19 ms·

A Bernard Cornwell novel about king arthur introduced me to all sorts of defunct, proto-english & welsh counting systems. Shepards used one system. Sailors used

A Bernard Cornwell novel about king arthur introduced me to all sorts of defunct, proto-english & welsh counting systems. Shepards used one system. Sailors used another. Soldiers another. It was part of a society that was deeply dialectic in all things, especially language. This resonated with me, because my grandfather had sheep. Sheep were weighed in kgs. People were weighed in stones. Feed in pounds. Sheep were sold in dozen and half-dozen dividable lots. Land in acres. In his region, one acre could feed one cow and one sheep so they had an intuitive serendipity. 100 acres made a viable farm. Measurement systems tend to leave even more vestiges than other elements of language. Most of the world uses metrics, but almost no one advocates for metric time or angular units. Square kms never became an agricultural measure of land because one is bigger than most farms. Instead, metric hectares and metric dunams were adapted to be metric. They were close enough. Acres weren't, so there is no metric acre. There are sixty minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle because sumerians used a base 60 numerical system 5 thousand years ago. I have never even heard of a metric angular unit. I totally accept the fact that metric systems are better. Engineering anything in inches seems impossible. OTOH, the richness and embedded history of language is valuable too. There's a reason esperanto never caught on, even though it's arguably the right tool for the job.

