begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Sat, Nov 11, 2006 at 06:27:01PM -0800: > Lan Barnes wrote: [snip] > >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).
Well, for that, doesn't metric have a plethora of different units? 250ml ~= 25cl ~= 2.5dl ~= .25l One of the supposed advantages of the metric system[0] was that you could pick your units and get an implied precision... > 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. "About 3 glugs." > 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. I would be terrible at making that sort of cake, I suspect. . . [0] According to the evangelism I got in high-school on the subject. -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
