We'd be Better Off with 9-bit Bytes

Re:We'd be Better Off with 9-bit Bytes by ljm on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @09:03PM (#44819563)

And many of the conversions between metric and imperial align with the Fibonacci sequence on any order of magnitude. 130km/h is roughly 80mph simply because the fibo sequence has 8 and 13.

Obviously not an emergent property but shows how these things were designed.

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Re:We'd be Better Off with 9-bit Bytes by rich_sasha on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @11:38PM (#44820345)

1 mile = 1,000 [double] paces of 0.8m each = 1,600m

1m = 1e-10 times half-meridian from the North Pole to the equator, via Paris for a croissant, apparently.

So kind of a coincindence... But a very neat one. Meanwhile, ratio of adjacent Fibonacci numbers converves to some expression involving sqrt(5) which is approx 1.6

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Re:We'd be Better Off with 9-bit Bytes by zveyaeyv3sfye on Thursday August 07, 2025 @08:09AM (#44823412)

converges

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Re:We'd be Better Off with 9-bit Bytes by thfuran on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @09:39PM (#44819732)

I don’t think any common conversions fall near there other than miles->km. It’s certainly not the case that the systems were designed to have the golden ratio as conversions between the two.

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Re:We'd be Better Off with 9-bit Bytes by speedgoose on Thursday August 07, 2025 @01:08AM (#44820800)

It wasn’t designed with British miles in mind.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metre

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_measurement_of_Delambre_...

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