emteycz 6y ago
Esperanto didn't catch on because a lot of people feel like it's not the right tool for the job - there are forks and whole different projects that try to mitigate the issues.
- yellowstuff 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better Esperanto would probably have to be 10X better than existing languages in some sense to be a viable replacement.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    It's not far from that, in terms of the original purpose. Esperanto is very easy to learn, compared to a natural language. English is the right one to compare with, since that became the international lingua franca esperanto wanted to be. There are even some studies suggesting that the quickest way to teach english is to teach esperanto first, and the language learning skills acquired shorten the path to fluency enough to be worth it. I think 10X is true in certain situations, but displacing incumbents can be more about path dependence than degrees of improvement.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Forks mostly mitigate philosophical issues, like gender neutrality, continental neutrality and such. That's a job, but not (arguably) the job. S The job was to be an easily learnable lingua franca, a common second language. Esperanto (also the forks) is a better tool for that job than english. All else equal, it's much quicker to learn. Returning to the metric analogy, I think it's interesting to see the whys. Ultimately, the quality of a language system is not the only or main thing leading to its adoption. There's a massive cultural element. The metric system was ideologically compatible with the French revolution and enlightenment/scientific/modern cultural ideals generally. It was also useful individually, often by influential individuals (eg scientists). Even if everyone uses another system, it's still worth learning metric so you can do math, engineering or land surveyance more easily. You can always convert units for communication purposes.. I assume it's still like this in the states. If you need to calculate volume, you use metric and then convert to square feet or gallons. This gave metric systems a bootstrap that esperanto didn't have. This has a parallel to network-effect products. You can't displace Twitter or facebook just by making a better alternative. That only matters once you have millions of users. You must have a bootstrap... a reason for individuals or small groups to use it regardless of overall usage.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    > You must have a bootstrap... a reason for individuals or small groups to use it regardless of overall usage. The literal "killer app" for Esperanto :D https://www.amazon.com/Aggressor-Maneuver-Esperanto-Language-Military/dp/B086B9RRW6 https://www.amazon.com/Aggressor-Maneuver-Esperanto-Language...
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  I do think that that's a problem with esperanto, but large-scale things like that are only part of the problem. You could also, just as reasonably, frame it as a sort of, "Why don't more people learn esperanto?" To that question, I found this YouTube polyglot explaining why he doesn't think esperanto is a language to learn raises some very good points: (https://youtu.be/n4AklOtfhMo https://youtu.be/n4AklOtfhMo - in french) The one I found compelling is that, in the absence of an economic motivator, you really need to fall in love with a language to remain motivated to learn it well. Where esperanto doesn't really have much of a cultural history or literary tradition, it just doesn't offer most people a lot to love.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    I agree about the framing of the problem. I would say that esperanto does offer some inherent reasons to learn it. It's very easy to learn, relative to natural languages. That's what it was invented for. It's fun to make fast progress, and I think this is the biggest motivator for people to learn it. It's also useful to learn a second language, because learning a language makes it easier to learn languages. There are some school programs teaching esperanto for this reason. It's part of their path to learning english. Besides that, there's linguistic interest & idealistic interest. You're right though, that it's all about the inherent reasons. There are no books to read or people to talk to. That's one hell of a downside. I think klingon and dothraki are good reference points. People learn those for no practical reason.
    - mumblemumble 6y ago
      But then, think about what's implied by those being the big reasons to learn the language. They implicitly relegate esperanto to the status of a toy language, comparable to the Lox programming language from Crafting Interpreters. You don't learn it because you actually want to speak esperanto (or program in Lox); you learn it as a simple model you can use to learn the techniques you'll use to accomplish some other goal, such as learning how to learn languages. It's definitely different if you really like the ideal of a language that doesn't belong to any one group of people. But I'm guessing that, nowadays, that's a compelling motivating factor for fewer people than, "I really like Star Trek," is. Klingon's rich cultural history may be a constructed patchwork, but at least it exists.
Symbiote 6y ago
> Instead, metric hectares and metric dunams were adapted to be metric Ares (and therefore hectares) aren't part of the SI system, but they are original metric units -- an are is 10m×10m, hect- is the prefix meaning 100×. The metric angular unit is a gradian. I've heard of it, as I read the whole manual when I first had a scientific calculator, age 11-ish, but I've never worked in a field where it's used.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  My mistake. I thought hectares predated their current size.
- michaelhoffman 6y ago
  The International System of Units (what most people refer to as "the metric system") unit for angular measure is the radian.
  - gowld 6y ago
    The gradian was the original metric angle unit, before it was replaced by the radian in SI because the powers that were decided that pi was more important than base 10, as the standard prefixes are nearly useless for angular measure.
    - jasomill 6y ago
      In terms of circles, angles, and, well, geometry in general, it's pretty hard to argue against the claim that pi is more important than ten.
  - jasomill 6y ago
    Pedantically, the SI standard[1] defines the term "radian" as a "special name[] for the number one that may be used to convey information about the quantity concerned." [1] https://www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/si_brochure_8_en.pdf https://www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/si_brochure_8_en.pdf
danielbarla 6y ago
I think this is a great example of how specialised numbering / counting can have advantages, in specific domains. Most imperial vs metric arguments tend to degrade into "my <slightly contrived> use case works for my number system, but not yours!", or the more nuanced "the number of use cases where my system works well is higher than yours". While I do fall on the metric side of the argument even for most of these, I think a more reasonable way to approach it is that by standardising, we lose some domain specific tricks and perhaps take on a tiny bit more complexity, in order to have a more consistent and unified system, overall.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Agreed, but I think we should also pay attention to reasons which have nothing to do with practicalities... however they are represented. In the medieval world of that novel, people didn't count much. Most people didn't use money much, and everyday language didn't place much demand on counting systems. The domains where numbering systems were used beyond simple basics were pretty isolated. Shepards count sheep. It's probably the only thing they ever count past 10, so a counting system for sheep is what evolved. They didn't interface with warlords counting troops, so there was no reason for these numbering systems to converge. It seems obvious to us that counting systems should be universal, but standards don't tend to appear in advance. They appear when needed.
