Lan Barnes wrote:
This is less bizarre that it might seem. Succeding generations of mathematicians have dealt with new kinds of numbers they had trouble believing in. The "real" numbers implied that some weren't. Then there were irrationals, imaginaries, trancendentals, and probably bunches I've forgotten. Probably the next breakthrough will be the "bizarro" numbers.
As I understand it, we currently don't have any numbers we have trouble believing in. Effective handling of certain classes can still be problematic (primes, for example). But field theory seems to have closed most of the holes including things like different degrees of Infinity (there are more real numbers (aleph-1) than there are integer numbers (aleph-0)) as well as non-Euclidean geometric systems.
And, as I may have mentioned before, because the Babylonians did the seminal work on circles and astronomy, circles and time are locked into their non-decimal base. Too bad, especially in time. Kids have to learn it, but it's really klugey[0]
I'm not as convinced it's so "klugey". We use a lot of our units to define an implied precision which is missing in metric. People don't like to move the decimal point until 10^3 for calculation. However, that confuses precision. A quarter hour and 14 minutes imply very different precisions. 250ml probably does not imply 250ml+-1ml. It probably implies 250+-25ml, but you jumped to that conclusion because it is 1/4 of a liter (oops, there's those fractions again).
In metric, is 50ml of red wine in a recipe: 50ml+-1ml or 50ml+-5ml? There is no ambiguity in an English recipe, you would specify one in teaspoons and the other in tablespoons.
This is actually *very annoying* when baking and using a metric recipe. There are certain French cakes with ingredients in which precision matters, and I actually have to scribble the blasted numerical precision on the recipe card to get it right repeatably.
-a -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
