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To: freedom_forge

For all your ranting all you did was support the politics of SI and state how stupid you are that anything not divisible by 10 is too much for you. No wonder our scientific education has gone to the dogs, we’re too lazy to get past simple math.


143 posted on 04/21/2008 9:56:10 AM PDT by CodeToad
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To: CodeToad

It is smarter to use an easier system. Period.


145 posted on 04/21/2008 9:59:26 AM PDT by arderkrag (Libertarian Nutcase (Political Compass Coordinates: 9.00, -2.62 - www.politicalcompass.org))
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To: CodeToad
For all your ranting all you did was support the politics of SI and state how stupid you are that anything not divisible by 10 is too much for you. No wonder our scientific education has gone to the dogs, we’re too lazy to get past simple math.

True, I do rant sometimes and, true, I don't like doing arithmetic and never did. How is a decimal system a political issue? And considering when SI was invented, how does that relate to the more recent phenomenon of scientific education going to the dogs? Or did I misunderstand?

150 posted on 04/21/2008 11:44:37 AM PDT by freedom_forge
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To: CodeToad
For all your ranting all you did was support the politics of SI and state how stupid you are that anything not divisible by 10 is too much for you. No wonder our scientific education has gone to the dogs, we’re too lazy to get past simple math.

Wrong. Our number system is base 10 so it is entirely logical to use a base 10 measurement system. SI does that. And it doesn't make the math any easier unless all you are focussed on is the ease of computation. So you think we should go back to 5/64 plus 9/128 minus 3/16 as a basis for teaching our kids? You think we should export products based on U.S. Standard units when the rest of the world is using SI? Decimal measurment units remove unnecessary difficulties and let us better understand what the numbers are telling us rather than worry about challenging fractional math. Moreover, decimal units work for scientific notation when dealing with different scales and significant figures, something older measuring systems do not consider. What you are saying just doesn't make sense. The rest of the world would resist products from here if they are incompatibe with their own, standardized system and would require retooling just to work with American components. That's where the politics comes in. People don't want something not congruent with how they operate. The U.S. standard system isn't even the same as the Imperial system, even though many of the terms are the same for crying out loud! That kind of confusion is the source of most problems, not the SI system itself. But if you go into the hard sciences, almost everything is done in SI, some in cgs (which is derived from SI), but there are some dinosaurs still using U.S. Standard for business.

155 posted on 04/21/2008 7:50:19 PM PDT by doc30 (Democrats are to morals what an Etch-A-Sketch is to Art.)
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To: CodeToad

And one other point. The rest of the workd is using base 10 SI units and they are getting ahead of us in science and math. They must be lazier dogs, then, but it isn’t giving us an advantage. They just find a more efficient way of doing things.


156 posted on 04/21/2008 7:52:01 PM PDT by doc30 (Democrats are to morals what an Etch-A-Sketch is to Art.)
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