Hal Murray wrote: ...
If you were an alien landing on Earth for the first time, which system would make more sense to you?
Ah! A Godcentric view of the universe. Decimal is an arbitrary number system that came about purely because we had 10 fingers, and a brain that could only think of using them to count on. Your hands are probably right now fondling a model of a life form that would find the metric system to be quite foreign, and unfriendly... Surely you should count using a number system based on an even power of 2? There was a time when I spent more time doing arithmetic in octal than in decimal. If humans had been born with 4 fingers on each hand, we would be talking about how certain we were that an alien would find an octal centric measurement system made more sense. Metric is purely arbitrary, as are all of the variants on the English system. Life would go just as smoothly if we had standardized on the inch, pound, and gallon, and used decimal fractions and multiples to represent measurements larger and smaller than the unit. -Chuck Harris OBTW, as time nuts, we are steeped in the two units of measure that are decidedly non-metric: seconds, and Hz. Think about it... _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
