[time-nuts] gravity controlled pendulumn clock?

Chuck Harris cfharris at erols.com
Wed Dec 14 15:30:34 UTC 2011


Hal Murray wrote:
...
>
> If you were an alien landing on Earth for the first time, which system would
> make more sense to you?

Ah!   A Godcentric view of the universe.  Decimal is an arbitrary
number system that came about purely because we had 10 fingers, and
a brain that could only think of using them to count on.

Your hands are probably right now fondling a model of a life form that
would find the metric system to be quite foreign, and unfriendly...
Surely you should count using a number system based on an even power
of 2?

There was a time when I spent more time doing arithmetic in octal
than in decimal.  If humans had been born with 4 fingers on each
hand, we would be talking about how certain we were that an alien
would find an octal centric measurement system made more sense.

Metric is purely arbitrary, as are all of the variants on the
English system.  Life would go just as smoothly if we had standardized
on the inch, pound, and gallon, and used decimal fractions and multiples
to represent measurements larger and smaller than the unit.

-Chuck Harris

OBTW, as time nuts, we are steeped in the two units of measure that
are decidedly non-metric: seconds, and Hz.  Think about it...



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