3 ms·

> In the real world, the Gimli glider was 32,000 feet high. How many nautical miles can it glide? Quick? In the real world, the Gimli glider was 9,753.6 m hig

• espadrine 10y ago
  > In the real world, the Gimli glider was 9,753.6 m high. How many km can it glide? 117,043.2 m. In about 5 seconds in my head. By doing value × 10 + value × 2. Because multiplying by 10 is so easy, because arabic numerals are in base 10. And by cheating, which obviously we would do as a first approximation, it is also much more trivial in SI units: 9,753.6m is about 10km, × 12 → 120km. At most 1 second to find. Faster again. But my fundamental point: we already have the mnemonics ready for base 10, and we won't switch away from arabic numerals any time soon, so we might as well benefit from it. It isn't a competition. After all, the metric system is screwed up: having 60 seconds in a minute is a pain (but wow, so many divisors! — really though, just an inheritance of an ancient culture that did not use base 10 numerals; using higher bases isn't an indication of modernity) and the fundamental definition of the second doesn't map to any physical reality in an intuitive way anymore. It is simply less screwed up.