12 ms·
Long Hundred
- prionassembly 6y agoClose enough to 1 gross (dozen dozens) I guess?
- hprotagonist 6y agoi’m not so sure. 144 has been a special number for a good long time.
- burnt_toast 6y agoThis is the kind of thing I love to use in conversation with my girlfriend because it annoys her. Basically anything that sounds off, or odd but is technically correct. The last thing I learned before this was the word coolth.
- lehi 6y agoThere are also long billions and trillions, still in common use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion
- peteretep 6y agoI think I would debate “in common use”, but “was in use until very recently” seems reasonable EDIT: For English
- GolDDranks 6y agoMaybe you are restricting the discussion to American and British English, which I am not very qualified to argue about, but they are in common use in my native Finnish and many other European languages.
- sellyme 6y agoYeah in most common forms of English you will likely go your entire life without ever hearing a single person use the long scale forms. Many of the words in other languages that used to translate to the (long) "million", "billion", etc. now actually translate to the esoteric "milliard", "billiard" in English.
- userbinator 6y agoThe relevant wiki page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_...
- peteretep 6y ago> The reckoning by long hundreds waned as Arabic numerals ... spread throughout Europe during and after the 14th century It is only recently I learned that the spread of Arabic Numerals was so recent
- kibwen 6y agoGiven the barriers to communication back then it feels like it didn't take them all that long to make their way to Europe. The numeral system seems to have been codified in India by 700, then extended by the Arabs to decimals and fractions by 900, then began making its way into Europe by 1000. The callout to the 14th century might just be because that's about when the printing press was developed, which caused the dissemination of knowledge to really start kicking off in general.
- cperciva 6y agoThe spread of decimal numerals in the 14th century had less to do with the printing press and more to do with growing commerce and increasingly powerful states -- both of which necessitated performing arithmetic on larger quantities.
- ncmncm 6y agoThe explanation I read was that accounting ledgers were the first big market for printed books after the Bible, and being printed ruled with columns, numbers had to fit in the columns, so became decimal. The notion that commerce was small before 1300 does not seem to me to withstand scrutiny. Curiously, the abacus was in use in Europe for centuries before written arabic numerals were used. So, the concept of place-zero was in practical use long before it got a name. It is claimed that our numbers are big-endian because they were written, in Arabic, right-to-left embedded in right-to-left text, so little-endian. But we picked up the Arabic visual representation without the meaning. All the nuisance of right-justifying numbers to line them up by place (now automated, but it used to be a huge hassle on mechanical typewriters) could have been avoided by adopting the same endianness relative to our text. But, I don't know what the original Indian form was, either the digit order or the text. It predated the advent of Arabic usage in India by some centuries.
- spqr0a1 6y agoThis is the basis for customary nail sizes, as it's (for example) how many 6d nails you could get for 6 pennies in medieval England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(unit)
- monkeycantype 6y agoI'm of the opinion - though not 100% confident - that you can tell the difference between houses built with metric and imperial materials. I think you can perceive the different factor relationship between the dimensions of timber, fittings and spacing. Although I'm not entirely certain that I'm not picking up other cultural habits in Australian and American building styles. Should I ever ascend the throne, I shall have an imperial palace (naturally) and a metric one built to the same plan to verify my intuition
- InitialLastName 6y agoWith CAD being what it is, if you have them built to the same plan the engineers will just convert with fairly good precision. What you need is a metric architect and an imperial architect to do plans based on the drawing of a pre-numerate child or (better) a tasteful adult from a culture without measurement units who won't have internalized the visual languages of metric or imperial ratios. edit: Words are hard
- monkeycantype 6y ago> pre-numerate child or (better) a tasteful adult my two favourite moments in a documentary are #1 in 'the smashing machine' when you glimpse a the boot of the bad girlfriend in the corner, and feel before you know that everything is about to go bad and #2 in the documentary 'Jean Nouvel: Reflections' about the architect of the same name, where you see him at work, in a dark cozy restaurant at a table surrounded by staff/devotees swirling a full glass of red wine, and he's looping loose enigmatic squiggles on wine stained napkins which he then passes out, a sacred relic, one to each person at the table. And off they go and make the buildings that bear his name.
- throwawayboise 6y agokilobyte, kibibyte.
- danaliv 6y agoIt’s a shame we didn’t go with “long megabyte,” etc. instead of the god-awful binary unit prefixes.
- Skunkleton 6y agoMibi you just don't like them because they are new? You should gibi them a chance.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoI reabd thbis wholbe combment wib mby toumbge imb mby teebth Ebdit: whoebver downbvotes tgbis canb hear mbe sbpeakinbg it
- ithkuil 6y agoThou shalt not speak ebcdic!
- lifthrasiir 6y agoKnuth once suggested "large megabyte" (and so on) with a wicked abbreviation "MMB" (for "both binary-ness and large-ness").
- userbinator 6y agoHe has also suggested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-yllion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-yllion
- sellyme 6y agoPreferably "megabyte" and "short megabyte", because that will annoy HDD manufacturers more.
