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Re:A Taxonomy of Technical Debt by LtRandolph on Thursday April 12, 2018 @06:35PM (#16825575)
Agreed; this is a really interesting perspective. It points to how different applications yield different optimizations. Base 60 is fucking cool. I really like musing on how we arrived at the duration of a second.

I stand by the assertion that being one of 7 countries that only sometimes uses SI has very real costs. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/mars-climate-orbiter/

Re:A Taxonomy of Technical Debt by eadmund on Friday April 13, 2018 @10:19AM (#16830216)
> Base 60 is fucking cool.

It really is! The number of digits might be a bit much for normal use, so perhaps base-12 is more realistic. If we're going to upend tradition, might as well do it for good, well-founded reasons …

> I stand by the assertion that being one of 7 countries that only sometimes uses SI has very real costs. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/mars-climate-orbiter/

Of course, that would have been equally a problem had one team been using kilogramme-metre-seconds and the other gramme-metre-seconds, and could have been avoided by standardising on customary or on French Revolutionary units!