Dear Carl, first of all, please note that 'convenience' is more of a relative concept. A good deal of time this characteristic is tied to subjective opinions; at other times it's driven by applications that use the units in question.
These are some of the reasons why we can NEVER satisfy Greeks and Trojans when it comes to 'convenience'! On the other hand we can *technically* build a system of units that ARE 'convenient' and by themselves if done properly. And this is achieved in the SI system. The difficulty here though arises when we deal with the *time* construct (the overwhelming case in your examples). Unfortunately it's fair to say that while the second is the fundamental unit in SI when it comes to the overall time framework we do NOT have a cohesive, coherent, consistent construct to deal with it. What we have is the mediocrity of the stupid Babylonian system which is evidently non-decimal and does not bode well into the SI construct, hence 'opinions' like yours (which are very well-founded, mind you. I unfortunately cannot find strong objections to your post in this regard). More on this below. On Sun, 14 Jul 2002 15:16:53 Carl Sorenson wrote: >The point below is an important one. Measuring in seconds is obviously >superior for many scientific and technical purposes, but in everyday life we >often use hours. If we had a decent agreed-upon time construct our 'hour' would be decimally-defined and there would be no difference in using the hour or the second as one would be able to simply move a decimal point to fall into the other "preferred" unit we may like better! Therefore, it's really sad that situations like these as you describe here end up causing us, metric supporters, a lot of grief, as we unfortunately would not have something... "better" to offer, at times. I just wished we had 100 hours in a day though... >... Automobile speedometers give values in km/h because >those units are more useful when you want to know how long it will take to >get to your destination. Possibly (even though some here may argue that it would be more important for people to simply be able to... "gauge" how fast someone is going and on that one, m/s could also do!), but again, if hypothetically we had a 100-hour framework, for instance, it wouldn't be such a burden to get the m/s value and "automatically" derive the "equivalent" in 'km/h'!!! Finally... >... It's also more convenient to use degrees Celsius in everyday >life rather than kelvins. Each of these units can be converted to pure SI >units without much effort, but they are more convenient. >... The above is a typical case of simply "resetting" where the "zero" is. We do likewise when it comes to atmospheric pressure, mind you, so, this example is somewhat... odd in this regard. But, *unitwise* it's technically appropriate to say that either Celsius or Kelvin provides the same... 'property'. Marcus Is your boss reading your email? ....Probably Keep your messages private by using Lycos Mail. Sign up today at http://mail.lycos.com
