> From: rantingrick <rantingr...@gmail.com> > Anyone with half a brain understands the metric system is far > superior (on many levels) then any of the other units of > measurement.
Anyone with a *whole* brain can see that you are mistaken. The current "metric" system has two serious flaws: It's based on powers of ten rather than powers of two, creating a disconnect between our communication with computers (in decimal) and how computers deal with numbers internally (in binary). Hence the confusion newbies have as to why if you type into the REP loop (+ 1.1 2.2 3.3) you get out 6.6000004 The fundamental units are absurd national history artifacts such as the French "metre" stick when maintained at a particular temperature, and the Grenwich Observatory "second" as 1/(24*60*60) of the time it took the Earth to rotate once relative to a line-of-sight to the Sun under some circumstance long ago. And now these have been more precisely defined as *exactly* some inscrutable multiples of the wavelength and time-period of some particular emission from some particular isotope under certain particular conditions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Standard_wavelength_of_krypton-86_emission (that direct definition replaced by the following:) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Speed_of_light "The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of ^1/[299,792,458] of a second." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second#Modern_measurements "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom" Exercise to the reader: Combine those nine-decimal-digit and ten-decimal-digit numbers appropriately to express exactly how many wavelengths of the hyperfine transition equals one meter. Hint: You either multiply or divide, hence if you just guess you have one chance out of 3 of being correct. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
