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Man I love this comic. Glad to see it on Lemmy!
One of his books explains it with 3 fingers on each hand and 2 toes on each foot - so a base-10 system makes vague sense for those beings.
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It’s not that a system based on base 6 would be strange. That’d be a logical system, too. Just as any other system that consistently uses a particular base.
However, a system that uses numbers of base whatever but then proceeds to jump from one unit to the next one in completely arbitrarily sized steps such as 3; 22; 10; 8; 3 is illogical in any base.
Mostly because it’s very easy to make calculation on base 10. If i ask you to tell me how many millimeters are in 5.7 meters you could probably reply easily without a calculator. You probably wouldn’t do it as easily if it wasn’t base 10
We define 1000 mm as one meter as we are base 10 centric. If we live in a base 8 world, we would have define 8x8x8 mm as one metre and the answer to 5.7 m base 8 would be 5700mm base 8 too
It’s not fundamentally easier to do calculations in base 10. It’s only easier for us because that’s what we learn as children.
If our number system was based on a superior base, like dozenal or senary, we would be able to do calculations on that base easily and would find working in tens awkward.
Technically the metric system is “the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce” as per the Metric Conversion Act of 1975.
You’re just also allowed to use lbs and feet and stuff and most people do.
The versions of imperial measurements the US uses are even defined in terms of metric units, so they’re less a completely separate measurement system these days and more just a weird facade on top of metric, even.
Regan also never bothered to reinstate Imperial standards at the bureau of weights and measures (because it would have cost a small fortune). So our units are officially defined by the their metric counterpart. Legally speaking an inch is 2.54 centimeters.
Screw that, we’ll make them use Metric. BY FORCE!
You are being democratized, please do not resist.
Yep, that’s what Napoleon did…
Base 12 is way more logical than base 10, I bet aliens would think we’re stupid for counting in base 10 just because we have 10 fingers, my opinion on this is infallible fight me
Base 12 is as arbitrary as base 10 and we don’t know what aliens would think nor should we care. Base 16 makes more sense because it is 2x2x2x2 instead of 2x2x3
A base based on 2^x makes the most sense since it’s easy to do conversions between bases that match that template. So base 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. The limit would just be how many symbols can be easily remembered and instantly recognizable (need 32 symbols for base 32).
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I feel like this is my wheel house.
There are so many baseless radixals in the comments.
Every time anyone talks about this, I feel obligated to inform them: there’s also a counting system that’s not based on ten, and it’s way superior. Do people know about it? Most don’t. The Wikipedia page stupidly calls it the “ten-plus-two” system, and there have been heated arguments there with the dumbasses who refuse to change it to the logical name. That’s how stupidly-biased people are towards the ten-based system.
You make a “metric” measurement system based on 12-based counting and then everyone wins. Everyone. It’ll never happen of course.
You’re not really helping your case by omitting the real name (but complaining about the Wikipedia name) and sharing why it’s superior.
I loosely tried to find it and didn’t find anything explicitly named 10+2 or “ten-plus-two”.
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Wikipedia seems to be pretty clear about the naming. You must be fun at parties!
Outside of school I don’t think I’ve ever had to convert feet to miles or yards to miles.
What about grams to ounces or pounds to kilos?
When I find a wood working video on YouTube from the states it blows my mind how anyone can not just adopt metric “This is 5” 4/57 and we need to cut it to 5” 5/45 and a half” bzzzzzzz.
There are some places that do use a base 12 number system.
Again, I wasn’t defending it, just explaining it.
Gonna take a shit on this idea like a good American and say dealing with fractions is easier than irrational decimals. I do like the metric system tho and I wish we would switch at least some things like temp and road speed over.
The only reason we do things in fractions of an inch are because we use inches.
Irrational decimal? You mean multiplying and dividing by factors of ten?
I never understood how it’s much easier to work with “three eights of an inch” than with one centimeter. Or how 6ft3 is easier to work with than 1.90m. The first one combines two measurement units and has very bad accuracy, the second one is straight forward dealing with fractions of itself and can be made even more precise if needed.
The problem isn’t exactly fractions or decimals, you can present the SI system in fractions as well. The issue is unit conversion. If you want to go from centimeter to meter to kilometer it’s very simple because all base unit conversion are a multiple of 10. But if you want to go from inch (the rough equivalent to centimeter) to feet (rough equivalent to meter) then that’s a division by 12 and if you want to go from feet to mile (rough equivalent to kilometer) then that’s a division by 5280 which is a fuck-all number that nobody is going to remember. So instead you have to remember feet to chain and then chain to furlong and then furlong to mile. And this is just one unit in one dimension. For derived unit conversions the imperial system can fuck right off because it’s going to get needlessly complex.
