this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
809 points (97.4% liked)
Memes
45625 readers
1373 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Metric is based in such a way that the idea is ease of unit conversion.
In base 4 multiplying by 4 would change the unit to kilo or whatever. That would be metric but base 4.
We use base 10, you can argue about the validity of using base 10 but it bears no effect on the metric system. And yes arguements about bases exist.
Base 12 Base 6 Base 60 are all common suggestions. But base 10 is what we are probably are going to be stuck with for a very long time.
What about time? That's base-60, and one of the most useful measurements we have.
The base 60 part of time is the least-used part of it. Very few people care enough about exactly what minute or second it is and end up rounding it to the nearest 5 or 15 anyway.
The people who do care about having precision in seconds usually aren't converting it to minutes or hours.
The nearest 5 minutes is a 12th of an hour, the nearest 15minutes is a quarter of an hour. No one ever cares about a 10th of an hour (6minutes) i.e. the nearest minute or second so you inadvertently demonstrated my point. Also the "high precision in seconds" is also conveniently a base 60 system which also goes evenly into a full day, or week, or year despite none of those measurements being metric either.