Why Five and Five?
The inscrutable design of the body blows my mind over and over. So you are going to hear about it over and over again too. What has been striking me is that almost every part of the human body is a unique singularity with a unique function (skin, nose, pancreas) or comes in a handy pair (eyes, nostrils, legs, kidneys). Some of the benefits of a duplicate are obvious (stereo vision and hearing) and some are less obvious (spare filter for your blood in case you get sucker punched in the mid back). If you consider the way cells differentiate, divide, and multiply, you’ll see the wonder it is that at the end of each appendage sits some of the most useful of body parts: the hands and feet. And the digits on these parts do not come in singles or pairs.
Recently I noticed some tingling and pain in my last two fingers on both arms. I thought about how much I use those fingers. How beautiful are the feet that bring good news. And the fingers that can feed the yarn for knitting. And the pianos and typewriters of the world cry out in a medley of beauty and function!
So here is my stab at it.
Base ten is so elegant, so simple, and fairly intuitive. We have a history timeline in our home which represents 1 year with 1 mm. So starting with earliest recorded history, we have every 100 years represented by 10 cm. It’s really beautiful and plays out beautifully when looking at the punctuation and significance of not just the events of history, but the space between the events. Human history fits on a single wall.
And look at the beauty of using 100 discrete units to express the forms of water we experience daily! How intuitive! I’m swooning, Anders Celsius! Is it because we have 10 digits with which to count that base ten feels like my favorite pair of sweat pants? Or do my insides feel the way they do because of constant practice? Either way, watch a room of engineers light up when you use SI and no strange conversions have to be used before and after calculating. I wonder how many engineering disasters have occurred as a result of a non base-ten unit system.
Anyone want to launch a base ten calendar or a base ten watch? I think the Engineer would likely make that day 2 of his presidency, just after abolishing the time zones.
The French Revolution
While in many ways the French Revolution wasn’t super revolutionary, it did pave the way for much of what we consider modern thinking with regards to some foundational ways of life in the Western world. The idea that common people or peasants have an inherent right to liberty crystallized during that time. The beginning of a base ten system of units based on concrete reality was established at that time. Nearly a century later 1875, the Treaty of the Metre gathered and 20 nations, including the United States, signed the treaty which established a conference and committee on weights and measures, as well as a prototype kilogram and its trustees. This platinum and iridium cylinder has copies located around the world, with very specific cleaning instructions and carefully documented offsets from *the* prototype kilogram.
I know some of you out there love binary and hexadecimal, but we’re raising our kids SI. They can dabble all they want at the edges of the Imperial system, but the beauty of the dovetail of human anatomy and math cannot be denied.
It truly was the age of enlightenment.
Two little ears and one little nose
Two little eyes that shine so bright
And one little mouth to kiss mother goodnight.
Yes, kiss me goodnight and carry on, SI hero.