Andrew Fildes wrote:
> Shame you guys metricised your currency so long ago, in the French style.
> Took all the fun out of it.
>
The root of the US Dollar is the Spanish eight Real coin, or Piece of
Eight, so called because it was commonly cut into eight pieces, like a
pizza. It does seem to have fallen out of favor, but there are still a
lot of us around who understand 25 cents, or 2/8ths, to be two bits,
half a dollar to be four bits, etc.
The US stock exchanges quoted stock prices in 8ths. until 1997,
traceable directly back to the Spansih coinage that was legal tender in
the US until 1857.
> I suppose the Imperial system would be far more intuitive to those with
> twelve fingers and sixteen toes - what part of the Ozarks did you grow up in?
>
I assume you are still talking about coinage. I really don't care about
that area. Money is such an intimate part of most human life taht it
doesn't matter how silly the system is, everyone will fully understand it.
You know perfectly well that I was referring to the Metric system of
weights and measures.
My simple objection is that the old English system of length measures
related to human scale and the body in ordinary use. The first knuckle
of my index finger is about an inch long. My foot is about a foot long.
From nose to extended fingertip is a yard. I'm two yards tall. Somehow,
I prefer something of human scale and meaning to a decimal subdivision
of a measurement of the Earth (and inaccurately done at that) or the
distance traveled by light in pure vacuum (assuming there is such a
thing) in ^1 ⁄_299,792,458 of a second.
I guess my objections to weight and volume measures are more
philosophic, as they were originally based on the meter and are now
based on physical standard objects, just like their predecessors.
I suspect that 12 became a part of measures and especially of coinage
because it divides into 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4 without requiring fractional
parts of the sub-measure. Likewise, 16 divides down quite far without
requiring partial amounts of the sub-measure. They made a lot of sense
in practical marketplaces.
I suppose one may deduce the centrality of time to the experience of
human consciousness from the failure of decimal time, introduced along
with the decimalized metric system. It sank almost instantly and without
a trace.
> But I wondered about that snarl directed at the height of the age of
> reductionism - I thought that we were still climbing towards that and were
> leagues, or at least versts away from the summit.
>
The effort to impose rational order and precision on the observable
universe was part of a spiritual and philosophical revolution. As
knowledge of the deeper nature of the universe in areas like quantum
theory, relativity, chaos and complexity theories and cosmological
theories and discoveries, the Cartesian revolution and its children look
more and more like a quaint mythology for understanding a very small
sub-set of all of nature.
It still seems to be part of popular belief about science that
accumulation of enough information combined with sufficient
computational power will allow precise and absolute knowledge about the
workings of the natural world. That's what they taught me growing up as
a science nerd. Chaos theory has pretty much put paid to that, but it
and the other changes that have outdated the Cartesian legacy have not
yet coalesced into a new cultural mythology to replace it. Quantum
theory and other discoveries and theories seem to be pointing in a
direction where even causality starts to seem only to be the outward
appearance to conscious resident in small, localized parts of the
greater universe of deeper forces that may well be a-causal and non-local.
The endless efforts to extend the Cartesian model beyond the limited
areas where it is useful will likely be viewed in the future as
mythological failures. There is a theory about the otherwise puzzling
collapse of some pre-historic societies of considerable age and
sophistication. It proposes that their religion and society were
essentially the same and were based, from purely religious practice to
practical matters like planting, on astrological measurement. However,
they had not discovered, and so did not understand, the effect of the
precession of the earth's axis. As the markers in the sky started to
betray variation from their religious beliefs (Mythology), the basis of
their societies failed and they collapsed.
I'm not proposing a similar collapse, only that the beliefs of the Age
of Reason may be in an analogous position today, no longer coinciding
with observation. They haven't ever agreed with the experience many many
people have of the universe. Their power to change the immediate world
and their agreement with and support of dominant psycho-spiritual belief
systems has led them into ascendence.
Many say that these have now led us into an untenable position as
inhabitant's of an ecosystem we are destroying.
I'm not sure whether that is simply true, whether the material
manifestation is a symptom of a psycho-spiritual upheaval, or indeed,
whether it is possible to separate the two. It seems clear to me at
least that the end of the Age of Reason and a purely reductionist
approach to understanding of the nature of our universe is fading. What
that change will be like, whether simple relatively cultural change or
something more apocalyptic, is pretty hard to see from within its midst,
let alone what may follow.
> Now I believe that you can use a diamond nail file to rub away the ISO on the
> button of your new 5D Mk2 - one of those natty little white fineliner pens
> will do to write ASA in it's place.
Just a new standards agency's name on the same numbers. No need to
change the label.
> Of course it will be a bit tricky if you'd rather use DIN, or GOST.
As above, I wasn't speaking to this area, but the same rule of using
numbers that make sense applies. The GOST system would have been OK, it
works like ASA/ISO, doubling for each stop. A system that adds one for
each stop would be OK too. Anything that can be calculated in the
photographer's head easily. The DIN log scale is useless because it
doesn't make sense in use. One has to memorize the speeds, rather than
being able to quickly calculate them in one's head.
Too late, I suppose, but a system more linear in nature would be more
intuitive. I suppose non-photographers are more impressed by the huge
numbers now showing up. Somehow, I know it takes my brain a second to
reduce ISO 25,600 to six stops over ISO 400, rather than being such a
big number it seems like infinity speed. :-)
Moose
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