this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1
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Clearly shows that hours and minutes are messy units. The French Revolution fixed a lot of stupid problems, but decimal time just didn’t stick for some reason.
Cannot say why decimal time didn't stick, but a similarly-proposed semi-decimal calendar with 12 months of 3 weeks each of 10 days was abandoned in France solely because Napoleon didn't like it.
It was also designed to frustrate Sunday church attendance because Sundays being every seven days would usually fall on a weekday on a workweek based on a ten-day week. While Revolutionary France experimented with state atheism and then deism, it eventually returned to Catholicism.
France spread its decimal measurements (the metre, gram, and litre) to the countries that Napoleon conquered or tried to conquer, but by that time, France was well beyond the "stamp out all semblance of religion" phase of its revolution, so a calendar designed with the intent to stifle religious attendance in mind was never going to stick very long once the French had left those territories. Besides, doing maths on length, volume, and mass is something that people do far more often than performing those calculations on dates. Sure, it would have made some things more convenient, but I'm guessing that for most people, the ten-day weeks just stuck out like a sore thumb.
In normal everyday life, you rarely need to involve time in your calculations. In science and engineering you do, and that’s when you run into problems.
When comparing two pumps, you run into issues like this. Which one is bigger: 29 m^3/h or 410 l/min. Doing calculations like that once or twice is recreational mathematics, but in a professional setting, these conversions are speed bumps standing in the way of getting stuff done.
Don't they have conversation lookup tables for stuff like that? Been years since I was in school so maybe those aren't really used anymore? At least to convert the numerator to different units.
Pump manufacturers are like: “We’re selling this professional grade stuff to people who know what they’re doing. They know how to math their way through this mess.”
They do, his take is nonsense and sounds like RP, don't take it too seriously. Any trained engineer can tell you the historical reasons why we use base 60 for circles. This is actually a well known computer science issue, but not an engineering or math one.