Re: measuring systems (was: Selenites)

-----Original Message-----
From: Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
To: Multiple recipients of list CONLANG <CONLANG@...>
Date: Monday, September 28, 1998 1:02 AM
Subject: Re: measuring systems (was: Selenites)


>Tommie Powell wrote:
>> A square mile is 102400 square rods.  A kilobyte is 1024 bytes -- not
1000
>> bytes -- for the same reason: It's very practical to some extra bytes (or
>> some extra square rods) because not all of the bytes (or square rods) are
>> going to be available for consumers to use.
>
>Wrong.  The reason for 1024 bytes is the binary system.  1024 = 2^10.
>102400 = 320^2, while 100000 isn't a square number.  A square mile is an
>area which is 320 rods on a side.
>
102400 = 2^10 x 10^2, so what's the disagreement about?  Do you think it's
immoral to combine the binary and decimal systems?
--Tommie