While it would he handy to have everything integrated, it’s not always vital. We don’t need to convert kilograms to seconds very often. Artificially enforced systems have always had trouble replacing older anachronistic ones that are otherwise still useful. Ask people in the UK about their cars’ efficiency and you’ll often get an answer in miles per gallon.

There’s nothing magical about 10, either, other than the accidents of evolution that left us with ten fingers. Base 12 is also extremely convenient, and comes from Sumerians counting with their thumb against each of the three joints on 4 fingers. Go through that process once for each finger on the other hand, and you get 60. And of course, in any industry where things are packed into packages, like nearly everything we buy, dozens fit better than tens. 60 divides very neatly into many convenient and geometrically simple fractions, and a lot of what we do with circles benefits from this.

We probably would have been better standardizing on a base unit that’s a power of two, which has more mathematical weight than ten does.

If that’s what you want to take from it, it’s up to you. That was not my intention. What I said is entirely true.

What a thought…we’ll have to form opinions of people based upon what they write, not on points that could always be faked or whored. Popularity is an incredibly stupid measure of quality. I’d like to see the up/down arrow on threads replaced by a simple view counter, too.

Words like this are fun for schoolkids but don’t say anything at all about what was actually done. It’s an effort to take something phenomenally complex and reduce it to a slogan. Slogans are good for fostering outrage, but not much else, and they distract attention from detail. Leave slogans to politics, not history.

I’m not commenting on the legality or appropriateness or intelligence of either invasion, but on the nature of the goals behind them.

One was an attempt at forcing a regime change, the other was an attempt at regime elimination and annexation of territory.

Both can and should be criticized, but not for being the same thing. They weren’t.

My mom was part of that hippie generation that gave LOTR its first taste of success. I read her copies about 1970 or so. That generation of fandom was quite different from what there is today. Now we’ve got volume after volume of additional information and stories and wonderfulness, but back then there was LOTR, The Hobbit, and some scholarly works. We couldn’t even be baffled by the Silmarilion yet!

That’s not the least of what makes me unhappy about the Google search experience lately. The thing I don’t like is how much it sucks. Like, really really sucks. It was the paradigm of mind-boggling usefulness at one point. Now it’s an ad server with occasionally marginally relevant results.