  - kazen44 6y ago
    this is also the reason why it took until the industrial revolution for a wider used system to develop. Even before metric became standard, a lot of local measurements existed inside countries. mass manufacturing required a system which would work outside the local sphere.
    - dalbasal 6y ago
      Good point. I think this story also interweaves practical and cultural elements. The industrial revolution changed how measurement systems were used. It became important that a 13mm fitting measured in Paris was 13mm in Milan. Also, that age had novelty everywhere. Cobblers & weavers were separate worlds in medieval times. It didn't matter if they used different units of measurement. Novel industrialism required it. On the cultural side, there was the French revolution. They wanted to throw out everything old and irrational. Old measurement units got the same guillotine treatment as old rulers. Tradition must die. This was the political and cultural environment that yielded the metric system. The political element also explains why the British Empire didn't adopt it. The BE also needed rational units, ultimately. But, instead of adopting the radically rational metric system... they tweaked their medieval system into standard "imperial units." Why? First, they weren't going to adopt their enemy's stupid system. Second, their philosophy was conservative. Tradition must live. It's interesting how the ideals of the era (republican vs parliamentary monarchy) were mirrored in these decisions.
m3at 6y ago
Oh but there was a metric time! Or at least a decimal one. After the French revolution, some attempts were made to rationalize existing systems of time, the republican calendar [1] being probably the most famous, but hours and minutes were adjusted too [2]. Usage lasted slightly over a decade at the end of the 18th century. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
- dr_dshiv 6y ago
  With a decimal second at 0.84 a current second: 100 decimal minutes per hour and 10 decimal hours per day. But, since alpha brainwaves (the most dominant) are almost exactly 10hz, regular seconds have a naturalness to them. Then again, maybe with decimal seconds, our brainwaves would adjust :)
- timbit42 6y ago
  It failed because dozenal is superior.
throw0101a 6y ago
> [...] * but almost no one advocates for metric time or angular units.* What would metric time look like? And angular units? I've heard milliradians being described as 'metric' (compared to MOA).
- Mtinie 6y ago
  https://zapatopi.net/metrictime/ https://zapatopi.net/metrictime/
- jimmySixDOF 6y ago
  I was fascinated by the formal re-definition of Kilograms in 2018 by General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) A kg is now tied to the Planck constant so - basically now involves a unit measure of time (/second) to calculate.
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    Yup, the second is officially 9192631770 oscillations of a cesium atom. How convenient!
    - jasomill 6y ago
      Even more convenient is the metre, defined as the distance travelled in one such second by light in a vacuum divided by 299,792,458, and "only within a spatial extent sufficiently small that the effects of the non-uniformity of the gravitational field can be ignored."
- dhosek 6y ago
  The calculator I had in high school offered three angle measurements: degrees, radians and gradians. Gradians? It turns out that a gradian is defined to be 1/400th of a circle so right angles are 100 gradians instead of 90. They were defined during the French revolution (when else?) and are apparently still used in some European applications such as surveying. But given the importance of measurements such as 30° and 60° in mathematics (π/6, π/3 in radians) that end up being the rather ugly 33⅓ᵍ and 66⅔ᵍ in gradians, the measurement has not met broader acceptance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian
rtkwe 6y ago
> but almost no one advocates for metric time People would love to but there are some nasty fractions left over if you try to impose a base 10 unit of time at any level above a day. Any metric time system stumbles on the fact that 1) Days do not even divide into years by 10 and there's not even a whole number of days in a year and 2) calendars should sync with the seasons to provide any real use. Also 10 days to a week is pretty long unless you include a break in the middle.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> Any metric time system stumbles on the fact that 1) Days do not even divide into years by 10 and there's not even a whole number of days in a year and 2) calendars should sync with the seasons to provide any real use. Only because a "year" is a measurement of how long it currently takes a specific planet to orbit its star. On larger scales such specifics don't matter. There is no daylight savings time in space. Metric time is a realworld thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time "In computing, at least internally, metric time gained widespread use for ease of computation. Unix time gives date and time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, and Microsoft's FILETIME as multiples of 100ns since January 1, 1601.[7] VAX/VMS uses the number of 100ns since November 17, 1858 and RISC OS the number of centiseconds since January 1, 1900."
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    > Only because a "year" is a measurement of how long it currently takes a specific planet to orbit its star. On larger scales such specifics don't matter. There is no daylight savings time in space. DST is kind of meaningless here. It's not an inherent feature of the calendar and it's a dumb hack that wasn't even great when it was implemented, I'm all for getting rid of it. Sure yes when we become a multiplanet species maybe metric time will make sense for use at a human level calendar. What I was really talking about was a metric calendar system today and for use on Earth. Even off planet mapping day night to the diurnal cycle will make sense and assuming it's a planet with seasons and a breathable atmosphere the calendar will be more useful if it can match the local seasons. If that becomes an issue we'll probably have a calendar for each planet and then a universal date system used as a translation layer between different calendars and by people living in space where seasons don't screw things up. As for the variability and year that's just as bad for a metric calendar as our current Gregorian. None of that really matters though because today the calendar needs to work for people living on Earth today. If we make it to mulit-planet/solar system we can figure out Stardates then. > Metric time is a realworld thing Only at the level where humans don't really interact with it directly. No one (well I'm sure someone out there does but to a reasonable approximations no one) uses epoch time directly in their daily interactions with people. It's communication layer for machines not for people.
