51–60 of 138 posts
Yet another battle won in the 0 indexing vs. 1 indexing war
Lua is the “last standing man” now.
⎕IO←0
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>make easier logical sense in day-to-day life The fact that the metric system is decimal and all conversions essentially consist of moving a point around are much more trivial. 1000 millimeters is a meter. 100 centimeters is a meter. 10 millimeters is a centimeters. it's in the name. Same for liters, same for kilogram. You don't need to do math, you just move a separator. It's not arbitrary, that's the big advantage.…
> What's 3.5 gallons in ounces? 448. That's not even hard. There's 128 fluid ounces per gallon. 3×128=384, add 64 to that for 448. You could work through that from the smaller units if you didn't know off hand. Still, it's pretty unusual to want fluid ounces at that scale. Keep it at 3.5 gallons.
> 448. That's not even hard. There's 128 fluid ounces per gallon. 3×128=384, add 64 to that for 448.
I think you just unironically showed why SI is the superior system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, for that matter, stop counting years and centuries from one. The 19th century was from 1900 to 1999. The 20th started at the year 2000.
The 20th century started on Jan 1, 2001. Because there was no year 0 (1 AD/CE started immediately after BC/E), 1/1/0001 was the beginning of the first century which ended on the last day of 100 CE, exactly one hundred years later.
Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.
Alternative take: the US customary units have stuck around because SI has failed to present itself as better enough to switch. Grant that all base units are arbitrary[1], many of the customary units make easier logical sense in day-to-day life, or are designed to be divisible in easier units than SI units are designed to be. Do you want ⅓ of a foot? Well, that's 4 inches (12 inches in a foot, divide by 3, you get 4).…
Sure, Americans also use non-metric units, but that's not as unique as is claimed. First hit for "site:.uk mpg" is "MPG stands for miles per gallon and is used to show how far your car can travel for every gallon (or 4.55 litres) of fuel it uses".
A handy trick is to memorize conversions in terms of a particular reference object or entity, instead of memorizing "the" conversion factor as a decimal. For example, while I know an inch is 25.4mm, I convert volume by remembering that 5.7 liters is 350 cubic inches - for obvious reasons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternative take: the US customary units have stuck around because SI has failed to present itself as better enough to switch. Grant that all base units are arbitrary[1], many of the customary units make easier logical sense in day-to-day life, or are designed to be divisible in easier units than SI units are designed to be. Do you want ⅓ of a foot? Well, that's 4 inches (12 inches in a foot, divide by 3, you get 4).…
Yes, even the SI base units. Shhh! Don't let them know that SI's base ten counting isn't some kind of scientific absolute and is just as arbitrary as inches and feet, and if humans had 11 fingers, SI would be different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What's 3.5 gallons in ounces? 448. That's not even hard. There's 128 fluid ounces per gallon. 3×128=384, add 64 to that for 448. You could work through that from the smaller units if you didn't know off hand. Still, it's pretty unusual to want fluid ounces at that scale. Keep it at 3.5 gallons.
> > What's 3.5 gallons in ounces? > 448. That's not even hard. There's 128 fluid ounces per gallon. 3×128=384, add 64 to that for 448. I think you just unironically showed why SI is the superior system.
Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.
Alternative take: the US customary units have stuck around because SI has failed to present itself as better enough to switch. Grant that all base units are arbitrary[1], many of the customary units make easier logical sense in day-to-day life, or are designed to be divisible in easier units than SI units are designed to be. Do you want ⅓ of a foot? Well, that's 4 inches (12 inches in a foot, divide by 3, you get 4).…
the customary units were plenty good in europe too, as far as i can tell. though i guess maybe they were not the same in all countries, which may have been a motivation for the switch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What's 3.5 gallons in ounces? 448. That's not even hard. There's 128 fluid ounces per gallon. 3×128=384, add 64 to that for 448. You could work through that from the smaller units if you didn't know off hand. Still, it's pretty unusual to want fluid ounces at that scale. Keep it at 3.5 gallons.
> > What's 3.5 gallons in ounces? > 448. That's not even hard. There's 128 fluid ounces per gallon. 3×128=384, add 64 to that for 448. I think you just unironically showed why SI is the superior system.
Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.
Alternative take: the US customary units have stuck around because SI has failed to present itself as better enough to switch. Grant that all base units are arbitrary[1], many of the customary units make easier logical sense in day-to-day life, or are designed to be divisible in easier units than SI units are designed to be. Do you want ⅓ of a foot? Well, that's 4 inches (12 inches in a foot, divide by 3, you get 4).…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system Seriously though, I wonder if immigration is going to help with that? Almost everyone else in the world uses metric in everyday life. Immigrants to the US have to go through the unpleasant process of adjusting to not doing so. I'm sure many (most?) of them wish they didn't have to do that. As the immigration process continues, might this lead to growing popular…
"Almost everyone else in the world uses metric in everyday life." RLY? Hello from the UK! Here we are metricated in general and then it goes a bit mad. As you know we generally have at least five ways of saying the same thing. Well actually we don't any more. Mostly metricated but we still have inches and feet etc hanging on in there. I suspect that most other countries are the same. I recall (my Mum) buying stuff in…
I did say almost everyone. The UK is unusual in still retaining significantly more pre-metric units than the average country does, although still much less than the US. Road distances in miles and speed limits in miles per hour being the most obvious one. Almost everywhere on earth, other than the US and UK (and maybe a tiny handful more, such as Burma/Myanmar, Liberia, Antigua), road distances are in kilometres.
> I suspect that most other countries are the same.
Many countries have some occasional lingering use of pre-metric measurements, but 90%+ of day-to-day units are metric. In the US, it is the other way around, 90%+ of day-to-day units are non-metric. The UK is unusual in lying somewhere in-between.
> I recall (my Mum) buying stuff in West German markets by der pfund (slightly larger than the Imperial pound, I think).
Since 1854, Germany has used the "metric pound" (pfund) of 500 grams exactly, as opposed to the US/UK pound of exactly 453.59237 grams (since 1959; before then, the US and UK had slightly different definitions of the pound). Prior to the metric system, almost every country in Europe had its own unique "pound", all of which were around about (but not exactly) 500 grams. Some countries (e.g Australia) metricated by dropping the pound entirely, but several West European countries (such as France and Germany) instead metricated it to be exactly 500 grams. Arguably, the metric pound actually is a metric unit (0.5kg is a sufficiently round multiple of the base unit, even if a power of 2 instead of 10), whereas the US/UK pound is not (nobody would consider 0.45359237 to be round)
> We still drink pints (obvs!)
In Australia, we still measure beer by pints too. But our pint is different from the UK pint. The UK pint is exactly 568.26125 mL. The US liquid pint is exactly 473.176473 mL. In Australia, a pint of beer is exactly 570 mL (metricated by rounding up from the UK pint), except (for obscure historical reasons no one seems to be able to explain) in South Australia were a pint is instead defined as 425 mL (a volume of beer which in other Australian states is called a "schooner").
However, stuff like beer sizes falls into that "10% of surviving non-metric" which many countries have, so I don't think it really counts.