Imperial vs. Metric, Base 2, Base 10, Base 12

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 8:05 am

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I can measure 26 cm...

That is one thick pinky.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 8:07 am

Hicks wrote:
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I can measure 26 cm...
That is one thick pinky.

Damn, I only have 19.05...

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 10:20 am

You guys have some small pinkies.

I usually use my pinky to measure out a meter. It's simple in that it could also be used in Imperial to measure out one yard. I seem to have no other uses for my pinky so this is a rather convenient measure for me.

John Magnum · Post by **John Magnum** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 4:27 pm

Thanks for the correction on the number of distinct multiplication table entries. Yeah, I wouldn't count the 0 or 1 entries either.

Now, the thing is, 37*49 is already in base 60, assuming you had numerals for 37 and 49. That's one of the seventeen hundred atomic multiplication entries. There's no way to further reduce it, it would be one of them that you memorize.

Or did you mean 37 = 3*60 + 7*1? In which case the rules for multiplication are actually the same, it's just that carrying occurs at different times. Instead of carrying when you get a result bigger than 9, you carry when you get a result bigger than 59.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 4:41 pm

I meant "37*49" as one of the atomic entries that would need memorization... and how necessary it would be to memorize, i.e. what you would do if you had not memorized it and weren't a pro at converting things into base 10 to do calculations. Probably use a calculator. Heh.

rampaging-poet · Post by **rampaging-poet** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 8:05 pm

If you don't know one of the atomic multiplications, you can find it through repeated addition. Adding 49 + 49 + 49 ... + (37th copy of 49) is tedious, but not difficult. That's actually another disadvantage of higher bases: if you don't know the higher atomic multiplications, it takes much longer to calculate them by hand.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 9:17 pm

PhoneLobster wrote:
Josh_Kablack wrote:So, any of you metric fans want to specify a useful body-part to metric-length-unit correspondence?
Is your foot actually a foot long?

WTF body part is a Yard?

Etc...

The imperial length measurements based on body parts thing was scrapped for a reason. That being that it was inconsistent and led to confusion and arguments. Because, fuck you I am 6 foot 7... in my own feet lengths and only in my own feet lengths... (edit: And a reasonable 6 foot in Ypres Belgium, nearly 5 foot 5 in modern short lived international imperial, and no more than 4 foot 8 just down the road in Angoulême France)

The inconsistency in body parts as measurements can be observed in the many different lengths of feet used prior to both metric and the various (apparently rather short lived?) internationalized imperial measures in various countries. So go check out the vast table on this page for an idea.

Feet ain't feet. Simple as that.

(and before you say that someone somewhere surely has foot long feet and golly how convenient it must be for that one guy... my girlish tiny (hairy flat) feet turn out to be nearly exactly 25cm long. So suck on the convenience of the 4 foot meter! Lets standardize it? No? Damn, didn't think so...)

Feet are all close enough to a foot for useful approximations; a yard is the distance from your hand to the center of your body (which makes yards really easy to measure in fabrics); a cup is the amount of water you can hold in your hands; a pint is a pound; etc.

They're all standardized against whoever happens to be king, because he is the ultimate judge in disputes.

Before you get too feisty on the imperial system, please explain what (exactly) a kilogram is?

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 9:28 pm

The mass of 1/1000th the volume of a cubic metre of pure water at the temperature of maximum density (3.98 °C) and standard atmospheric pressure (101.325 kPa).

And before you even ask, a meter is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.

And before you even ask again, a second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. Duh.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 9:44 pm

A kilogram is actually the mass of the kilogram prototype, which is a thing that lives in a vault in France. It is almost, but not exactly the mass you suggested.

Interestingly, the pound is also defined based on that chunk of material, so they are exactly as rigorous.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 9:56 pm

fectin wrote:A kilogram is actually the mass of the kilogram prototype, which is a thing that lives in a vault in France. It is almost, but not exactly the mass you suggested.

But the difference between the object and the water used as the means of determining the weight in the first place. Is negligible. That is NOT THE CASE WITH FEET.

Seriously. Your foot is NOT reliably a good approximation to "the foot". Mine is easily 5cm off.

And also you are flat out wrong with your king's foot bullshit. The international imperial foot is simply a compromise between the foot used in the USA and the foot used in Commonwealth countries in 1959. That huge list of feet I linked you to? Some of them are very possibly kings feet, but many will be similarly arbitrary bullshit, like the length of the foot of the guy in town who made tape measures or some crap like that. It was that bad and that is what was that bad about using the foot in the first place.

And again seriously. Look at that list. The foot prior to 1959 varied dramatically world wide. The official measurement called a foot was not a good approximation for the same thing the next town (let alone country) over. Let alone the wildly variable actual body parts on actual people.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 10:02 pm

That was my bullshit, and I learned it in Elementary school, so I'm really not surprised it was bullshit, because it's from Elementary school.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sun Jan 06, 2013 12:40 am

PhoneLobster wrote: Is your foot actually a foot long?

+/- about 5% depending on the style of shoe I am wearing

And it sure is convenient to be able to make approx measurements in a common unit for the sorts of odd job handyman / heavy lifting tasks I get called on to do so frequently.

It's of far lesser convenience that my hands are approximately one Hand wide.

WTF body part is a Yard?