- mjevans 6y agoMaybe the prefix and separation: SI M B (SI for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units The International System of Units (SI, abbreviated from the French Système international (d'unités))) ((International System of Units) Mega) Bytes -- Edit, addition Additionally, I'd be willing to prefix my preferred units some variation of: Base Two M B (BTMB) Computer Science M B (CSMB)
- wave_function 6y ago120 is divisible by a lot of numbers, which is convenient for many calculations. There's a similar reasoning behind 24 hour days, 60 minute hours, and 360 degrees in a circle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal
- zz865 6y agoNah we should go metric on time. 20 new-hours a day, 100 new-minutes per new-hour.
- astrea 6y agoAnd I thought time libraries were a mess already...
- gerikson 6y agoBring back the French Revolutionary clock!
- chriswarbo 6y agoThe existing system is perfectly rational, although using base-60 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal ) rather than base-10 (decimal). We can use the ideas of metric without base-10 (see http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2020-05-22-metric_red_herring.html http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2020-05-22-metric_red_herring.htm... ); and I would argue that base-60 is actually better, since it has many factors (see http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2020-05-22-improving_our_units.html http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2020-05-22-improving_our_units.ht... ). It's actually illuminating to trace the linguistic history: - The 'hour' used to be the base unit for time - Smaller intervals were called 'small parts', where a 'small part' is 1/60 of an hour (the sexagesimal equivalent to a 'decihour') - Even smaller intervals were called 'second small parts', defined as 1/60 of a 'small part' - Even smaller intervals were called 'third small parts', defined as 1/60 of a 'second small part' - And so on This was done by Latin speakers, whose phrase for 'small part' is "pars minuta". Hence 1/60 of an hour is a "pars minuta" ('minute' in English), and 1/60 of a pars minuta is a "pars minuta secunda" ('second' in English). Metric/SI units take the "second" to be their base unit, and give us shorthand multipliers like "kilo". Tracing this back, we find that a kilosecond is 1000/3600 of an hour! Likewise we don't tend to use thirds or fourths anymore, instead using multipliers like "milli" and "nano". I'm not aware of any shorthand multipliers for sexagesimal. In my blog post linked above I suggest “prota” for x60 and “defter” for x3600, so we could use "protasecond" instead of minute and "defersecond" instead of hour (I also suggest abbreviating second to "sec", since it's no longer used as an ordinal number ("second small"))
- tnash 6y agoThis is relevant in my field (Waste Management) as there's the long ton, the short ton, and long and short hundredweight (CWT). All different and confusing!
- csense 6y agoSo wait. The English once used C to mean what we now notate as "120" and the Romans used C to mean "100"? Wouldn't that have been super confusing when the English sent trade ships to mainland Europe? Especially in the days when England was a Roman colony? And at one time the British spoke German? Fascinating. I always thought the single biggest language influence on British was French (because William the Conqueror), and the pre-Conquest indigeneous British was a mix of Celtic, Roman, and Norse from the Vikings that's more-or-less unique. How'd they end up speaking German?
- flukus 6y agoThe Romans weren't super consistent either, at least when it came to the size of their military units: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion > How'd they end up speaking German? You've probably heard of Anglo Saxons? After the Roman withdrawal came the Anglo Saxon invasion from Germany and Old German became the predominant language of England, even the name comes from these invaders (Angles -> Angle Land -> England). After that the Vikings and French added their layers to varying degrees, Celtic languages remained dominant in Ireland, Scotland and Wales until much later.
- guerrilla 6y ago> Old German You mean Old English or Anglo-Saxon. Also, they came not just from what became northern Germany but also from what is now Denmark.
- kevinmchugh 6y agoWho did William conquer? The Anglo-Saxons. If you know where Anglia and Saxony are, well, it's easy to see what happened. German grammar is pretty easy to pick up for English speakers. Lots of sentences are constructed the same way in German and English.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoAnd we glom words together the same way, just maybe less gratuitously
- guerrilla 6y agoTo throw further confusion into it, both hundred[1] and centum[2] came from the same Proto-Indo-European word *ḱm̥tóm. 1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hundred#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hundred#Etymology 2. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centum#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centum#Latin
- CyberRabbi 6y agoReminds me of the ambiguity of “gigabyte”
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoSo a dozen times ten?
- throwaway_2047 6y agoTangential, reminds me of this question about name of the decades https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/107437/there-are-70s-80s-and-90s-how-do-you-describe-the-years-from-2000-00s https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/107437/there-are-70s...
- Grustaf 6y agoWe have a lot of place names in Scandinavia and the former Danish Viking colonies, and apparently in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, reminiscent of this. A "hundred" is a geographical entity that can deliver a long hundred men to the armed forces.
- rufusroflpunch 6y agoThat’s what she said?
- orangepanda 6y ago> prior to the 15th century Until 1400s or 1800s?
- mikewarot 6y ago> Within the original Latin text, the numeral c. is used for a value of 120: Et quodlibet c. continet vi. xx. ("And each such 'hundred' contains six twenties.")[2] This implies those Roman Numerals we learned in school are wrong.