saalweachter 6y ago
> Sheep were weighed in kgs. People were weighed in stones. Feed in pounds. The reason you can get away with this for so long is because you -- historically, especially -- almost never need to convert between "mass of feed" and "mass of sheep" and "mass of people". Even for the most common case where it would matter (transporting each of the above) it almost doesn't, because you typically use different vehicles for each purpose. This means most people who deal with non-metric units almost never run into the friction of mixed units -- if you're doing carpentry, for instance, everything is inches, from lumber to doors to room dimensions, so you almost never actually have to deal with multiplying or dividing by 12 to convert to feet. Likewise with there being 5280 feet in a mile. Sure, if you actually have to convert from feet to miles, it's a pain and a potential source of error. But why the heck are you converting from feet to miles? Pick whichever unit makes sense for the task and hand and stick with it.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  Those are really good points, except maybe converting between masses. At some point or another you have to transport stuff. If you send a wagon with 3 tons of feed on it to a farm, how many sheep can you send back to town for sale? That goes double if a ship or boat is involved.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    Well firstly, your sheep are walking to town. Secondly, the answer is: a wagon-full. Sheep are not particularly more dense than grain. You are not going to be able to cram a higher mass of sheep in a wagon than you can cram grain; the exact number you could transport in a particular wagon will be determined more by geometry than mass. This does tend towards a common mass-unit for anything that is shipped by mass; in archaic American/English units this is typically the hundredweight and ton, depending on whether you are shipping a little or a lot. A more likely example would be shipping grain or coke one way and shipping iron stock back; you might transport 15 hundredweight each way, although more likely you'd be light one way or the other.
    - 6y ago
scythe 6y ago
>but almost no one advocates for metric time In physics it is not rare to see seconds used, with scientific notation, for measuring periods much longer than an hour. But for practical purposes it is very nice to have units which are easily divided into thirds and quarters, which is possible in base-60 but not base-10. This is equally true for angles, which also tolerate eighths (45 deg) and ninths (40) of a circle. The impractical division of liters to 1000 milliliters has after all given us a couple of incompatible reifications of metric measuring cups and ugly numbers in recipes. 960 = 64 * 5 * 3 might have been nice if we were willing to tolerate a "metric quart" which differs from the liter (alternatively, a "baker's milliliter"), and recovers the teaspoon, tablespoon, ounce, cup, and pint in round numbers.
jasomill 6y ago
I have never even heard of a metric angular unit. Well, the radian measurement of a plane angle can be defined as a ratio of the length of a circular arc divided by the length of the arc's radius, so the "metre per metre" (a.k.a. "1") is a legitimate (derived) metric angular unit.
FullyFunctional 6y ago
> I have never even heard of a metric angular unit. Yet it exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian I'll be the first to acknowledge that it doesn't seem add value over, say, using 1.0 for 360º or just plain ol' raidans (2π)
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Fascinating! Have to read that one. It's not just different occupations that use different counting systems. Apparently in Japanese you count liquid using one set of names, grain another, and countable things with a third, people with yet another. Or something like that. In English we do something similar. Small units of people are 'single', 'a couple', 'menage a trois' etc. Not to mention the myriad names for groups of things (herd, flock etc).
zeveb 6y ago
> Engineering anything in inches seems impossible. And yet that is how the Wright brothers invented flight … and a few decades later we made it to the moon!
- necovek 6y ago
  OT but I must: I've always hated this use of "invented": they were the first to successfully cover a particular (small) distance using a self-powered device, which we today consider a first successful flight, out of many competing teams striving to do the same thing at roughly the same time. I hate the use of the term because nobody has really "invented" anything in the last century or so. We are always building on the shoulders of giants enabling us to apply existing knowledge in new directions. Heck, Gallileo did not invent a telescope, but he did point a scope at the stars and planets. We could arguably say things like Leibnitz "invented" integrals, but he actually gave them a nomenclature and written language, whereas many contemporaries worked on infinity calculus at the same time (including Newton). I think I have a problem with the use of the term because it is so overloaded and can mean a number of things (I've heard people say things like "he invented gravity" which just boggles my mind, just like your use of "inventing a flight" where there were birds flying forever and people strived to fly for just as long). I am guessing it is just me who is weird, but I wonder if it is so? :)
  - zeveb 6y ago
    You're right, of course: I should have written 'discovered.'
    - Jedd 6y ago
      Very droll. Perhaps 'implemented' would be better. But to claim imperial measurements were key to implementing a very short powered heavier-than-air flight (lots of qualifiers, given myriad successful flights had occurred prior) is a stretch.
      - zeveb 6y ago
sergeykish 6y ago
> almost no one advocates for metric time or angular units. Frequency — hertz (SI) is turns per second, engines RPM is revolutions per minute. Integral would produce turn with fractions. Turn, half turn, quarter turn, used in common language. Centiturn (0.01 turn) or milliturns (0.001 turn) could serve degree role. No need to force a change, degrees already replaced with pi in a middle school, though tau reflects turn better. Time does not follow angle subdivisions (1/24/60/60 vs 1/60/60), second is SI measure, people can't even abolish DST, no change in foreseeable future. That said we use spoons and cups on a kitchen, floors to describe building height, inches for plumbing and displays.
- romwell 6y ago
  >Centiturn (0.01 turn) or milliturns (0.001 turn) We already have this measure, we just spell "turn" as "2π" :)
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    That's radian, numeric value is different. Hertz measured in turns, not radians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_(angle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_(angle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz
- dmoy 6y ago
  In precision rifle shooting, milliradian is very common. Minute of angle is also still common. Scopes are sold with both. It sort of depends on the discipline. For example service rifle scopes are almost universally in minutes of angle, while in the Precision Rifle Series the overwhelming majority use scopes in mils. Super confusing is when a scope uses mils for the reticle but minutes of angle for the adjustment. That's just terrible, but they exist.

