2500 miles ≈ 4000 km.
Guys, switch to metric units already. Thank you.
The rest of the world.
Guys, switch to metric units already. Thank you.
The rest of the world.
16 seems most sensible of those.
You'd end up with a number system where everything is a sum of halvings and doublings, which is conceptually much simpler. Sure, you can't represent a third neatly, but I don't consider that a very important property.
Chinese uses a 10,000-based ("myriadic") system. Conversion is a gigantic pain. Calling these all "10-based" is more harmful, likely to confuse people, than helpful.
You might consider the powers of ten that get their own unit in each system:
English: 0, 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, ...
Indian: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, ...
Chinese: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 12, 16, ...
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
[I had to look up if the official definition of trillion is 10^18 or 10^24. It looks like a nice question to get a good irrelevant discussion for the coffeetime after lunch, if you can collect a few mathematicians in a Spanish speaking country.]
one, ten, hundred, thousand, myriad, lakh, million, crore.
We have a unique word for each power of ten up to 10^8. That's pretty neat.
Words mean what we want them to mean. If I said there are five myriads of sand grains in an hourglass, what could this possibly mean but 50 thousand?
‘Certainly,’ said Alice.
‘And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’
‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’
Of course, this is a famous example of an idiot who can't communicate. (Or, indeed, subtract 1 from 365.) Words mean what they mean by common agreement; your wish to use one inappropriately will not make that use appropriate.
> If I said there are five myriads of sand grains in an hourglass, what could this possibly mean but 50 thousand?
That you're given to poetic turns of phrase? That you're confused about how to refer to numbers in English? If I actually encountered this phrase, I'd lean heavily toward option one there. It would be much like saying the glass contained five times as many grains as the stars in the sky, instead of as many.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myriad
Now apologize.
By inspection, there are exactly zero such examples in the first 200 COCA hits for "myriad", of which there are about 4000 total.
There are 72 total hits for "myriads", of which exactly one is arguably using the sense of 10,000, but it is a translation of the foreign phrase 八百万の神, where 万 is literally 10,000. I don't know whether the number in the Japanese phrase is meant to be interpreted literally, but I doubt it. Even here, the translation given is "myriads of gods", not "eight hundred myriads of gods".
You don't seem to understand what linguistic prescriptivism means. Everyone agrees that there are rules determining what is and isn't valid in a language. Descriptivism is the approach of determining the rules from usage. Prescriptivism is the approach of postulating an authoritative source.
Descriptively, "myriad" cannot be used to indicate the quantity 10,000 in English, only to indicate a large but vague number.
If you were trying to refer to India, you missed. They are estimated to have less than half the English-speaking population the US does. (And a negligible number of first-language speakers.)
1 crore = 1,00,00,000 (written with accepted formatting). Which is 10'000'000 (formatted) - 10 million - for the rest of the world. Anyone used to the Western formatting will quickly get cockeyed seeing those numbers at a glance. I'd imagine it is just as jarring for the Indians seeing Western formats.
You don't just switch to a different system mid way.
Utterly hopeless.
I mean, the US screwed up their fluid ounce / weight ounce so that a US fluid oz of water doesn't quite weight a US oz, but the UK redefined a hundredweight as 112 lbs to make it an even number of stones, and even though they kept their ounces correct, they redefined a pint to 20 ounces so now there's nowhere in the world a pint's a pound.
was 20 years ago in our student bar. More like 3-4 pounds for a pint now, 5 in London
Nor do I spend much time around freezing or boiling water. Fahrenheit has 9/5th more specificity.
Is the point that it's different than the rest of the world? I can see that point, but am I missing anything particularly bad about the Fahrenheit scale?
Mainly that it doesn't make any sense. Why was 32F made the magical number for the freezing point of water? The "well known" temperatures like freezing/boiling points of water are based on observations after the scale was invented. The secrets to the F scale died with Fahrenheit and today nobody knows for sure what 0F actually means.
50F -> 10C
51F -> ~10.5C
52F -> ~11C
I've a particular hatred of Fahrenheit :)
(And if that doesn't help for long, they can stimulate the economy further by changing the driving side to the right one.)
Actually, I'm Indian, and we have our steering wheel on the right side, just like the Brits. It's one of the less fortunate things we picked up from them.
If you're pointing out the inconsistency of the UK using metric units for i.e. weight and then not for travel distances, I agree, its a bit of a schism.
For the record, in the UK, and indeed most metric / english-speaking countries, it'll be metres (and kilometres).
A metre is the ISO unit for distance.
A meter is a device to measure things (not just distances).
Speeds are measured in miles per hour. This can be seen when driving a car, and also on road signage.
It's basically a mix. Yards are not really used outside really by people, but you will find feet and inches being used (alongside metres and centimetres) often in commercial settings.
Other examples of finding both things in the wild in use by people and companies in the UK: pints and litres. pounds and kilograms
Some units are imperial
People's height in Feet
People's weight in Stones+Pounds
Beer in Pints (proper pints, not american tiny-pints)
Roads in Miles
Temperature in C
Milk in Litres
Petrol in litres, but we also use miles/gallon
Food in grams from shops, but oz when buying steak at a pub
Bottles and Cans in ml
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/fresh-food/milk-b...
18 of the first 24 are in litres.
I wonder when the day will come that humanity overcomes these issues without the need to convert values between several systems all the time.
Your Mileage May Differ? :)
This is the worst date string format I've ever seen. Today is 0026, and February 26th will be too.
