One of the reasons that people like Mr. Parry were forced to recede back into their holes in the ground was that they didn't know the that those who build guided missiles don't measure in a base 16 system but in base 10 and in millimetres, as you note. Has anyone ever seen a human interface measuring device made using base 8 or 16 numerics, or is it always in decimals?
Computers don't really use base 8 or 16. They use base 2. Either the switch is on or it is off. Base 8 is just a short hand for human users of grouping base 2 numbers in to groups of three digits and base 16 is grouping in groups of 4 digits. A base 2 number of 11001011110011001 can be expressed in base 8 as 313731 or in base 16 as 19799. There are even those who will claim that imperial is base 3, 4 12, 16, 32 or whatever sounds nice to them, but in reality it uses base 10 numerics like everything else. They like to confuse (either deliberately or ignorantly) bases and conversion factors. It isn't surprising that imperial extremists can't get it right. Jerry ________________________________ From: Pierre Abbat <[email protected]> To: U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 8:32:07 PM Subject: [USMA:44712] Re: A blast from the past - Australian anti-metric Association > Mr. Parry believes that the metric system will prove to be outdated - there > are better systems. He says that advanced computers use a 16 base system; > the computers that control guided missiles cannot do decimal calculations; > decimal calculations are too slow! Mr. Robert Parry is doing a first class > job. He should be given support. I have not programmed guided missiles, but I have programmed barcode readers and battery chargers. The battery charger uses an idiosyncratic unit equal to a seventeenth of a volt. It uses an 8-bit ADC (0-255) to digitize a range of 0 to 15 V. The barcode reader uses a time unit of 1/1152000 s, or something like that, to measure bar widths. The timer overflows in 65536 of these units. Its clock rate, IIRR, was chosen to be a multiple of 9600 Hz so that it can talk in common baud rates. These idiosyncratic units have nothing to do with an all-purpose measuring system with a consistent numeric base, except for being defined in terms of it. As to the base of such a system, it could have been 16, 20, 60, or 10, as long as most humans know how to calculate in that base.. Base 20 was used in what are now northern Spain, France, England, and Guatemala, and base 60 was used in Babylonia. Base 10 has won out, and that is what the metric system is based on. There is no other general-purpose measuring system with a different base; other sets of units have numeric mishmashes. Pierre
