degrees.
There was an attempt to replace 24h system by 10h system around the same time metric system was introduced (French Republican Revolution), as a part of (much better, IMO) French Republican Calendar. Unfortunately, it didn't gain enough momentum and was cancelled after not so long.
Babylonians inherited base-60 from sumerians. AFAIK, there is no real consensus why exactly it was base-60 with sumerians. One hypothesis is exactly what hyperman1 is telling us. Also, don't quote me on that, but I seem to remember hearing that 360° might have been introduced not because of divisibility specifically, but because of the size of the sun. Not sure how plausible is that, but, notably, angular diameter of the sun is ≈0.5°. So I might believe it is related, but if I'm not mistaken 5/12/60-numeric systems seem to be much older than 360°.
Interesting, but the fact that a sequence of finger positions indicates a number sounds risky in a blink and you get the wrong result kind of way.
When we travelled to China years ago we were advised to learn the one-handed 1-10 gestures[1] which we were assured was in common use there, and solves one of the basic problems of asking for specific quantities of things without language.
I guess that if you had an agreed endian (LSH / MSH?) you could represent all integers from 0-110 in a single two-handed gesture.
Obviously, with 10 fingers, you could also represent 0-1023 by holding up various digits - and that's needing only two states per finger. How quickly or easily others would be able to read that representation is a different question. Plus most of us would need some training exercises to recover finger independence of pinky and ring.
The metric system is everywhere in Britain. Brexit was about returning to and retaining common law, as Roger Scuton so eloquently lays out in this speech.
I wonder if he'd lived, he'd have changed his opinion from 4 years ago, given the dogs breakfast that is the current transition process, run by a non-representative collection of opportunists.
I did watch the video you shared, btw, but I didn't feel his argument was especially persuasive.
With ~45 years or EEC/EC/EU membership to refer to, there were zero examples offered where this ostensible move away from common law had actually manifested, let alone in a negative way.
Actually, I thought his position seemed to be the standard nebulously nostalgic nationalism.
I don't recall common law being a talking point in any of the leave / remain discussions and marketing. Cameron originally couched the question purely around economics -- which unfortunately made the public debate, such as it was, vulnerable to grossly influential outright lies around money. The famous '£350m a week’ lie, f.e.
This then seemed to morph (or was manufactured) into some kind of national identity existential crisis.
But in the same way that we can't switch to driving on the other side of the road over the space of a week, the UK can't spend a half century or so half-arsedly failing to commit to the metric system, and then complain that things don't make as much sense as they seem to in 95% of the world.
Btw, is your foot precisely 12 inches, or is your shoe? I wonder, because it sounds dreadfully inconvenient to have to take your shoes and socks off when you want to measure a field. (I measure large distance by paces, which for me are roughly a metre.)
I know that my hand span is 22cm, which has occasionally been quite handy when I'm without a tape or rule, and want to roughly measure something -- but that's not a compelling reason for me to advocate a base-11 measuring system. : )