Metric?

[Chewbacka]

1 minute ago, Murflynn said:

aliens arriving on Earth and discovering our counting system would be shocked by our ridiculous decimal system.

humans counted their fingers and cam up with 10, divisible by 1,2 & 5, and never progressed beyond that.

any bright mathematician or engineer will favour the duodecimal system with base 12, divisible by 1,2,3,4 & 6.

is it too late to change?

Then what's wrong with the Babylonian base 60 system if you want it divisible by lots of other numbers

[MtB]

On 11/06/2017 at 19:58, Murflynn said:

aliens arriving on Earth and discovering our counting system would be shocked by our ridiculous decimal system.

humans counted their fingers and cam up with 10, divisible by 1,2 & 5, and never progressed beyond that.

any bright mathematician or engineer will favour the duodecimal system with base 12, divisible by 1,2,3,4 & 6.

is it too late to change?

I was about to post exactly the same thing, but then you'd been and gone and done it already. 

Base 12 counting system makes so much more sense in every way.

[mross]

There must be some evolutionary reason that we have five digits.  Octal and hexadecimal are useful in digital computers.  I don't think base 12 is necessarily the optimum.

[nbfiresprite]

Some people seem to have a lot of time on their hands to be fighting over this subject.  Just use which ever system you prefer or do as I do use the best one for the job in hand.

[Murflynn]

1 hour ago, mross said:

There must be some evolutionary reason that we have five digits.  

maybe Anne Boleyn was more advanced than we previously thought.  She certainly gave birth to the greatest monarch England has ever known.

 

I watched a documentary addressing evolution.  Nearly all vertebrates have similar skeletons: birds, reptiles, mammals, in most respects but not in the number of digits.  Apparently while the embryonic skeleton is forming a message goes out to 'make digits', which form one by one from the thumb towards the pinky, and when the correct number has been reached the switch is turned off..... except in some cases it isn't.

Edited June 11, 2017 by Murflynn

[mross]

5 minutes ago, Murflynn said:

maybe Anne Boleyn was more advanced than we previously thought.  She certainly gave birth to the greatest monarch England has ever known.

But even it were true, she only had six fingers on one hand!  Base 11 has no advantages over base 10.

[ditchcrawler]

2 hours ago, mross said:

There must be some evolutionary reason that we have five digits.  Octal and hexadecimal are useful in digital computers.  I don't think base 12 is necessarily the optimum.

Binary, we have two hands, two feet, two eyes, two ears and also some twos of other things

2 hours ago, mross said:

There must be some evolutionary reason that we have five digits.  Octal and hexadecimal are useful in digital computers.  I don't think base 12 is necessarily the optimum.

It has if you use your toes in Norfolk

[36national]

On 2017-6-9 at 19:24, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

Ok then, I challenge you to work out the 20% VAT to charge on, say, a sale of £17 13s 4d in your head using mental arithmetic. 

Such calcs are easy with metric money.  

on the one hand y can blame the demise of an arcane currency system for peeps being bad at maths 

on the other hand y can argue that it was never a problem coz VAT wasn't introduced till until 1973, 2 years after decimalisation.

on the third hand (the one yer mother kept hidden from you after you were born but would be soooo useful soooo much of the time) VAT in 1973 was set at 10 percent which was easy to work out. so double it 

[MtB]

On 11/06/2017 at 22:36, 36national said:

on the one hand y can blame the demise of an arcane currency system for peeps being bad at maths 

on the other hand y can argue that it was never a problem coz VAT wasn't introduced till until 1973, 2 years after decimalisation.

on the third hand (the one yer mother kept hidden from you after you were born but would be soooo useful soooo much of the time) VAT in 1973 was set at 10 percent which was easy to work out. so double it 

 

Ok then, what is 10% of £17 13/4d ?? 

I give you ten seconds to work it out in your head...

[36national]

7 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

Ok then, what is 10% of £17 13/4d ?? 

I give you ten seconds to work it out in your head...

£ 1.7  s 1.3   d 0.4

too much 

[jam]

3 hours ago, nbfiresprite said:

Some people seem to have a lot of time on their hands to be fighting over this subject.  Just use which ever system you prefer or do as I do use the best one for the job in hand.

Must admit to being bilingual with imperial/metric. Originally an imperial guy but changed to metric during my apprenticeship. I have no problem in measuring in metric and quoting in imperial or vice versa

[1st ade]

7 hours ago, mross said:

Base 11 has no advantages and an awful lot of disadvantages over base 10.

Corrected that for you...

[Murflynn]

10 hours ago, ditchcrawler said:

Binary, we have two hands, two feet, two eyes, two ears and also some twos of other things

 

nahh, that'll never catch on.   

 

 

[Machpoint005]

On 11/06/2017 at 08:22, 1st ade said:

A half-litre and when I finish I'm looking at the glass wondering if someone had a swig when I wasn't looking.

Never had a bottle of beer at home? They've been 500ml for decades.

[ditchcrawler]

I only found out last month that an acre is semi metric

Edited June 12, 2017 by ditchcrawler

[mayalld]

7 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

I only found out last month that an acre is semi metric

Do tell!

An acre is a chain by a furlong, 1/640 of a square mile. Not very metric.

[Athy]

3 minutes ago, mayalld said:

Do tell!

An acre is a chain by a furlong, 1/640 of a square mile.

I never knew that, thank you! Have a green acre (shurely shome mishtake here?)

[mross]

Did you hear about the young farmer?

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#

#

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He had a couple of achers!

[WotEver]

13 hours ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

Ok then, what is 10% of £17 13/4d ?? 

Shouldn't that be 1/10 of £17 13/4 ?

[Machpoint005]

44 minutes ago, mayalld said:

Do tell!

An acre is a chain by a furlong, 1/640 of a square mile. Not very metric.

I was only saying the other day that I have very little concept of how big an acre is. A hectare I can visualise as it's 100m by 100m. 

[mayalld]

4 minutes ago, Machpoint005 said:

I was only saying the other day that I have very little concept of how big an acre is. A hectare I can visualise as it's 100m by 100m. 

That is the beauty of imperial units. 

Real world measures

the Acre is easily visualised as its primary measure is the length of a cricket pitch  

 

 

 

[WotEver]

5 minutes ago, Machpoint005 said:

I was only saying the other day that I have very little concept of how big an acre is. A hectare I can visualise as it's 100m by 100m. 

We considered buying a house once that apparently sat in 7/8 of an acre. In that context it seemed very big but when our local farmer points and says "that's the 20 acre field" it doesn't appear nearly as big. 

And on a housing estate being built some years ago the promotional video stated "Only 13 houses per acre"

[Machpoint005]

59 minutes ago, mayalld said:

the Acre is easily visualised as its primary measure is the length of a cricket pitch

Not the cricket square, though!

[mayalld]

24 minutes ago, Machpoint005 said:

Not the cricket square, though!

Well, actually consider the cricket square.

If it truly is square, it is 1/10 of an acre.

[ditchcrawler]

2 hours ago, mayalld said:

Do tell!

An acre is a chain by a furlong, 1/640 of a square mile. Not very metric.

 

• 10 square chains (1 chain = 66 feet = 22 yards = 4 rods = 100 links) 

1 hour ago, mayalld said:

That is the beauty of imperial units. 

Real world measures

the Acre is easily visualised as its primary measure is the length of a cricket pitch  

 

 

 

Surly that was the other way round, when they laid out the cricket pitch it was 1 chain long