emteycz 6y ago

Esperanto didn't catch on because a lot of people feel like it's not the right tool for the job - there are forks and whole different projects that try to mitigate the issues.

yellowstuff 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better Esperanto would probably have to be 10X better than existing languages in some sense to be a viable replacement.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  It's not far from that, in terms of the original purpose. Esperanto is very easy to learn, compared to a natural language. English is the right one to compare with, since that became the international lingua franca esperanto wanted to be. There are even some studies suggesting that the quickest way to teach english is to teach esperanto first, and the language learning skills acquired shorten the path to fluency enough to be worth it. I think 10X is true in certain situations, but displacing incumbents can be more about path dependence than degrees of improvement.
dalbasal 6y ago
Forks mostly mitigate philosophical issues, like gender neutrality, continental neutrality and such. That's a job, but not (arguably) the job. S The job was to be an easily learnable lingua franca, a common second language. Esperanto (also the forks) is a better tool for that job than english. All else equal, it's much quicker to learn. Returning to the metric analogy, I think it's interesting to see the whys. Ultimately, the quality of a language system is not the only or main thing leading to its adoption. There's a massive cultural element. The metric system was ideologically compatible with the French revolution and enlightenment/scientific/modern cultural ideals generally. It was also useful individually, often by influential individuals (eg scientists). Even if everyone uses another system, it's still worth learning metric so you can do math, engineering or land surveyance more easily. You can always convert units for communication purposes.. I assume it's still like this in the states. If you need to calculate volume, you use metric and then convert to square feet or gallons. This gave metric systems a bootstrap that esperanto didn't have. This has a parallel to network-effect products. You can't displace Twitter or facebook just by making a better alternative. That only matters once you have millions of users. You must have a bootstrap... a reason for individuals or small groups to use it regardless of overall usage.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  > You must have a bootstrap... a reason for individuals or small groups to use it regardless of overall usage. The literal "killer app" for Esperanto :D https://www.amazon.com/Aggressor-Maneuver-Esperanto-Language-Military/dp/B086B9RRW6 https://www.amazon.com/Aggressor-Maneuver-Esperanto-Language...
mumblemumble 6y ago
I do think that that's a problem with esperanto, but large-scale things like that are only part of the problem. You could also, just as reasonably, frame it as a sort of, "Why don't more people learn esperanto?" To that question, I found this YouTube polyglot explaining why he doesn't think esperanto is a language to learn raises some very good points: (https://youtu.be/n4AklOtfhMo https://youtu.be/n4AklOtfhMo - in french) The one I found compelling is that, in the absence of an economic motivator, you really need to fall in love with a language to remain motivated to learn it well. Where esperanto doesn't really have much of a cultural history or literary tradition, it just doesn't offer most people a lot to love.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  I agree about the framing of the problem. I would say that esperanto does offer some inherent reasons to learn it. It's very easy to learn, relative to natural languages. That's what it was invented for. It's fun to make fast progress, and I think this is the biggest motivator for people to learn it. It's also useful to learn a second language, because learning a language makes it easier to learn languages. There are some school programs teaching esperanto for this reason. It's part of their path to learning english. Besides that, there's linguistic interest & idealistic interest. You're right though, that it's all about the inherent reasons. There are no books to read or people to talk to. That's one hell of a downside. I think klingon and dothraki are good reference points. People learn those for no practical reason.
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    But then, think about what's implied by those being the big reasons to learn the language. They implicitly relegate esperanto to the status of a toy language, comparable to the Lox programming language from Crafting Interpreters. You don't learn it because you actually want to speak esperanto (or program in Lox); you learn it as a simple model you can use to learn the techniques you'll use to accomplish some other goal, such as learning how to learn languages. It's definitely different if you really like the ideal of a language that doesn't belong to any one group of people. But I'm guessing that, nowadays, that's a compelling motivating factor for fewer people than, "I really like Star Trek," is. Klingon's rich cultural history may be a constructed patchwork, but at least it exists.

