unit juggler

Then you have to type a bunch of numbers into a calculator, or cut and paste somewhere.

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John Larkin      Highland Technology, Inc 

The best designs are necessarily accidental.

Roads and bridges have to be paid for.

Here that is done via a fuel tax, and there are very few toll roads.

In the US there are more toll roads and, arguably, some of the bridges are too decrepit.

A fuel tax has another benefit: it somewhat isolates the haulage industry from wild swings in the price of crude oil.

No you don't.

You have: 2 furlongs per fortnight You want: m/s * 0.00033261905 / 3006.4424

Jeroen Belleman

I was referring to there being eight furlongs to the mile and eight pints in a gallon.

For number systems, base 12 is better than base 8, because of the larger number of divisors. I'd also make it symmetrical around zero, with digit values in the range -6 to 6 rather than 0 to 11. That makes arithmetic *so* much easier. It's far too late for that, alas.

Jeroen Belleman

What do * and / mean?

Which one is the answer?

--

John Larkin      Highland Technology, Inc 

The best designs are necessarily accidental.

Interesting concept: isolate users from price swings by adding huge taxes.

--

John Larkin      Highland Technology, Inc 

The best designs are necessarily accidental.

2 furlongs per fortnight is 333 um/s. 'Units' tries to helpful: It gives you the reciprocal conversion too.

Jeroen Belleman

It isn't the objective, but it is a beneficial result of the objective.

Someone has to pay the money one way or another. Making the payment proportional to distance and weight is a pretty fair way of doing it.

It's instructive to drive over the state line from California to Nevada. All the potholes and roadside trash diasppear. California gas tax is twice Nevada's, and they have no state income tax either.

In most cases, the selection between octal and hexadecimal was made based on the hardware architecture and instruction set. A computer with 8 (more or less) general purpose register would use octal, such as PDP-11, 8080. while ,machines with 16 registers, such as S/360. RCA

1602, Texas 9900. VAX etc. would be naturally hexadecimal. In the days of entering programs with front panel binary switches, this was very convenient.

The strange thing is that Intel used octal notation in very early 8080 documentation on the naturally octal machine, but later on switched to hexadecimal, apparently to handle a byte with only two hex characters (FF) instead of 3 octal characters (377)

Arthur

works

+1. Google agrees with you. 2 furlongs per fortnight = 0.000332619 m/s

meters-per-second

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The best designs are no accident - sw

Ah, the wonders of hypothecation.

Doesn't change the basic points, though.

!

an

s.

Providing and maintaining the roads on which the trucks are driven is paid for by the fuel tax.

The actual cost of building and maintaining the roads is pretty stable - th e changes in the prices that the oil companies can get away with charging a re less so. Free markets are subject to all kinds of manipulation - the oi l producers cut production when the oil price gets lower than they like - a nd it does pay to isolate the rest of the economy form that sort of arbitra ry change.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Nevada largely earns it's money from its sales tax, which can be one of the highest in the US and varies from 6.85% to 8.375%.

Sales tax is a regressive tax, which takes more (as a proportion of income) from the poor than the rich.

The rich like driving on well-maintained roads, free from road-side trash, and if they can get the poor to pay for most of this, they will use their political influence to make it happen.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

I noticed, but that gets you a factor 64 difference. counting in octal would cerainly help, just multiply or divide by 0100

that would allow "synonums".

[1][6] = [2][-6] = 18 decimal seems messy.

--
  Jasen.

units is a calculator.

$ units '1/(2*pi*sqrt( 100nF * 30uH ))' Definition: 91888.149 / s

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  Jasen.

That's GNU units, not the original version. Nice all the same.

Yes. However, it's not really a problem. Doing arithmetic by hand in such a system is a breeze. Really easy. The decimal system looks like Roman numerals in comparison.

Jeroen Belleman