Burns MacDonald wrote: > For more measuring trivia, see http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/ > It is truly mind-boggling and aptly demonstrates the need for a simple, > global 10-based suystem.
Well, metric is only half the answer, isn't it? Shouldn't time be measured in powers of 10? Unfortunately the Earth's orbit and rotation don't cooperate - but we could do better than we have. How about angular measures like lat & long? Radians are 2 pi to a circle because it makes some calcualting simpler (what's with that pi thing, anyway?!?) So some things are more amenable to convenient units than others, I guess. I'd say BFD, but them seems to be fightin' words in these parts ;-) <anecdote> Years ago my mom was bemoaning the fact that her high school chemistry class couldn't multiply or divide by powers of 10 without their calculators. With quantities expressed in scientific notation, no less! So maybe metric isn't such a big win after all :-) </anecdote> Dave _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