Center of my chest to the end of the fingertips of my outstretched hand, although in practice it's easier to touch my heel to my toe and then shift the rear foot to be in front.

While metric offers far easier conversion, as a farmer, I'd expect you to understand the convenience of the furlong being the ideal length for the furrows you plow with your oxen? I mean, really, is it that hard to remember that there are 64,512 fluid drams per hogshead? Or are you still confusing drams and fluid drams?. They explain all this stuff in kiddie comics.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Jan 06, 2013 12:48 am

I have had to abandon this thread completely, because I literally cannot tell who is serious and who is joking and who is sarcastic at all.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Jan 06, 2013 4:25 am

rampaging-poet wrote:If you don't know one of the atomic multiplications, you can find it through repeated addition. Adding 49 + 49 + 49 ... + (37th copy of 49) is tedious, but not difficult. That's actually another disadvantage of higher bases: if you don't know the higher atomic multiplications, it takes much longer to calculate them by hand.

Righto. Sorry for being unclear, as I know that's how you could do it. I meant, since that isn't very practical, then what to do.

I'm thinking if I had to use base 60, I'd probably memorize the multiplication table but only in chunks. 1-60 x 1-12 and then every 6 (18,24,30,36,42,48,54,60). So it really is a 60 x 20 chart which I think comes out to around 1029 products to memorize after discounting the x1 and x60 products... still a fat stack to memorize, but doable.

That way I would have to memorize a smaller table and say if I had to solve (37) X (49), then I could either go (36) X (49) and add another (49), or (37) x (48) and add another (37). Easy peasy. You could probably get by with learning 1-12 and then every 12, shaving off a couple hundred to learn. Then you just have to bump a number up or down at most 6X in an extra step to solve multiplication.

John Magnum · Post by **John Magnum** » Sun Jan 06, 2013 4:31 am

Remember that there are exactly as many atomic additions as there are atomic multiplications.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Sun Jan 06, 2013 12:45 pm

How would phones look if you had base 60?

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Sun Jan 06, 2013 4:04 pm

Maj wrote:I thought that inches were defined as the length of three barley grains. Unless you're a scarecrow, I don't imagine that's a body part.

i was once long ago told a foot was literally a foot, and inch was the width of the big toe. of course this was all based on the kings measurements or some such.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Jan 06, 2013 4:15 pm

ishy wrote:How would phones look if you had base 60?

I imagine a society using base 60 would have tools like an abacus or a string of padlock dials well-ingrained into culture and usage. Setting dials to pick numbers seems a quick way to type in base 60 digits.

On the upside, telephone numbers need only be 4 base 60 digits long.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sun Jan 06, 2013 5:46 pm

Base 60 looks like this:
http://cs-exhibitions.uni-klu.ac.at/index.php?id=323

PhoneLobster wrote:
fectin wrote:A kilogram is actually the mass of the kilogram prototype, which is a thing that lives in a vault in France. It is almost, but not exactly the mass you suggested.
But the difference between the object and the water used as the means of determining the weight in the first place. Is negligible. That is NOT THE CASE WITH FEET.

Seriously. Your foot is NOT reliably a good approximation to "the foot". Mine is easily 5cm off.

But your foot is not the prototype for the foot measurement. In fact, there is no prototype, because feet are defined in terms of light travelling in a vacuum, exactly like meters.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Sun Jan 06, 2013 7:03 pm

fectin wrote:Base 60 looks like this:
http://cs-exhibitions.uni-klu.ac.at/index.php?id=323

Interesting. They seemed to only have symbols for the first 10 numbers, and the rest of the 50 'digits' were writing out the full number.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 2:05 am

fectin wrote:because feet are defined in terms of light travelling in a vacuum, exactly like meters.

But thats how we modern post metric people measure feet. That is NOT how we fucking decided how long feet should be back before we knew what the fuck light speed was and at about every point since including the compromise on the international imperial foot.

The fact that you don't fucking get that is... wow...

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 2:29 am

Josh_Kablack wrote:So, any of you metric fans want to specify a useful body-part to metric-length-unit correspondence?

My ego weighs a metric tonne.

Count Arioch the 28th · Mon Jan 07, 2013 3:13 am

I dated a chick whose boobs weighted a metric tonne. It pisses me off now, three nicer chicks could have had nice bouncy DDD's with that much chest ham and they were wasted on one person who used them to substitute for an actual personality.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 6:11 am

PhoneLobster wrote:That is NOT how we fucking decided how long feet should be back before we knew what the fuck light speed was and at about every point since including the compromise on the international imperial foot.

The definition of a meter didn't use the speed of light until 1983. We started with some fraction of Earth's meridian, then later arbitrarily chose a specific wave emitted by an arbitrary atom (not full history)...

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 6:20 am

PhoneLobster wrote:
fectin wrote:because feet are defined in terms of light travelling in a vacuum, exactly like meters.
But thats how we modern post metric people measure feet. That is NOT how we fucking decided how long feet should be back before we knew what the fuck light speed was and at about every point since including the compromise on the international imperial foot.

The fact that you don't fucking get that is... wow...

That fact that you are arguing against a system of units based on prior history of said system rather than ease of use or commonality is also ...wow...

If prior history is the determining factor in which system to use or not to use, I'm gonna call the The Magna Carta