LVII percent of people are morons.
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XIV% of people just wanted to see the results.
Or fiftyseven percent
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but why? you’ll still measure things in football fields, elephants or “large boulders” so it won’t affect you much
Rest of the world: meters, cm, mm
The US: gerbil teeth, lark tongues in aspic, toenail clippings on fire
Pretty sure king crimson are English, still pretty accurate tho
Metres*
Meter is a measuring device (like a rain meter)
Metre is a unit of measurement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre
Meter is seemingly the american spelling, it’s also spelled meter in many european countries e.g. germany, netherlands
Metr in Czech.
We just have to be special. :-D
Nah, it’s like that on most (all?) Slavic languages. It’s метр in Russian for example which is exactly metr just in Cyrillic.
But well he translated the rest of his post into English
Why would we use the American spelling if they don’t like the unit
Hm see, we don’t have aspic, and I don’t know what a lark is. But I definitely use bananas for scale
I especially love it when they use the weight of an airplane as a comparison. “It’s as heavy as a Boeing 747”. Even if someone had an intuition about the weight of something that large, they would probably be wrong because aircraft are relatively light for their size, it helps when you need to fly. Everything in a plane is made to be as light as possible, so nothing on board of it would weigh as much as the non-aircraft equivalent you’d be familiar with.
Excuse me but the correct SI units for length and area are double-decker buses and Waleses respectively ☺️
A base-12 metric system would be absolutely gorgeous. Geometry and trigonometry would be greatly simplified with a duodecimal unit circle. Our 360-degree circle is a truly ugly hack to make geometry play nice with a decimal number system.
Our base-10 number system would be as ugly to a duodecimal society as a base-7 system would be to us.
On the last point, a better comparison would be base 6 or base 14.
10 = 2 × 5
6 = 2 × 3
14 = 2 × 7Or maybe a better way of thinking about it is the percentage of numbers that divide nicely in the base, as a percentage.
Base 10 has 2, 5, 10 = 30%
So maybe base 3 is the closest, at 33% of numbers being easily divisible.
Either way, 7 is a significantly worse base than 10.
Base-6 wouldn’t be bad at all. “100” in base 6 is 36 in base 10. Their metricated unit circle would have three times as many “degree” divisions as we have hours on a clock.
Base 7 or 14 would require something akin to the sexagesimal abstraction layer we use to make base-10 play nice with angles.
You’re not alone, but the idea of a movment to duodecimal hasn’t had traction in a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal#Advocacy_and_“dozenalism”
Also, ancient Egypt was hip to his idea: https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/2881
Fun fact, you can count from 1 to 12 on one hand by touching your thumb to count your finger bones, as there are 12 of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger-counting#Asia
duodecimal is a decimal based name, I propose “dozecimal”
Seems confusing, why don’t we just call it base-10?
Seems confusing, why don’t we just call it base-10?
I love this joke so much.
This made my day…I felt way too proud of the joke for being clever, and usually when that happens some people don’t get it and think I’m an idiot, and the people who get it think it’s just a dumb joke
I very nearly didn’t post the comment because of that, but said “fuck it, I think it’s funny, and if no one else does no one will notice”
Compliments mean nothing to me when I don’t feel proud of the thing being complimented, but I felt proud of this…
It’s a stupid little thing, but it comes at a time when I’m trying to build up the confidence to release the game demo I made months ago. You moved the needle a little bit… I’m going to text a friend right now and have someone else play the demo.
So thanks for telling me you loved the joke, it was the straw that pushed me into putting more of my work out there
I’m so glad! I totally get it, I love when someone notices something I’m proud of, especially when it’s unexpected. I’m thrilled I could help!
Also, I have previously told this joke you may appreciate:
“There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who understand binary, those who don’t, and those who knew this joke was in ternary all along.”
I laughed out loud, the twist at the end got me
Dozenal
Well you heard them. American numbers only from now on.
Get learning, kids.
Those are Mayan numerals for those curious
Now I ain’t sayin that’s a good system but I ain’t sayin it’s a bad system.
Straightforward enough. Dots and tics in fives. And a weird croissant for some reason.
That’s clearly a doughnought
That’s not a croissant, it’s a “bolillito” calientito pal’ perro frio que hace.
What’s 20? 100? 1000?
How dare you! Circles!? They must be stars!!
It’s America, we count shit in stars and stripes.
What about other things besides shit?
Eagles per gun
If it’s big, I’ve seen them use refrigerators, washing machines and football fields as units of measure.
Anything to avoid the metric system.
“Wait, it’s all shit?”
“Always has been”
Can’t speak for americans but in the UK it is customary to measure things in number of bananas and count things in tins of baked beans. Dont get me started on fractions.
Dont get me started on fractions.
13/16" is the dumbest fraction I have to use on a regular basis. I’d love to hear a good fraction rant!
Silly Brits. Bananas are only for scale!
Time is measured in eagle caws (eagle shrieks?).
The sound many attach to eagles because of Hollywood is by the way not from an eagle, but from a red-tailed hawk. Video here.
…ucked.