Symbiote 6y ago

> Instead, metric hectares and metric dunams were adapted to be metric Ares (and therefore hectares) aren't part of the SI system, but they are original metric units -- an are is 10m×10m, hect- is the prefix meaning 100×. The metric angular unit is a gradian. I've heard of it, as I read the whole manual when I first had a scientific calculator, age 11-ish, but I've never worked in a field where it's used.

dalbasal 6y ago
My mistake. I thought hectares predated their current size.
michaelhoffman 6y ago
The International System of Units (what most people refer to as "the metric system") unit for angular measure is the radian.
- gowld 6y ago
  The gradian was the original metric angle unit, before it was replaced by the radian in SI because the powers that were decided that pi was more important than base 10, as the standard prefixes are nearly useless for angular measure.
  - jasomill 6y ago
    In terms of circles, angles, and, well, geometry in general, it's pretty hard to argue against the claim that pi is more important than ten.
- jasomill 6y ago
  Pedantically, the SI standard[1] defines the term "radian" as a "special name[] for the number one that may be used to convey information about the quantity concerned." [1] https://www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/si_brochure_8_en.pdf https://www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/si_brochure_8_en.pdf

danielbarla 6y ago

I think this is a great example of how specialised numbering / counting can have advantages, in specific domains. Most imperial vs metric arguments tend to degrade into "my <slightly contrived> use case works for my number system, but not yours!", or the more nuanced "the number of use cases where my system works well is higher than yours". While I do fall on the metric side of the argument even for most of these, I think a more reasonable way to approach it is that by standardising, we lose some domain specific tricks and perhaps take on a tiny bit more complexity, in order to have a more consistent and unified system, overall.

dalbasal 6y ago
Agreed, but I think we should also pay attention to reasons which have nothing to do with practicalities... however they are represented. In the medieval world of that novel, people didn't count much. Most people didn't use money much, and everyday language didn't place much demand on counting systems. The domains where numbering systems were used beyond simple basics were pretty isolated. Shepards count sheep. It's probably the only thing they ever count past 10, so a counting system for sheep is what evolved. They didn't interface with warlords counting troops, so there was no reason for these numbering systems to converge. It seems obvious to us that counting systems should be universal, but standards don't tend to appear in advance. They appear when needed.
- kazen44 6y ago
  this is also the reason why it took until the industrial revolution for a wider used system to develop. Even before metric became standard, a lot of local measurements existed inside countries. mass manufacturing required a system which would work outside the local sphere.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    Good point. I think this story also interweaves practical and cultural elements. The industrial revolution changed how measurement systems were used. It became important that a 13mm fitting measured in Paris was 13mm in Milan. Also, that age had novelty everywhere. Cobblers & weavers were separate worlds in medieval times. It didn't matter if they used different units of measurement. Novel industrialism required it. On the cultural side, there was the French revolution. They wanted to throw out everything old and irrational. Old measurement units got the same guillotine treatment as old rulers. Tradition must die. This was the political and cultural environment that yielded the metric system. The political element also explains why the British Empire didn't adopt it. The BE also needed rational units, ultimately. But, instead of adopting the radically rational metric system... they tweaked their medieval system into standard "imperial units." Why? First, they weren't going to adopt their enemy's stupid system. Second, their philosophy was conservative. Tradition must live. It's interesting how the ideals of the era (republican vs parliamentary monarchy) were mirrored in these decisions.

m3at 6y ago

Oh but there was a metric time! Or at least a decimal one. After the French revolution, some attempts were made to rationalize existing systems of time, the republican calendar [1] being probably the most famous, but hours and minutes were adjusted too [2]. Usage lasted slightly over a decade at the end of the 18th century. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

dr_dshiv 6y ago
With a decimal second at 0.84 a current second: 100 decimal minutes per hour and 10 decimal hours per day. But, since alpha brainwaves (the most dominant) are almost exactly 10hz, regular seconds have a naturalness to them. Then again, maybe with decimal seconds, our brainwaves would adjust :)
timbit42 6y ago
It failed because dozenal is superior.

throw0101a 6y ago

> [...] * but almost no one advocates for metric time or angular units.* What would metric time look like? And angular units? I've heard milliradians being described as 'metric' (compared to MOA).

