Metric/imperial

[Bill Phil]

4 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Because 000 is easy to visually distinguish from 0 and 00, but 0000 and 000000 and 00000 are more difficult. That's why Roman numerals almost never chained more than three of the same digits in sequence; III can be identified at a glance as three but you have to look more closely at IIII whether it's four or five.

Also because we have "ten" and "hundred" and "thousand" but no "ten hundred" or "hundred ten", so doing things in thousand-magnitude orders makes sense for verbally spoken numbers.

But they're only in threes verbally because of the Romans. Also, Milli- technically means thousand. So, thousand thousand, is wha million means.

1,0000,0000 is easy, too. That's actually equivalent to 100,000,000. Still quite easy. Almost any single digit number can be easily counted.

Also Roman Numerals used Is, Xs, Ls, etc. You could pretty easily see over four digits represented, with no separation.

[PB666]

9 hours ago, omelaw said:

http://www.shoemetro.com/t-shoe-size-chart.aspx

lt's more like size 14. how many peolple uses +14 size shoes? I won't find such big shoes in local shoestore, I think

Thats women shoes, mens shoes size twelve is very close to 12 inches. Its something like 11.25" in the sizing horn.If you don't compress the back of the foot it basically is one foot.

Are we still arguing this thing, just remember, except on eva you don't need shoes in space because you don't really use your feet.

 

[Temstar]

5 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Because 000 is easy to visually distinguish from 0 and 00, but 0000 and 000000 and 00000 are more difficult. That's why Roman numerals almost never chained more than three of the same digits in sequence; III can be identified at a glance as three but you have to look more closely at IIII whether it's four or five.

Also because we have "ten" and "hundred" and "thousand" but no "ten hundred" or "hundred ten", so doing things in thousand-magnitude orders makes sense for verbally spoken numbers.

It's cultural. In China and many Asian culture there are words for "ten", "hundred", "thousand" and "ten thousand", with the word "ten thousand" used since ancient times to mean "really big number". So for example, if you were to meet a Chinese emperor you would greet him with "may the emperor live ten thousand years".

Consequently when grouping numbers, the Chinese would do it four digits at a time, eg 13,0000,0000. Because "ten thousand" is the base unit for big number, the next unique word for numbering is actually "hundred million" (that is, 100,000,000), being ten thousand of ten thousands.

[RizzoTheRat]

15 hours ago, omelaw said:

how about using orange tank standard?

I don't know about other countries, but British media usually relates size and weight to London busses or blue whales, and areas to the size ofWales or Belgium.

[magnemoe]

13 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

But they're only in threes verbally because of the Romans. Also, Milli- technically means thousand. So, thousand thousand, is wha million means.

1,0000,0000 is easy, too. That's actually equivalent to 100,000,000. Still quite easy. Almost any single digit number can be easily counted.

Also Roman Numerals used Is, Xs, Ls, etc. You could pretty easily see over four digits represented, with no separation.

3 is also nice as it fit with the thousand, million and billion grouping, 1.250.000 is one and an quarter million. 

[Bill Phil]

56 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

3 is also nice as it fit with the thousand, million and billion grouping, 1.250.000 is one and an quarter million. 

But that's circular reasoning. It's only like that because that's what it's defined as. And it's defined as that because that's what the Romans did.

[magnemoe]

Just now, Bill Phil said:

But that's circular reasoning. It's only like that because that's what it's defined as. And it's defined as that because that's what the Romans did.

True, however did the grouping in thousands origin from the romans? or is it older
both 3 or 4 would work well, 2 is to small and 5 start to get to big, in part in that you rarely would use two separators. 

[p1t1o]

In an, admittedly half-ar*ed, google around the subject - as far as I can tell, putting a "delimiter" every three places has been chosen entirely arbitrarily, almost purely to make it easier to intuitively see how many digits are present (ie: telling 1000000000 apart from 100000000 at a glance).

