My car lease (in Sweden) is in Swedish miles.
2000 miles (i.e. 20k km).
5,546 karma · joined November 3, 2011
2000 miles (i.e. 20k km).
four score for some things, six score for others, or for onions, a hundred was 15^2
In Javascript, also, effectively you have to work with code as data.
So this isn't just about writing macros. There are a lot of areas where this does touch things.
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.
The whole point of the American unit system is that they are optimized for specific use, but definitely not for conversion.
ISO paper sizes are a great counterexample, actually, because they took an application, rather than a conversion-centric approach. I.e when you print a signature you do so on a larger piece of paper, and then you fold, crop, and bind. Each fold cuts the paper size in half.
So ISO paper sizes are much more like American units than American paper sizes are.
If you are brought up with metric units, the units are built around the number system.
A good way to understand the problem by for the HN audience is the problem of using IEEE floats where precise numbers matter in programming. The problem with IEEE floats is that we usually think about them in base 10 but they represent something in base 2, and no lossless conversion across the domain is possible. American units bridge that sort of gap much better than metric ones do because they usually focus on divisibility than on quick representation and conversion.
There are certain areas where metric makes sense. If I have prices in kg and I want to know how many g I can buy for a certain amount of money, because the money and weight systems coincide we are well optimized for that problem.
But, imagine calculating the angles of a triangle or a hexagon if your degree system was base 10.
In other words, American units are abstracted around actual application.
There is of course a happy medium. We could change to duodecimal numbers and come up with a duodecimal metric system. Then everyone would get what they want, right? ;-)
Or you buy fruit at the supermarket in Indonesia in ounces and kg (an ounce is an hg).
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.
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
However, that's part of the process too as is learning when to use a hammer vs a wrench vs a screwdriver. There is the point in learning a new tool where everything looks like a nail. Yes, people will really mess things up by applying the wrong concepts but how else do we learn?
Thinking about Belloc's thesis a bit more, you have a parallel to the Confiscation of the monasteries in the US, and that was the liberation of the slaves. One can think about slave-based agriculture in the Antebellum South as increasingly industrialized (and even increasingly exploitative as a result). And the civil war not only empowered corporations with large military contracts but also in its resolution provided them with destitute masses pushed into the wage labor system. As I usually say, all racial oppression in the US has been economic in both ends and means.
But in both cases, the religious landscape evolved to match the economic landscape. And the ideological landscape quickly followed. In some rural parts of the US it is still possible to have a discussion about common good, even with people one politically disagrees with. But in the cities, it is all about individualism and rights and any questioning of the in-group orthodoxy gets one labeled as "the enemy."
It took me actually living in Indonesia for a number of years to grasp the depth of difference there. And one of the things that is worth repeating often is that when third worlders speak of first world problems, they don't regard these as trivialities. Indonesians and Malaysians don't want to become like Americans and grow old alone. To those in the third world[1], they have already rejected what Americans and British hold to be (paraphrasing Thatcher) without alternative. I now count myself in the same category.
[1] using the term in the original sense, namely countries which reject both Anglo-American capitalism and Soviet/Chinese Communism. I sometimes refer to Sweden as third world for this reason also, though it is far more Capitalist than others.
The one thing that does save things a little bit is that Westerners are usually so out of touch that there really isn't much room for us to do much that doesn't just effectively turn into disengagement. But even that poses real problems. I do my best to help engage in dialog on both sides of very culturally bound issues in order to try to foster some room for dialog through disagreement but getting Westerners in general (and Americans in particular) to accept that an issue like abortion or same-sex marriage is dependent on culture and other cultural institutions (such as how family relates to the economic order) is virtually impossible.
That also gets to what is wrong with multiculturalism in the US, namely that it is being pushed by people who hate culture generally.
It's also worth noting that both Thomas Hobbes and JJ Rousseau came from Calvinist circles. So I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that the Hobbes/Rousseau (and those closely influenced by them, such as those of Locke) are effectively Calvinism as applied to society and clothed in secular rhetoric.
Also I think it is important to scope that "atheism" is usually a shorthand for "Western, Secular Humanistic Atheism" which is philosophically an off-shoot of Protestantism in general and Calvinism in particular. You get a different set of results when you look at Buddhist Atheists or Hindu Atheists for example (because in neither of these traditions is religion dependent on belief like it is in Christianity).
Hope that helps.
As I usually say, JSON is for relatively free-form, dynamically typed languages, but if one side is uses a statically typed language, XML is probably the better choice.
JSON, remember, was written for a language without even firm object structures. It is great in that environment but all exchange formats require external knowledge to validate, and XML unlike the others provides a way to do that.
The single greatest strength of a skilled software engineer is to know when to make it someone else's problem.
But on the other hand... It sounds like this is training data for a neural net? In that case maybe working with the XML directly makes more sense?
In the end, I would probably go with SQL to start with just because the analysis features of relational databases would provide some really nice ways to check results. That may be secondary but it is significant.
Other cultures may see the universe as a great mountain or a great tree.....
As far as I can see, however, Orthodox Christianity didn't have the same history in this regard as Western Christianity did. Part of this was that the Eastern Empire lasted a lot longer, and part was that the spread occurred to Kiev and Novogorod under very different circumstances than it did to Denmark or the Franks. But in the West, the promise offered was that the Church (Roman) would help kings solidify power in return for conversion. It was from that promise that eventually the kings secured their independence by means of the reformation. And secular humanism is effectively an effort to banish competition to the state from the public square in this regard so it too is a further development of the same mistake.
Wolfram points out that before the Migration Age began in earnest, the Eastern Empire was spending more in the military (and that was only 30% of the budget) than the Western Empire was collecting in taxes, and the issue was, in the West, that the Senatorial families had achieved such a monopoly on wealth and power that they both couldn't be effectively taxed and controlled the economy. Some families had a budget that was as high as a third of the whole Western Empire's budget (suggesting it is likely that some families had businesses which were consuming more than the Western Roman military). According to Wolfram, this was not the same in the East.
Nonetheless, the East found its military too expensive during the Arab wars and that's where the Theme System came from.
The perspectives of Tainter and Wolfram are not unrelated. Complexity usually does concentrate power and resources in coordinator roles, and that concentration itself cannot be maintained without complexity -- remember that the fall of Rome effectively meant the transition of the role of slave into a role of peasant simply because central enforcement of slavery could no longer really occur. But at the same time the Ostrogoths could not challenge the powerful families enough to hold Italy for more than a couple of centuries before the Eastern Empire invaded and the Goths fell for the same reasons (according to Wolfram) that the Romans did.
Regarding the article, one of the problems not discussed is the issue of economic concentration. These breakthroughs usually demand that. The industrial revolution wasn't caused by population, but by concentration of economic power in a few hands and the quite intentional efforts to evict peasants from their lands and make them destitute factory workers.