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FourWinds

10943 posts

Re: You are the cool ruler

Feb 28, 2006, 17:55

>> .i mean think of the cost of changing, the road signs for example

Ireland recently changed its speed limits to Km/h at great expense. Before that we had the mad situation where the speed limits were in mph and distances in kms, so it's a little different here.

A note on decimals. Mathematically they suck. It's easy to display a number such as 100 and know it's bigger that 74, but the same goes for base 16 once you know it - A7 is bigger than 72.

Base 10 is crap for dividing up. 10 has 2 & 5 as factors. 12 has 2,3,4,6 as factors and so is easier to divide up into smaller parts with fractions. Likewise 16 has 2,4,8 not as good as 12, but better that 10.

The Babylonians used base 60 and we get the division of the hour and circle from them, but like the Greeks and Romans they had no zero. This meant you could not write down 10 and 100 and know the difference using the same digits. That's why the Romans had so many symbols for the base ten stages 1, 10, 100 & 1000 rather than being able to represent them as we do.

In reply to:
Re: You are the cool ruler (wolfnighthunter)

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Re: You are the cool ruler (PeterH)

Topic Outline:

You are the cool ruler – fitzcoraldo, Feb 28, 2006, 11:33


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