Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

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That's the trick. In a sense, the units follow the application, and hence English units always feel a bit natural. They have a tendency to have integer multiples and simple fractions.

And when I say natural, I don't mean elegant. They often tend to be thoroughly arbitrary. But they match the needs, which is usually reasonably pragmatic. For example, 360 degrees is ideal for simple in-head directional geometry, but radians are by far simpler in algebra or very precise measurements (because Pi can often be neatly factored out).

Once you start using enough decimal points, all units are lousy. I remember using angstroms in astronomy because it fit better into the optics theory and the distances are already absurd it didn't matter. So you may as well use the units that are convenient, and just get good swapping.

(PS: glass sheets are sold by the square foot, but in thicknesses measured in millimeters. Turns out to be pretty convenient that way.)

The Sumerians divided the circle into 360 degrees because the Sun's annual path took 360 days to come around a full circle. It's no wonder that 360 degrees feel natural for directions.

Another thing I've encountered: in South India, there is a measure of distance & time called a "nazhika". It is 24 minutes. 2 1/2 nazhika is one hour, 60 nazhikas make a day. A nazhika is also roughly the time taken for a normal person to walk 1 mile. Hence a nazhika is also used as approximately one mile. Seems a bit weird until you remember that light-years involve the same identification of time and distance.

Non-metric units like these and others ("foot") have probably very good reasons behind them, and they could be used by people in their day-to-day activities while not carrying measuring instruments with them. Metric System is more systematic, but people "lose touch" with intuitions of quantity.

I assume that the Sumerians were observant enough to realize that there were still a few days missing, and that 360 was better because it was a more divisible number actually.

The Sumerians did, in fact, periodically insert intercalary months in order to offset the difference, which suggests that this is in part close approximation and on the other part nice for application.

I did not know this. Thanks.

I feel like unit debates often result from a misunderstanding between sides of "is perfect the enemy of good?" I thought it suspicious that they would have miscounted the days, but you're right: it's so dang useful that it's worth a little error (with occasional corrections) for such convenience.

Of course, at some point it becomes a huge pain and you buckle down and choose something just as arbitrary but easier to handle. And that's why we don't count angles in the milliseconds since 1970. Or days in a year; though we do sometimes measure 3D angles in solid minutes, which seems like a metaphor taken too far :)

How many kiloseconds will you spend working next week?

Even in metric-using countries, nobody uses it for time.

For actual applications of spherical trig though degree, minute, second makes a lot of sense, primarily because the earth rotates about one arc second every 4 minutes, and if you know this then you can do manual navigation via the stars and many other things.

However for many things I do use metric time, just not for the human aspect of it. For example, for one customer (admittedly in the sciences), we had to help them estimate how much hardware they needed for additional load. So you do the work in seconds because at that point the math is easiest, and convert to ratios following.

I for one would love to have metric time. Just today I had to add some durations together to get total duration, which would have been simple thing to do with metric time.

Of course for practical use using SI second wouldn't be very good solution. Traditionally second is derived from the length of day, and I think that would make sense for metric time too. 1 milliday would be somewhat close to 1 minute and 50 millidays (or maybe half deciday) would be close to one hour. Of course the name probably should be something else than "day" to reduce confusion.

So I could be working something like 16 decidays next week.

Regarding your PS: The most baffling measurements to me are tires. The diameter is expressed in inches, the width in millimeters, and the sidewall thickness is given as a percentage of tread width. So you get 255/40R17 to describe a 17” tire that's 10” wide with 4” sidewalls. (Or a 430mm tire that's 255mm wide with 100mm sidewalls)

And try to replace your wheel, for example, for one that has 16 or 18 inches, and calculate the size of the tire to have the same final size...

One of the neat things about degrees and plane geometry is how regular polygons you can have without partial degrees.

The number of sides depends on the divisiblity of 360 by the number of angles so:

3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 30, and so forth.

For angle measurement where you want a closed geometry figure at the end, degrees are extremely elegant, and 360 is 2^3x3^2x5

360 is arbitrary I hope you know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degree_(angle)#History

Wouldn't a much more natural unit for angular measurements be 1/(2*pi)? That way angular measurements are represented as their fraction of a circle (which is pretty easy to visualize; 180 degrees becomes 1/2.)

You'd lose the definition of angle as arc length / radius, which would make your proposed unit just as arbitrary as degrees - most formulas involving angles would need to contain a conversion factor.

You'd also lose the small-angle approximations sin(theta)=tan(theta)=theta which in my field are used extensively to convert nonlinear to linear equations.

Nonetheless, your proposed unit already exists and is called tau. Or write it as 2pi if you want to be more easily understood.

The most relevant point here is that the natural choice of units is very subjective and depends on the task at hand. For example, particle physics uses "natural units" where all units are powers of gigaelectronvolts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units#.22Natural_units...

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