this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle
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A truly logic system would be entirely designed around a base-12 number system. But we were born with an imperfect set of 10 fingers and that doomed us.
Those aliens have 6 fingers. It's an absolutely ironic twist that their discussion on measuring systems is super illogical for them, and yet logical is the verbiage they use.
I'll also defend fractional measurements over decimal to my dying breath. Decimal measurements can't express precision very well at all. You can only increase or decrease precision by a power of 10.
If your measurement is precise to a quarter of a unit, how do you express that in decimal? ".25" is implying that your measurement is precise to 1/100th - misrepresenting precision by a factor of 25.
Meanwhile with fractions it's easy. 1/4. Oh, your measurement of 1/4 meter is actually super duper precise? Great! Just don't reduce the fraction.
928/3712 is the same number as 1/4 or .25, but now you know exactly how precise the measurement is. Whereas with a decimal measurement you either have to say it's precise to 1/1000th (0.250), which is massively understating the precision, or 1/10000th (0.2500), which is massively overstating it.
Fractional measurements are awesome.
This feels like such a niche reason to prefer fractional measurements.