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Comment by gladiatr72 | Hacker News Reader

Not trolling. Promise. I can't think of a non-computing/math-related context where being cog of base number theory comes into play.

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You've never needed to know what time it will be 2 hours and 45 minutes after 11:30 AM?

Heh. Yeah, I guess. Maybe I'm an idiot, but the idea of a minute being a unit of a base-60 system didn't occur to me til round the time I was learning about complimentary binary arithmetic.

I think you're not unusual in not having thought about it, but there's value in being able to intuitively extend your understanding of decimal math to cover it.

Yeah, because it isn't required to facilitate the functional understanding of rough time (>=1s/tick) intervals.

I understood how perceiving numerical values in various bases is useful, just not how it applies to the post.

Imperial units are unfortunately still in common use in the United States, the United Kingdom, and related colonies/ex-colonies. They are variable base number systems that people reckon with on a daily basis.

It wasn’t so long ago, historically speaking, that England used pounds, shillings, and pence! Decimal currency really was a fantastic innovation.

Pedantic comment: USA doesn’t use the imperial system, that was Britain. USA has used the “United States Customary Units” since 1832. Since 1893 the units have been defined in terms of metric.

Since 1991 the rule has been to “prefer metric units”, which I guess is why all packaging you commonly see includes measurements in both systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units

edit: After living in EU and US, I will grant that the lbs is a more convenient unit for measuring food. A kilo of apples is a lot, but a pound is just right.

I don't think the difference between pounds and kilos really matters to purchasing food, but labeling everything with a per 100g nutrition facts rather than just whatever BS serving size the manufacturer makes up is a significant improvement. You can buy oil in the US that is listed as containing 0 calories and 0 fat per serving (and 1000+ servings per container). Not that that's a unit system issue.

As a calorie counter, I have thoughts on this. Comparing foods at the supermarket based on 100g base units is easier, true. But that means you need a scale every time you eat anything. It’s waaaay easier to go “yeah that’s about 1/3rd of the package” (and accurate enough for me).

So really I’d love nutritional labels that have both.

If everything was based on 100g, people would become used to roughly weighing things with their hands and knowing roughly how many calories are in their food.

It’s at least partially about recognizing that there are other ways to view the world than the default one we carry around inside our precious egos, ways that are — literally, in this case — equal to our defaults.

What?

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