Mtinie 6y ago
https://zapatopi.net/metrictime/ https://zapatopi.net/metrictime/
jimmySixDOF 6y ago
I was fascinated by the formal re-definition of Kilograms in 2018 by General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) A kg is now tied to the Planck constant so - basically now involves a unit measure of time (/second) to calculate.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  Yup, the second is officially 9192631770 oscillations of a cesium atom. How convenient!
  - jasomill 6y ago
    Even more convenient is the metre, defined as the distance travelled in one such second by light in a vacuum divided by 299,792,458, and "only within a spatial extent sufficiently small that the effects of the non-uniformity of the gravitational field can be ignored."
dhosek 6y ago
The calculator I had in high school offered three angle measurements: degrees, radians and gradians. Gradians? It turns out that a gradian is defined to be 1/400th of a circle so right angles are 100 gradians instead of 90. They were defined during the French revolution (when else?) and are apparently still used in some European applications such as surveying. But given the importance of measurements such as 30° and 60° in mathematics (π/6, π/3 in radians) that end up being the rather ugly 33⅓ᵍ and 66⅔ᵍ in gradians, the measurement has not met broader acceptance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian

rtkwe 6y ago

> but almost no one advocates for metric time People would love to but there are some nasty fractions left over if you try to impose a base 10 unit of time at any level above a day. Any metric time system stumbles on the fact that 1) Days do not even divide into years by 10 and there's not even a whole number of days in a year and 2) calendars should sync with the seasons to provide any real use. Also 10 days to a week is pretty long unless you include a break in the middle.

sandworm101 6y ago
>> Any metric time system stumbles on the fact that 1) Days do not even divide into years by 10 and there's not even a whole number of days in a year and 2) calendars should sync with the seasons to provide any real use. Only because a "year" is a measurement of how long it currently takes a specific planet to orbit its star. On larger scales such specifics don't matter. There is no daylight savings time in space. Metric time is a realworld thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time "In computing, at least internally, metric time gained widespread use for ease of computation. Unix time gives date and time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, and Microsoft's FILETIME as multiples of 100ns since January 1, 1601.[7] VAX/VMS uses the number of 100ns since November 17, 1858 and RISC OS the number of centiseconds since January 1, 1900."
- rtkwe 6y ago
  > Only because a "year" is a measurement of how long it currently takes a specific planet to orbit its star. On larger scales such specifics don't matter. There is no daylight savings time in space. DST is kind of meaningless here. It's not an inherent feature of the calendar and it's a dumb hack that wasn't even great when it was implemented, I'm all for getting rid of it. Sure yes when we become a multiplanet species maybe metric time will make sense for use at a human level calendar. What I was really talking about was a metric calendar system today and for use on Earth. Even off planet mapping day night to the diurnal cycle will make sense and assuming it's a planet with seasons and a breathable atmosphere the calendar will be more useful if it can match the local seasons. If that becomes an issue we'll probably have a calendar for each planet and then a universal date system used as a translation layer between different calendars and by people living in space where seasons don't screw things up. As for the variability and year that's just as bad for a metric calendar as our current Gregorian. None of that really matters though because today the calendar needs to work for people living on Earth today. If we make it to mulit-planet/solar system we can figure out Stardates then. > Metric time is a realworld thing Only at the level where humans don't really interact with it directly. No one (well I'm sure someone out there does but to a reasonable approximations no one) uses epoch time directly in their daily interactions with people. It's communication layer for machines not for people.

saalweachter 6y ago

> Sheep were weighed in kgs. People were weighed in stones. Feed in pounds. The reason you can get away with this for so long is because you -- historically, especially -- almost never need to convert between "mass of feed" and "mass of sheep" and "mass of people". Even for the most common case where it would matter (transporting each of the above) it almost doesn't, because you typically use different vehicles for each purpose. This means most people who deal with non-metric units almost never run into the friction of mixed units -- if you're doing carpentry, for instance, everything is inches, from lumber to doors to room dimensions, so you almost never actually have to deal with multiplying or dividing by 12 to convert to feet. Likewise with there being 5280 feet in a mile. Sure, if you actually have to convert from feet to miles, it's a pain and a potential source of error. But why the heck are you converting from feet to miles? Pick whichever unit makes sense for the task and hand and stick with it.

