Friday, April 05, 2013
Ten is not magic
Polistra always favors natural and experience-based measuring systems, but finds it hard to argue against the convenience of moving the decimal point. It feels easy and automatic to convert 300,000 Kilothings to 300 Megathings, or .007 Things to 7 Millithings.
This convenience turns out to be nothing more than habit induced by long use of decimal currency and measures. In 1833, when metrication was still fresh and unsettled, the Franklin Institute decided firmly to keep the English system here in the States. The Institute formalized standards for the state of Pennsylvania and strongly urged the other states to adopt them. One factor in their decision: Even France, under the total tyranny of its Revolution, had to back off from metrication because it didn't serve the purposes of commerce.
Relevant passage:
Pulling the relevant text out of the image:
"The decimal notation, though long use has made it habitual, is by no means the most convenient for the calculations of arithmetic; it seems to have originated in no other cause than the habit of counting upon the fingers in the infancy of society.... It is not applicable to the divisions of the unit in [practical use]. For this last purpose a system admitting of binary division is alone fitted."
Those scientists and mathematicians, in an era when decimal was not yet fully acculturated, could still see clearly that ten is not magic.
Now that computers and calculators handle all the details of arithmetic, there is no good reason to force metrication into areas where it doesn't already exist. Computers don't use tens at all. Their basic arithmetic is binary, but it runs so fast that no system of numeration has a real advantage over the others.
Best proof: Measurements about computers are the newest of all measurements. Are they decimal? Nope, they're binary, because memory space is naturally partitioned by powers of 2. One Kilobyte is not 1000 bytes, it's 1024 bytes. One Megabyte is 1048576 bytes. Natural and appropriate measurement has returned! Or more precisely, it never went away.
Pulling the relevant text out of the image:
"The decimal notation, though long use has made it habitual, is by no means the most convenient for the calculations of arithmetic; it seems to have originated in no other cause than the habit of counting upon the fingers in the infancy of society.... It is not applicable to the divisions of the unit in [practical use]. For this last purpose a system admitting of binary division is alone fitted."
Those scientists and mathematicians, in an era when decimal was not yet fully acculturated, could still see clearly that ten is not magic.
Now that computers and calculators handle all the details of arithmetic, there is no good reason to force metrication into areas where it doesn't already exist. Computers don't use tens at all. Their basic arithmetic is binary, but it runs so fast that no system of numeration has a real advantage over the others.
Best proof: Measurements about computers are the newest of all measurements. Are they decimal? Nope, they're binary, because memory space is naturally partitioned by powers of 2. One Kilobyte is not 1000 bytes, it's 1024 bytes. One Megabyte is 1048576 bytes. Natural and appropriate measurement has returned! Or more precisely, it never went away.
Labels: Metrology
¶ 3:44 AM
