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Indeed, gradiens are a scale where a circle is divided into 400 equal parts. Really fucked me up a few times when I got a new calculator and wasn’t paying attention to what the little “grad” meant.

But I can't subdivide 400 in to as many ways as 360. Think about the pie industry. They could be put out of business!!

I usually want to cut pies into 14 pieces. Some might want 11 or 13. (17 is just too many.) I demand that we implement a system where a circle is 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 7 * 3 * 11 * 13 = 360360 degrees, so that we can cut pies evenly at anywhere from 2 to 15 slices. If my baker cuts a slice at 25739 degrees, I want a refund! (I'll keep the pie, because the pie is obviously useless.)

(720720 might be OK too so we can cut 16 pieces, but honestly, if you're cutting 16 pieces, you're not going to measure. You're just going to divide pieces in half until you have 16. 360360 is the future.)

Of course that's true, that doesn't mean you should.