7 ms·

You say you are not convinced but you give no explanation about why. Would you, please ?

by jylam 9y ago

linksnapzz 9y ago
Well, this paper has me convinced: http://dozenalsociety.org.uk/pdfs/aitken.pdf http://dozenalsociety.org.uk/pdfs/aitken.pdf Of course, YMMV.
- zeveb 9y ago
  Exactly! The revolutionaries' error in this case was that they weren't revolutionary enough: they should have switched to a dozenal system. As it is, French revolutionary units are an imperfect compromise, with no really good argument for them other than 'almost every country in the world uses them.'
- zokier 9y ago
  Base 12 is nice and I would prefer it over base 10. But that would probably been too big of a change to get actually implemented (especially globally) even during the tumults of french revolution, so that is not really my main gripe with metric system. The most obvious problem is the definitions and "values" of the base units. The (current) defintions involve such nice round numbers like 299792458, 9192631770, 273.16, and so on. I can appreciate that nature might not allow aligning all the units in a perfectly harmoniuous matter, but surely we can do better than this. Then there is of course the big kilogram debacle that we are still trying to figure out. In addition to the fact that it is defined via an artifact, it also is the only base unit with a prefix, mostly by accident. While everything else in metric system is mostly nicely aligned with decimal system, the attempt to reform time failed, so we are stuck there with the legacy unit(s). I would had preferred to have the time base unit to be (roughly) 1/1000th of a day rather than 1/86400th of day. Admittedly basing time on earth rotation lacks certain degree of universality that other base units have, so maybe altogether different base would have been a good idea. These days metric system is associated mostly with 10^(n*3) prefixes, but that is relatively new feature. That is something I would have liked to have from day 1 so that we wouldn't have a cacophony of centimeters and deciliters in common use. Oh, and mentioning liters gets us to the confusing world of area and volume units. Originally metric system had a(c)res and liters, but then they noticed that they are not that great and switched to square and cubic meters. Except of course people didn't follow and I think in pretty much every metric country at least liters are still in common use. It might have been a good idea to retain those specialized units, because of the ambiguity problems of prefixed sq/cu meters. At least personally I think it would be more convenient (if maybe not as elegant) that mm³ would be 10^-3 cubic meters instead of the current 10^-9 cubic meters. Now if we are sticking to the "main" prefixes, we don't have anything between mm³ (which is tiny amount) and m³ (which is large amount). From a purely notational perspective, it would have been nice to have bit more consistency with the naming and symbols of the units and prefixes. Some of the units are named after people, some are not, so some of them have capital letter as symbol, others a lower-case. And to mix things up, some units (even base units) have two or three letter symbols. Of course ohms are the special snowflake that deserve a greek letter. Prefixes mostly follow the rule that capitals are >0 and lowercases <0. Thats nice, except kilo strikes again as an exception. And again a greek letter sneaked in just to make sure that typesetting units remains a challenge. How many times have you seen µ substituted with a u? I probably could go on, but yeah, it sure is not perfect system.

You say you are not convinced but you give no explanation about why. Would you, please ?

by jylam 9y ago

You say you are not convinced but you give no explanation about why. Would you, please ?

Well, this paper has me convinced: http://dozenalsociety.org.uk/pdfs/aitken.pdf http://dozenalsociety.org.uk/pdfs/aitken.pdf Of course, YMMV.

zeveb 9y ago
Exactly! The revolutionaries' error in this case was that they weren't revolutionary enough: they should have switched to a dozenal system. As it is, French revolutionary units are an imperfect compromise, with no really good argument for them other than 'almost every country in the world uses them.'
zokier 9y ago
Base 12 is nice and I would prefer it over base 10. But that would probably been too big of a change to get actually implemented (especially globally) even during the tumults of french revolution, so that is not really my main gripe with metric system. The most obvious problem is the definitions and "values" of the base units. The (current) defintions involve such nice round numbers like 299792458, 9192631770, 273.16, and so on. I can appreciate that nature might not allow aligning all the units in a perfectly harmoniuous matter, but surely we can do better than this. Then there is of course the big kilogram debacle that we are still trying to figure out. In addition to the fact that it is defined via an artifact, it also is the only base unit with a prefix, mostly by accident. While everything else in metric system is mostly nicely aligned with decimal system, the attempt to reform time failed, so we are stuck there with the legacy unit(s). I would had preferred to have the time base unit to be (roughly) 1/1000th of a day rather than 1/86400th of day. Admittedly basing time on earth rotation lacks certain degree of universality that other base units have, so maybe altogether different base would have been a good idea. These days metric system is associated mostly with 10^(n*3) prefixes, but that is relatively new feature. That is something I would have liked to have from day 1 so that we wouldn't have a cacophony of centimeters and deciliters in common use. Oh, and mentioning liters gets us to the confusing world of area and volume units. Originally metric system had a(c)res and liters, but then they noticed that they are not that great and switched to square and cubic meters. Except of course people didn't follow and I think in pretty much every metric country at least liters are still in common use. It might have been a good idea to retain those specialized units, because of the ambiguity problems of prefixed sq/cu meters. At least personally I think it would be more convenient (if maybe not as elegant) that mm³ would be 10^-3 cubic meters instead of the current 10^-9 cubic meters. Now if we are sticking to the "main" prefixes, we don't have anything between mm³ (which is tiny amount) and m³ (which is large amount). From a purely notational perspective, it would have been nice to have bit more consistency with the naming and symbols of the units and prefixes. Some of the units are named after people, some are not, so some of them have capital letter as symbol, others a lower-case. And to mix things up, some units (even base units) have two or three letter symbols. Of course ohms are the special snowflake that deserve a greek letter. Prefixes mostly follow the rule that capitals are >0 and lowercases <0. Thats nice, except kilo strikes again as an exception. And again a greek letter sneaked in just to make sure that typesetting units remains a challenge. How many times have you seen µ substituted with a u? I probably could go on, but yeah, it sure is not perfect system.