this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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xkcd
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There's nothing wrong with kilowatts, it's an SI unit. The problem is hour, which is 3600 seconds, and we have ancient Egyptians to blame for this, who divided the day into 24 hours despite having already developed base-10 numerical system.
Kilowatt per kilosecond, which is 1 megajoule, would work better.
I really don't get the issue with kWh. Things are rated in W and we mostly care about the hours they're powered on. If I wanna figure out how many kWh a PC that needs 300W used in 4 hours, I multiply 300*4. If I wanna know how many joules it used, I have to do 300*4*3600. Only one of those can be done in your head in 3 seconds.
You gotta use an escape character, specifically a backslash ( \ ), when dealing with *s on lemmy.
Otherwise you end up with "stufflike this!"
When it could have been "stuff*like this*!"
ETA: Damn, you're good. Fixed it before I even finished this post!
One pet peeve of mine is the usage of watts and kilowatts though. Chargers are often labelled like 1 second lasting batteries :/
Damn, I was convinced it was the Babylonians with their base-60 system.
That actually works great.
60 is cleanly divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30.
10 is cleanly divisible by 1, 2, and 5.
Yeah Babylon was very clever but also looking at their math and writing makes it clear why they had to have a class of people to do their math and writing
I have no problem remembering what 1 is divisible by.
It would've been better if we had a 6 or 12 based number system
The big reason for 60 over 12 or 6 is the divisibility by 5. That makes it divisible by all numbers through the first 3 primes.
To get it divisible by all the numbers up to the next prime (7), you'd have to go to 420, and the one after that (11) you'd need to go to 27,720, and 13 would require a whopping 360,360.
The problem with base 60 is needing to know and remember instinctively the names, symbols, and relative positioning for 60 digits. Like, I love Babylon, they're underrated for certain, but imagine teaching this to a 5 year old. Imagine doing calculus with this shit. Now remember that their writing impliment was a triangular reed and their written marks were entirely triangles and straight lines.
I knew a 26-letter alphabet by the time I was 2.
Yes, but set to music i assume and not nearly to the level one was expected to understand the ordering of digits.
In base 34: 1…9,a…z,10 it's slightly more than half the digits the babylonians had, and as someone whose career involves a lot of math I don't want to be dealing with at a glance trying to figure out the approximate difference between jl5x and ik8r
As an adult with a college degree in stem I know my digits and their ordering perfectly and without question unless literally trying to trip me up. The alphabet, I know in that specific order and would have to think to start in the middle. I don't want to do series or sequences on that shit and if you do then good for you