🤣🤣
Gotcha questions like this (eg “should we ban dihydromonoxide”) are supposed to show us not to jump to conclusions, but I’m guessing the people voting no on this one aren’t taking much away from it
I think the point is less the conclusions of the poll itself, but moreso the ignorance of the average person about what the Arabic numerals are.
You’re joking, but give it a few months to a year.
This will be a republican talking point for doing away with public schools.
Back to Greek then. 😅
Is that like Roman numerals?
It is similar in that they use characters from their alphabet as numerals but not exactly the same way as the Romans. Greek numerals are decimal, based on powers of 10, just like Roman and Arabic. The units from 1 to 9 are assigned to the first nine letters of the old Ionic alphabet from alpha to theta. Instead of reusing these numbers to form multiples of the higher powers of ten, however, each multiple of ten from 10 to 90 was assigned its own separate letter from the next nine letters of the Ionic alphabet from iota to koppa. Each multiple of one hundred from 100 to 900 was then assigned its own separate letter as well, from rho to sampi.
Not really, they’re based on gematria like Hebrew numerals. α = 1, β = 2, γ = 3 and so on
my hebrew is a little rusty
Roman got it from the Greek too before adapting it, iirc.
Romans got like 80% of everything they stood for from the Greeks.
A joke goes: The Greek invented sex. The Romans later improved upon the idea by introducing women to it.
Hehe, yeah, even their God’s were recycled Greek ones.
Do you want to tell them, or should i?
Idk, I have no idea how to read the results I’m American.
To be fair the system is hindu arabic.
Closer to hindu १२३ than arabic ١٢٣
TIL
Im guessing the “No” makes a bell curve of those who know and those that dont
How did they get mixed? I see 1 in arabic and 2 and 3 in Hindu. Is there a good place to start reading or watching about this in your opinion? If not, I’m just gonna YouTube the history of numbers and see where I land
IIRC Hindus invented this number system (with glyphs for 0-9), and then the Arabs starting using it. Eventually the west started using them and credited the Arabs.
As for how they are written, everyone used the same shapes, and then they probably just ended up changing over time (“Hmm…how do I write that number again? Oh whatever I’ll just make it up”)
Feel free to do your own research though.
IIRC Hindus didn’t have a “proper” 0, and Arabs did, which I guess is the reason why they got the credit
Zero was (in its modern form) invented in India. It’s pretty fundamental to the concept of Hindu-Arabic numerals too: it’s how we represent numbers such as 10, 100, and so on.
I am speechless. My guy. Aryabhatta.
Yeah after some quick googling it looks like I’m wrong. I’m quite sure that’s what I was taught in school though, so blame my teacher !
Basically I was taught that Hindus invented the 0 for base-10 numerals, but didn’t actually use it for maths (e.g 0*x = 0), whereas Arab mathematicians did.
I’d go on a youtube journey. I’m sure you’ll find some cool linguistics videos about it
1 and 9 are the only ones that seem more arabic than hindu. Hindu gets १ and ९. Everything else is pretty close to source.
We, a Christian nation, should instead teach Church Numerals like GOD INTENDED! (/s)
In fairness the question is open to interpretation. They don’t specify if they mean western or eastern Arabic numerals.
As schools in the west already teach western, the people responding could justifiably deduce that the question is referring to eastern.
But the Eastern Arabic numbers are the same as the western ones except that the Arabs call them Indian numbers
“What kind of swallow, African or European?”
Imperial mesure and Roman numerals fits good in this dystopic redneck country
My thought exactly. Arabic numerals imply the decimal system and then people can’t use their grandma’s recipes anymore.
I like the Batman unit
…ucking stupid
Ah yes, 2,313 people, otherwise known as a representative sample 350 million.
Edit: I’m not respond to the morons who think someone’s FB status poll is representative of America.
2000 can absolutely be a representative sample size. The bigger worry here is sampling bias rather than sample size.
You mean, MMCCCXIII people.
You know there will be plenty of Americans who think their numbers are American and not Arabic.
I’ve heard “speak American” coming out of one’s mouth once.
Hey now. Every village has its idiots. We just happen to have a lot of them.
Because freedom!
MURICAAAA!
I don’t believe this is a representative sample, but not because of the sample size. Stay in your lane, high school level science education.
High school statistics covers sampling just fine. Some people weren’t paying attention.
🙄
This fucking comment on every single poll result. Consider learning even the tiniest bit about how statistical sampling works.
It appears to be an online poll which wouldn’t have proper sampling
That’s a vastly better critique than just whining about the sample size.
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Tell me you don’t know statistics without saying it specifically.
I don’t think a more representative sample would improve the ratio, tbh
I’ve been seeing this one for years, are we even sure it was ever a real thing and not just a meme about the “dihydrogen monoxide” science word scary type reactionary movement?
It most definitely is. The fact isAmerica is either smart enough to run the largest empire ever, or the world is dumb enough to let them do it. Personally, I’d like to think the rest of the world is also smart.
I agree this isn’t representative. But i would argue there was no need for a poll to determine what percentage of americans would have said no.
It would likely be fifty-seven percent. Or LVII per centum