I get your point but as an American I’ve never heard of converting feet to chains or furlongs? Lol sounds like pirate measurements to me
I agree that they probably don’t see much use but they’re there, along with some other pretty impressive units.
That’s not what they’re saying.
They’re saying that the only way you can keep neat and easy conversions between same-dimension units is by maintaining a lot of those deprecated units such as furlongs or chains, because by removing them, now you end up with complete nonsense conversions.
I doubt that very much. Just yesterday I checked out the product page of the new DJI Air 3 and compared it with the Air 2. One of the new features is a bigger sensor compared to the old one. So I wanted to see how much bigger it got. For some reason though DJI only lists their sensor sizes in fractions. The Air 3 has a sensor size of 1/1.3 Inch and the Air 2 1/2 Inch. To be honest. I thought shortly about that and then concluded I would have to do math to compare those two and did something else with my life. I know how to convert between different bases but honestly - why should I? This is weird! Why use random switching fractions for anything? Fractions are only useful to display numbers that would be hard to express in decimal. And that is mainly 1/3 and 2/3! Which to be honest I dont encounter that much in my life.
I’m steel-manning the argument for sticking with US Standard. I think there is a lot more precision inherent in how the system functions that you don’t really get in every day uses. Even so, I would rather deal with meters and liters because I hate having to convert between the two systems and metric seems to have won anyway.
I really dont get why it should be more precise… Precision is dependent on my measurement and calculation. How can it be dependent on units? (if you smaller units as needed by your measurement and calculation)
I’ve never seen metric units represented with fractions
Well, sometimes, because writing 1,3333333333333 is shitty :P, in those seldom cases I rather write it as 1,1/3
The only thing I still like Fahrenheit for is temperature. There’s a wider range for the human livable temperature, so you get more persision. For everything else metric all the way.
And yes, it’s 100% my American brain can’t figure it out in Celcius no matter how hard I try lmao. 10’s are chill, 20’s are nice, 30’s sind heiß. But in the end, I end up thinking Fahrenheit and going from there every time.
I am not familiar with fahrenheit, but celsius and kelvin allow for decimals. You can have as much precision as you like
I’m going to blow your mind, then.
Look up the human body temperature in Fahrenheit.
Turns out all ways of measuring temperature are linear and equally accurate. All of them have decimals.
I hoped ypu would have noted the sarcasm in the tone of my message. Of course every system has decimals.
Nope! Your fault for making a bad joke. Make it more obvious for idiots next time time.
What makes you think Farenheit is more precise for “human liveable” temperatures?
The temperature is the same. Regardless of which unit you use to document it in.
Which is why I think any argument between Celsius and Fahrenheit is completely arbitrary.
Like, the temperature that water melts and boils is completely dependant on pressure. If I follow a recipe I’ll use the temp they recommend. My computer’s heart gauge uses Celsius. I don’t need to know what it is in Fahrenheit to know if it’s overheating.
Those aliens have 3 fingers. A decimal system to them is like a system based on 14, 196, 2744, 38416, … would be like to us - probably worse than US Customary
No, the problem with the imperial system is not what number it’s based on. The problem is that it’s not based on any number. A coherent base 14 system would be easier to use than the madness that is imperial.
There’s no good way to predict what base they’d actually use for their numbers, but there’s definitely nothing about 10 that makes it an obvious choice for an inter-species standard line the comic implies.
3, 6 or 12 would be overwhelmingly likely though, inferring from all documented human language families
They have 3 fingers on each hand and 2 toes on each foot. 10 total.
Everyone focuses on why learning metric would be better in the first place, and they’re right. No one has come up with a good argument for me to throw away all of my measuring tools, convert all my recipes and relearn an entirely new system when the system and stuff I have works for me now.
Because otherwise it will be difficult to live in a country that has converted to metric, presumably. While I’m not pushing for us to change to metric (even though I know it would be good), I suspect the change would be fairly easy to adjust to.
it would be difficult to live somewhere that uses metric
In the absence of any plans to do that, what’s the advantage of converting?
Because it will make life easier for people coming after you, your kids off you have some or the generation after you.
If you don’t do it then they will have to do it or suffer the difficulty of the imperial system.
This attitude is exactly WHY the US failed to actually convert back in the 70s
