JDG wrote:
>
>Still, at least Farenheit is a much better system for everday temperatures
>than Celsius. Also, I would have to say that measuring the height of
>people in feet is far more useful than a bizarre 1.3 metres.
>
Celsius - and most of SI - is based on the properties of water, which
is much more natural. Water freezes at 0, boils at 100. This is far more
useful for everyday temperatures than Farenheit.
Julia Thompson wrote:
>
>Hey, knots at least make some sense! One knot is a one minute degree on a
>great circle on the surface of the Earth -- no more arbitrary than the
>meter! ;)
>
One knot is one minute per hour? So, it's 1/60th of the great circle per day?
Bah. This just confuses the equations, because the arc-minute is some
fraction of the arc-time.
It's a pity that SI didn't ban degrees and replace them by decimal degrees
(where 360 degrees = 400 "decimal degrees"; my first calculator machine
still had an option to use this instead of deg or rad)
Julia, from other message:
>
>Um, first of all, it would be given as 8 feet 1 inch tall, and that's
>TALL. (Pretty darn tall!) That's significantly over 2 meters tall. My
>father-in-law, who's a pretty tall guy, isn't even 2 meters. (He's 6 feet
>4 inches, IIRC -- after 6 feet, I just register people as "really tall",
>and he's "really tall". My husband is *almost* 6 feet tall, so that's
>why my "really tall" cutoff begins close to there....)
>
I used the conversion factors 1 inch = 2 cm (measured from my
computer screen, who is nominally 14 inches and measures 28 cm)
and 1 foot = 14 inches (taken from Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh
Mistress_). Am I right?
Joshua Bell wrote:
>
>On that note, though, we should also have switched to base 12 (and grown two
>extra fingers) since it's much more handy than base 10 (divisible by 2, 3
>and 4). Maybe we should revive sexagesimal. Then our clocks would make
>sense, and the yearly hoax email about "metric time" would be a non-issue.
>
No, base 10 is bad enough with 2 divisors, base 12 would be hell with
so many divisors. Mathematically, it's simpler to have just one prime
factor for the base, because then all fractions (except those that are
powers of the root of the base) are infinite "decimals".
Dan Minette wrote:
>
>Also, the metric system has its own problems. It uses kilograms as a unit
>of weight, when we all know that the proper unit of weight is Newtons.
>
It should have used *grams* are the unit of mass; but at least the units
relate to each other as powers of 10. And SI-aware kids learn the
difference between Mass and Weight pretty soon.
Alberto Monteiro