kstrauser 6y ago
Those are really good points, except maybe converting between masses. At some point or another you have to transport stuff. If you send a wagon with 3 tons of feed on it to a farm, how many sheep can you send back to town for sale? That goes double if a ship or boat is involved.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  Well firstly, your sheep are walking to town. Secondly, the answer is: a wagon-full. Sheep are not particularly more dense than grain. You are not going to be able to cram a higher mass of sheep in a wagon than you can cram grain; the exact number you could transport in a particular wagon will be determined more by geometry than mass. This does tend towards a common mass-unit for anything that is shipped by mass; in archaic American/English units this is typically the hundredweight and ton, depending on whether you are shipping a little or a lot. A more likely example would be shipping grain or coke one way and shipping iron stock back; you might transport 15 hundredweight each way, although more likely you'd be light one way or the other.
  - 6y ago

scythe 6y ago

>but almost no one advocates for metric time In physics it is not rare to see seconds used, with scientific notation, for measuring periods much longer than an hour. But for practical purposes it is very nice to have units which are easily divided into thirds and quarters, which is possible in base-60 but not base-10. This is equally true for angles, which also tolerate eighths (45 deg) and ninths (40) of a circle. The impractical division of liters to 1000 milliliters has after all given us a couple of incompatible reifications of metric measuring cups and ugly numbers in recipes. 960 = 64 * 5 * 3 might have been nice if we were willing to tolerate a "metric quart" which differs from the liter (alternatively, a "baker's milliliter"), and recovers the teaspoon, tablespoon, ounce, cup, and pint in round numbers.

jasomill 6y ago

I have never even heard of a metric angular unit. Well, the radian measurement of a plane angle can be defined as a ratio of the length of a circular arc divided by the length of the arc's radius, so the "metre per metre" (a.k.a. "1") is a legitimate (derived) metric angular unit.

FullyFunctional 6y ago

> I have never even heard of a metric angular unit. Yet it exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian I'll be the first to acknowledge that it doesn't seem add value over, say, using 1.0 for 360º or just plain ol' raidans (2π)

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Fascinating! Have to read that one. It's not just different occupations that use different counting systems. Apparently in Japanese you count liquid using one set of names, grain another, and countable things with a third, people with yet another. Or something like that. In English we do something similar. Small units of people are 'single', 'a couple', 'menage a trois' etc. Not to mention the myriad names for groups of things (herd, flock etc).

zeveb 6y ago

> Engineering anything in inches seems impossible. And yet that is how the Wright brothers invented flight … and a few decades later we made it to the moon!

necovek 6y ago
OT but I must: I've always hated this use of "invented": they were the first to successfully cover a particular (small) distance using a self-powered device, which we today consider a first successful flight, out of many competing teams striving to do the same thing at roughly the same time. I hate the use of the term because nobody has really "invented" anything in the last century or so. We are always building on the shoulders of giants enabling us to apply existing knowledge in new directions. Heck, Gallileo did not invent a telescope, but he did point a scope at the stars and planets. We could arguably say things like Leibnitz "invented" integrals, but he actually gave them a nomenclature and written language, whereas many contemporaries worked on infinity calculus at the same time (including Newton). I think I have a problem with the use of the term because it is so overloaded and can mean a number of things (I've heard people say things like "he invented gravity" which just boggles my mind, just like your use of "inventing a flight" where there were birds flying forever and people strived to fly for just as long). I am guessing it is just me who is weird, but I wonder if it is so? :)
- zeveb 6y ago
  You're right, of course: I should have written 'discovered.'
  - Jedd 6y ago
    Very droll. Perhaps 'implemented' would be better. But to claim imperial measurements were key to implementing a very short powered heavier-than-air flight (lots of qualifiers, given myriad successful flights had occurred prior) is a stretch.
    - zeveb 6y ago

sergeykish 6y ago

> almost no one advocates for metric time or angular units. Frequency — hertz (SI) is turns per second, engines RPM is revolutions per minute. Integral would produce turn with fractions. Turn, half turn, quarter turn, used in common language. Centiturn (0.01 turn) or milliturns (0.001 turn) could serve degree role. No need to force a change, degrees already replaced with pi in a middle school, though tau reflects turn better. Time does not follow angle subdivisions (1/24/60/60 vs 1/60/60), second is SI measure, people can't even abolish DST, no change in foreseeable future. That said we use spoons and cups on a kitchen, floors to describe building height, inches for plumbing and displays.

romwell 6y ago
>Centiturn (0.01 turn) or milliturns (0.001 turn) We already have this measure, we just spell "turn" as "2π" :)
- sergeykish 6y ago
  That's radian, numeric value is different. Hertz measured in turns, not radians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_(angle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_(angle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz
dmoy 6y ago
In precision rifle shooting, milliradian is very common. Minute of angle is also still common. Scopes are sold with both. It sort of depends on the discipline. For example service rifle scopes are almost universally in minutes of angle, while in the Precision Rifle Series the overwhelming majority use scopes in mils. Super confusing is when a scope uses mils for the reticle but minutes of angle for the adjustment. That's just terrible, but they exist.