Comment on 5 tomatoes

• ricecake@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It’s not nonsense, just old and focused on priorities that don’t matter anymore. A mile was initially a thousand paces. So you send a group of people out, one counts each time their right foot takes a step and after a thousand times they build a mile marker. Bam, roman road system. 1000 strides per mile, 5 feet per stride.

  Later the English used the unit as part of their system of measurement, and built the furlong around it, which is the distance a man with an ox team and plow can plow before the ox need to rest. A mile is eight furlong. This got tied into surveying units, since plots of land were broken up into acres, or the amount of land an ox team can plow a day.
  When some unit reconciliation needed to be done, they couldn’t change the vitality of oxen, and changing the survey unit would cause tax havock, so they changed the size of a foot.

  All the units and their relationships were defined deliberately and intentionally. They just factored in priorities that we don’t care about anymore.

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• chaonaut@lemmy.4d2.org ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Because there’s a hidden system of measurement change hiding in the middle. Inches, Feet and Yards are familiar 12:1 and 3:1 conversions, and Rods, Chains, Furlongs and Miles. Their conversation rates are generally nice conversion, with rations of 4 rods : 1 chain, 10 chains : 1 furlong, and 8 furlongs : 1 mile.

  So where do we get 5,280 with prime factors of 2^5, 3, 5 and 11? Because a chain is 22 yards long. Why? Because somewhere along the line, inches, feet and yards went to a smaller standard, and the nice round 5 yards per rods became 5 and 1/2 yards per rod. Instead of a mile containing 4,800 feet (with quarters, twelfths and hundredths of miles all being nice round numbers of feet), it contained an extra 480 feet that were 1/11th smaller than the old feet.

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  • captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The fun one is a nautical mile. Which is 6076.12 feet. How’d we get there? A nautical mile is equal to a minute of latitude, which happens to be just a bit bigger but on the order of magnitude of most “miles” to include the US statute mile.

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• bryndos@fedia.io ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I think a mile is specified in terms of 'chains' not really feet or yards.
  Feet and yards are meant for measuring smaller stuff, like the size of a foot, or a courtyard.

  The 'chain' was a specific surveyors tool for measuring larger land areas. I imagine defined to be a length of physical chain practically manageable by the surveyor - probably pre-dating optical / triangulation methods before lenses got cheap.

  I think an acre was then defined as 10 square chains or something.

  But go back in time far enough and different jurisdictions have different lengths of standard chain, so different miles and acres derived from it. But it doesn't really matter because if you were buying land in Scotland, then you'd probably want to use a Scottish surveyor and his big long chain.

  The nautical mile is then a whole other kettle of fish.

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• yermaw@sh.itjust.works ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  If an alien species has 12 fingers to our 10, would they work in base 12 as normally as we use 10s? Like would their whole system end (or start) with a 0 or equivalent and not end all different?

  My maths coherence is too high-school for this thinking, but now its in there.

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  • Marz157@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    There’s really nothing special about base 10 numbering, it just feels natural to us. They probably would use base 12 and just have 2 extra symbols for the digits after 9. Example 10 x 10 = 100 in both base 10 and base 12 math. It’s just the translation of that in base 12 to base 10 looks like 12 × 12 = 144 to us.

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  • the_crotch@sh.itjust.works ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The Babylonian number system was base 12, that’s why there are 24 hours in a day and 60 minutes in an hour. Afaik they had the normal number of fingers, they were just smarter about making their numbering system divisible.

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    • saimen@feddit.org ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The just started counting with zero (fist)

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      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        That gets you base 11, which is what we count on our fingers in now.

        They counted, at least for tallying, by putting their thumb on the three finger bones if the other four fingers on the hand. One hand can count to 12, and then you lift a finger in the other when starting over. That method gives you a count of 60’on your fingers. That’s why 12 and 60 still crop up all the time.

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  • Liz@midwest.social ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1A, 1B, 20, 21, …, A0, A1, A3, …

    You can use your hands to count in base 12 if you want to, and some cultures have done so. Just use the segments on your fingers on one hand, using your thumb to count each segment.

    youtube.com/shorts/ThOuUa_iLnM

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• Olhonestjim@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Base 60 can do 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, and 12.

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