Metric

You forgot one (intentionally?) :-)

You can shorten the gap by using hecto-, deca-, deci-, and centi- for everyday measures.

When you buy cheese in Poland, you buy it in decagrams (dag): "Proszę piętnaście deka sera."

In Germany you can give your waist size or body height in cm: "Mein Bauchumfang beträgt 127 Zentimeter." Not my true girth, btw. but not much missing. :-)

Well, the Imperial "system" is nothing to write home about.

Donchya mean "short people units"?

nb

:>none of which correspond to a power-of-ten division of a dollar). ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ : You forgot one (intentionally?) :-) :

No, didn't forget it. See above. I did mistakenly include the penny.

-- Andy Barss

Interesting! I'd heard of something like that, but in that tale it was the Alabama or Tennessee legislature and I'd considered it just another Urban Legend. Glad to see it was a Yankee legislature instead of another dumb redneck Southerner story.

In one sense, that's a fun story. In another sense, it's a little scary to see what could happen when legislators debate and vote on things they don't understand. It's very comforting to know that, in these enlightened times, our legislators in the state houses and congress never, never do that!

Tom Veatch Wichita, KS USA

But there's really only one type of people, those who can't do base one arithmetic. :)

Wouldn't 6.(5/3) x 3 = 23?

Note sure what the point was but I am pretty sure it was a typo, or a bad handle on how to represent mathematical equations.

Probably meant 6"+(0.5"/3) i.e. 6 1/6"

On 9/10/2009 1:44 PM FrozenNorth spake thus:

I thought it was intentional, and rather clever at that; I read it as a made-up notation that meant "5/3rds of a tenth" (or 0.16666666 ...). Interesting mix of fractions and decimals.

On 9/10/2009 10:55 AM Morris Dovey spake thus:

Never thought about until now, but base 1 would be an impossibility, no? I'm sure it would take higher mathematics (or at least higher arithmetic, which does exist) to prove it, but my top-of-the-head guess is that it isn't possible because each position in a written number must have at least two possible symbols, as in binary.

Unless you could represent unary numbers by something like this:

but of course you still have two possible symbols (call them a mark and a space).

On 9/10/2009 2:01 PM David Nebenzahl spake thus:

Ack! Total brain fart! Shoot me already.

Of course base 1 exists, and you've probably used it many times. Think of the typical tally system. It's simple: the number represented equals the number of marks made.

Duh.

David Nebenzahl snipped-for-privacy@but.us.chickens> wrote in news:4aa96712$0$11392 $ snipped-for-privacy@news.adtechcomputers.com:

Just trying to be too clever. It should be 6.(.5/3)

Puckdropper

Business forms design?

You got it.

I got one of those too. ;-)

I think you were right the first time. A tally system and Roman numerals do provide a way to express non-zero integer values, but neither supports what we'd be willing to accept as a complete set of arithmetic operations.

Consider how you might represent pi, or even just 1/2 with either notation. I don't even want to think about calculating the square root of II (or //).

A base n system provides a set of digits {0..n-1}, so a base 1 system could only provide the digit 0. As soon as you attempt to increment a zero value you'd find yourself in the predicament of propagating a carry forever.

But it is kinda handy to toss (like a petard) into discussions of number systems. ;)

On 9/10/2009 4:18 PM Morris Dovey spake thus:

Well, we're both right. A simple tally is a valid base-1 representation, but it's certainly not practical to do arithmetic using it.

Don't read well...

It was the Yard in the Bible. A cubic...

Mart> > [...]

Ummm.... no, it wasn't. The "yard" dates from medieval England. The length measurements used in the Bible were cubits and spans.

XXICVIII