I could not find any sign of some kind of higher meaning behind where the delimiter goes, nothing to do with prime numbers or advanced math or ancient aliens or anything. People are free to place them wherever they like, in theory. Doing this on a whim, of course, is likely to cause fatal misunderstandings.

[Bill Phil]

4 hours ago, magnemoe said:

True, however did the grouping in thousands origin from the romans? or is it older
both 3 or 4 would work well, 2 is to small and 5 start to get to big, in part in that you rarely would use two separators. 

The Romans didn't use our system, but they had a dedicated symbol for one thousand, which is 10^3. That emphasis on 3s originated there, I think.

[Shpaget]

32 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

The Romans didn't use our system, but they had a dedicated symbol for one thousand, which is 10^3. That emphasis on 3s originated there, I think.

They also had a dedicated symbols for 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 etc.

[StrandedonEarth]

Base-10 is almost certainly because of 10 digits on our hands. I've often thought that if we had a base-9 or base-16 system, then square roots shouldn't be (as far as I can tell) irrational numbers, since there is a number that, when squared, is equal to "10." We already use base-16 with hexadecimal computer code, although with base-9 one could also have "perfect thirds."

Ye old programmers' joke: There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.

[andrewas]

An irrational number is an irrational number regardless of base. The only way to give one a neat representation is to work in an irrational base, and if you do that, pretty much nothing not related to your base number has a neat representation.

Anyway, hexadecimal is nice for computers since it translates to binary easily, but base 12 has more factors than base 16, so it would make a better number system for human use.

[YNM]

Wanted to say that the greeks had a higher "limit" on what can be called separate: 10000 are myriads. So their numbers would likely looks like 100,0000 instead of 1,000,000. Additionally, I think that base-10 is because, other than digits, we have only invented 10 characters for numbers : 0-9. If somebody can come up with something other than A-F for hex then probably someone will be able to use it.

On the topic of fractions, actually using the usual fractions instead of decimals helps a bit when it comes to 1/3, 1/6, 1/7, 1/9, 1/11 etc.

 

[LN400]

Interestingly enough, the ancient Kharosthi numeral system (works somewhat similar to Roman numerals) seems to be some kind of base 5 for single digits (like the Roman V) but when it comes to double digits it resembles more base 20 (a score) with 10 noted a bit like half 20 (unlike Roman which would be opposite with 10 and double 10, X and XX). 

The Babylonians used a positional base 60/base 10 hybrid. The Mayans used a positional base 20 system (curiosly enough, traditional Inuit counting would be base 20 where 1 would be "first finger", 2 would be "second finger", all the way up to 5 then 6 would be "1 hand first finger" and so on then 11 gets it going with "first toe" and when they get to 20, it's "first human counted for". They have some REALLY long names for higher numbers). The Indians introduced the 10 symbols for a positional system that developed into the 10 digits we use.

If anything, it all goes to show that which base we choose, doesn't really matter. It's about what we are familiar with. You will always have irrational numbers no matter the base. You will always have nice and ugly looking fractions, or decimal representations.

Back on topic: Same goes for Imperial VS metric. It really doesn't make any difference on its own.

However, when we send probes crashing into Mars because someone thought the other team was using this system when they really used the other, then we have a problem. That's where standards enter the equations. I don't build Mars probes, neither do most people so for me, and I would think, most, it really doesn't matter in our daily lives. It's all about what we are most familiar with if we don't overthink it. As for international communications in tech and science, SI units and standard notation is where it's at now and mission accomplished.

EDIT: Complete digression: How would it be to use a base in the complex plane?

Edited February 24, 2016 by LN400

[kerbiloid]

It's none of my business, of course, but looks like the thread question would be reduced to:

"How often do you really need to divide something by 3 ?"

[RizzoTheRat]

10 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Ye old programmers' joke: There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.

And the old classic of why do mathematicians confuse Christmas and Halloween?  Because Oct 31 = Dec 25