Your Measurements May Differ?
But the cost of making that switch maybe far outweighs any gains.
Source?
The rest of the world has switched from its arcane units and is quite happy about it.
Even if you want to argue days and years are based on physical measurables, hours, weeks, and months are arbitrary and not based on 10.
But yes, it is still worthwhile to keep in mind that despite nearly all countries officially adopting SI, a much lower percentage of humanity uses SI exclusively in their day-to-day life.
You can then use the standard multipliers and get things like kiloseconds and megaseconds, milliseconds and nanoseconds, some which are widely used, while some are not.
You the can also use legacy minutes and hours, which are based off the fundamental seconds unit, but that doesn't make them "metric", nor technically a SI unit (although it's accepted to be used alongside SI units. "Although not an SI unit, the minute is accepted for use with SI units" Source https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/)
I mean, what the hell, we are cutting their taxes to single digits anyway, might as well write this one off too.
The USA, because of its size and remoteness from Europe and Asia, has relatively little international trade of goods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_trade-to-... has the USA sixth from the bottom) and didn’t, and, apparently, still doesn’t feel that pressure as much.
Sincerely, metric system and friends.
One litre of water only approximately weighs 1kg and density is relative to temperature and pressure. Further, the "standard pressure" density is measured in isn't equivalent to average sea level pressure. Celsius is as much a SI derived unit as Fahrenheit is. The official unit is Kelvin and water freezes at 273.15K. Not such a beautiful number, but still based on the scientifically more significant definition of temperature.
Like this:
1.000.000,52
Why is that better than this:
1,000,000.52
When it comes to imperial vs. metric, the systems are very much not equivalent, and you could argue that either of them is better. Of course, they're better at different things, so in the end it comes down to weighing their respecting strengths against each other - but at least there the discussion is somewhat meaningful. When it comes to dot vs comma, it's just an arbitrary choice, and too bad we didn't all choose the same.
An Intel driver program crashed at me because it stored its Window size American style while the system was set to a different locale.
This can easily be fixed by specifying the input and output locale in your code, which I'd something you should always do anyway if you're selling software to more than one country. There's more differences in internationalisation than just decimal separators and date formats. Using proper locale code will fix all of those for you so you don't have to deal with calls from customers.
Let's not kid ourselves, the comma representation does not play well with programming languages or common data formats, and for that reason shouldn't be used except at the very top level of the UI for formatting purposes when displaying for certain locales. You're needlessly making things a lot harder for yourself if you attempt otherwise.
I don't store floats in the users locale and I don't think anyone should, just like dates should be stored in UTC (timestamps, preferably) instead of in any local date format. However, many programmers seem to forget that if you don't specify a locale, the system will choose one for you and its probably the one the user set up while installing their system, just like what would happen with any date or time.
I'm not going to change the way I write numbers because some American programmer thinks it's too annoying to bother and neither are my customers. Localisation is important to remember because if you don't, you're going to be burned by it at some point. This is just another gentle reminder about that.
- Numeric text fields filtering out all characters except figures + ".", even when the locale is set to something that should allow commas.
- Numeric text fields that expect a specific keyboard layout, for example numbers as the lower characters of the top keyboard row, filtering out anything else. In some layouts (like French), that's not the case : numbers on the top row are accessed with Shift, direct access is for symbols / punctuation. If the text field also disallows pasting, that makes it impossible to fill unless you switch layouts in the OS.
You make it sound that the EU is the odd one out here by not using the "normal" decimal point, but internationally both version are used just about as often: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Arabic_numer...
Neither is better or worse, it's just convention.
There's no real reason why one is better than the other. They're both somewhat arbiratry and as far as separation goes, there's not even worldwide consensus about the amount of zeroes that are in front of a separator. As a European, I don't think I've ever been confused reading an English-style number because of the different separator. The only problem i can imagine is a number with three decimals (123.456) but with such many orders of magnitude in difference it should not be a problem to understand the right number based on context.
The character was chosen based on either practical reasons (the French already used a period for something else in maths) or because it made sense to use the system of countries around you or countries you were trading with a lot.
You can ask the same question about why some countries drive on the left and some on the right but in the end it's because you have to pick something and at that point you just pick what's practical. Or, you can ask why the American number system uses billion to mean 1e9 while in Europe it often means 1e12. It all comes down to what people are used to. Or why America has its date format unsorted (m/d/y vs d/m/y or y/m/d).
Furthermore, the whole world uses metric aside from three specific countries versus the much larger split of comma versus period. It's not really something that can go wrong much as long as you can understand some context (if you read a theoretical numbering system like 10-000-000'00 you'd still understand what the decimal point would be). Using two or four decimals clears up any confusion regardless of system.
I'm gonna stick up for the American system here, because if "billion" doesn't mean 1e9 then the only way you can say that number is "thousand million", which is terrible. The long scale just sucks.
The short scale is just another reason why European and American data sources get confused every now and then. I find it kind of strange that the UK switched to the American system despite having used the long scale themselves for quite some time. I suppose it was just a consequence of the US media getting influence in Europe after World War 2, but it couldn't have been an easy switch.
Miliarda - 1 000 000 000
Bilion - 1 000 000 000 000
Biliarda...
Trilion...
(Czech, it's very painful to read translated articles BTW)
The original arabic character now has a Unicode code point, so we could fix the mess by switching back to that ;-) https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/066b/index.htm