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0 pointsKoshkin3y ago0 comments

1/40,000,000 of the Earth’s circumference does not make sense to me, but the foot does. (As does the school bus.)

0 comments

The foot is just a light nanosecond, it makes perfect sense.

it isn't precisely a light nanosecond either, it's about 5mm off. today the standard foot as used in the USA is ironically just defined as 0.3048 meters

hanche3y ago

And the surveyors’ foot is 500000/499999 times that. Not sure how that came to be.

yosito3y ago

Sure, the definition of a meter may be a little bit arbitrary. But the advantage of metric for measuring distances is that the units are all factors of 10.

10 mm = 1 cm

10 cm = 1 dm

10 dm = 1 m

1000 m = 1 km

Makes math and scaling up and down a lot easier than having to remember that

12 in = 1 ft

3 ft = 1 yd

5280 ft = 1 mi

1760 yd = 1 mi

nemo44x3y ago

Agreed. There’s this weird idea we should have the same UX for everything. In practicality we need different scales. I don’t describe the distance between myself and my neighbor in light years.

coutego3y ago

Exactly! In fact, it would be wonderful if you had some standard way of producing different units at different scales for a given magnitude, upwards or downwards, so you could use the best in a given context. Perhaps you could even randomly chose a fixed easy multiplier to automatically produce these derived units from the fundamental unit, and then use the same factor for every magnitude. You only need to chose some base unit for every magnitude and then, boom, you get a full family of units at different scales to chose from depending on your context.

How cool would that be? I'd suggest to use a factor that is the easiest to multiply by, in order to simplify operations. I guess the optimal factor would be 10. What is easier to multiply or divide by than 10, right?

I think I need to patent this bright idea. It's amazing nobody has thought about it before.

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