Born programmer?
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James, And that, my friend, is why they CHOSE 12 as the base. (and why 13 is the first TEEN) It was literally a base 12 approach. It was a lot easier to divide whole things up. But their foresightedness ended there abruptly. The system does not scale well. Much like Roman Numerals. They work. They are obvious enough, but they get worse and worse. What was that last Superbowl Number? (In Roman Numerals). Try doing division in Roman Numerals. Without converting back and forth. Pure fun. On the other hand. 10 is not more natural than any other number. I challenge people to define time in terms of a metric system that works! (So that 1 day = 10 hrs. 1 hr = 10 minutes, and 1 minute = 10 seconds. 1 month = 10 days, and 1 year = 10 months). Boy that would be fabulous. Of course, we would have to stop using the SUN as a clock, LOL.
I've thought this through before, but only within a Day's context (because a day is based on the rotation of the earth and a year is based on the revolution of the earth around the sun, you CAN'T have anything other than 365.25 (approximately) days in a year). But for a day, if you have 100 units in the day, each would be very close to 15 minutes of our current measurement (14 minutes, 24 seconds). Since there are 100 in a day, they would be centidays. Since that term sounds horrible there would probably need to be something else to call them - maybe "hours" would just be redefined? If you divide each of those centidays/hours into 1000 smaller units, those would be fairly close to 1 second each (0.864 seconds) and could be called millihours (or maybe still "seconds" for each of use). Having units of time similar in duration to what we're comfortable with would make it easier to get buy-in. All of that is moot, though, because almost all computer software would have to be rewritten. If someone had come up with this BEFORE computers I think it would have stood a better chance.
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The university I went to had the basement as floor 1, the ground level floor as 2 and so on. I wonder what they do at the Pentagon[^]; it has 5 floors above ground and two basement levels. There are a lot of office buildings and missile silos that have numerous basement levels.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that... - Harvey
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Overheard today (kids talking in the back seat) Elder: What number is the lowest floor in the building? (referring to place we just left) Younger: Zeroth floor Elder: No it is the first floor! Younger: No, zeroth floor! (this goes on for some time) Younger is 5. :)
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The university I went to had the basement as floor 1, the ground level floor as 2 and so on. I wonder what they do at the Pentagon[^]; it has 5 floors above ground and two basement levels. There are a lot of office buildings and missile silos that have numerous basement levels.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that... - Harvey
> ... and two basement levels. Plus all the ones containing the alien artifacts....
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Eddy Vluggen wrote:
Go stand outside. That's 0 floors. You are at "level 0". Yes, build a floor, we'll call that one. Dig, and we'll call it -1. The latter is counting, but the first is merely a statement of what is if you go outside - 0 floors!
What about "terrace" buildings that are built on the side of a hill, having more than one ground level floor?
I'm retired. There's a nap for that... - Harvey
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IF we had 12 toes and 12 Fingers... THEN this Imperial System would make sense! Worse, 11 and 12 should be NAMED: One-Teen, and Two-Teen, but NO, the TEENS did not start until 13. It is NO WONDER we are dead last in math :-)
but we own the programming language community. LOL
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I have this problem in the US where they seem to think the ground floor is the first floor and the first floor is the second floor, etc. Weird. It doesn't seem to matter how many times I try to correct them, they still keep getting it wrong!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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From Wikipedia:
Quote:
Floors in the Pentagon are lettered "B" for Basement and "M" for Mezzanine, both of which are below ground level. The concourse is located on the second floor at the Metro entrance. Above ground floors are numbered 1 to 5.
The alien artifacts are in area 51, not the pentagon. They were in the pentagon, but then the "plane" hit the building ...
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IF we had 12 toes and 12 Fingers... THEN this Imperial System would make sense! Worse, 11 and 12 should be NAMED: One-Teen, and Two-Teen, but NO, the TEENS did not start until 13. It is NO WONDER we are dead last in math :-)
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Kirk 10389821 wrote:
It is NO WONDER we are dead last in math :)
No, it's not "math", it's "maths"
xiecsuk wrote:
No, it's not "math", it's "maths"
And there goes the English scores... :-)