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[–] 163 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is because fibonacci numbers approach golden ratio which is approximately 1,618033... and one mile is 1,609344 kilometres exactly.

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  • [+] 99 points 1 year ago (19 children)
  • [–] 42 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    Nah, that's too difficult for USAians. They can memorize fibonacci numbers much more easily.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Be like us Brits and measure short distances in metric, long distances in Imperial, yet struggle to convert between them.

    GPS navigation gets frustrating. It's either metric "turn left in 4km" when all road signs and speeds are in miles, or imperial "turn in 200ft" when you have no idea how long 200ft is.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I never understood the use of yards for exits over there, but the hardest part was figuring out what my GP meant when he said I needed to lose a couple 'stones'... C'mon, you can't expect me to learn imperial, metric, and whatever the hell that is.

    I'm already stuck having to be able to convert between elephants and F-250's because my homeland REFUSES the metric system, now I have to study geology just to figure out how unhealthy I am (actually was, I've lost 40lbs since then).

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Stones are imperial. There are 14 pounds in a stone. Obviously it's the right unit for people's weight because who wouldn't want to share the weight of a human equally seven ways, eh?

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago*

    Yeah, people talk shit about Americans using Imperial, but Brits are so fucked up. At least we consistently use one shitty system. Brits are constantly switching between the two, and sometimes even using outdated systems no one else uses. Like, why the fuck do you use stones for body weight, but pounds, ounces, and grams for different measurements of weight? Be consistent at least.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    To be fair, kilometers make a lot more sense to me, as an American. However, everything is written in miles, and everyone speaks in miles. Estimating distance for me is easier in metric, but it isn't really acceptable.

    (I play milsims, which is why I'm more used to it. Most Americans have almost zero experience with metric.)

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Hey I’m going to have to ask you to censor that word. There’s American children on this ap! We can’t have them going to the playground and repeating that kind of language.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Are there children on this app though? Seems like they’d rather be on TikTok or whatever. Unless they are some edgy ML tankie contrarian maybe. In which case, expose to the metric system and nsfw content is the least of their problems.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    They might realise that the metric system is much better than the stupid Imperial system, and this could make them fell guilty that their forefathers were ignorant bozos. Republicans hate it when children learn about the errors of their forefathers.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Their forefathers were actually in favor of the metric system. The US is an original signatory to the treaty of the meter, it's the official unit of measure for the government and military, and we were on the brink of getting switched over when Republicans decided they didn't want to spend money on the final conversion and education, despite it being a popular enough notion that it was used for advertising. (The two liter bottle became popular when they used the popularity of metric to sell plastic pop bottles).

    The fervent attachment to imperial is weirdly recent.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    And are units are tied to metric system as well.

    1 inch is defined as exactly 2.54. That’s what an inch “is” in America.

    That’s why I liked my joke. We just hate the words themselves

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    This is such a cool example of how some recursive algorithms have a closed form. We all know that there's a simple equation to plug miles into to get kilometers, but we don't talk about how the Fibonacci sequence has a closed form. This is so cool.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Wjat does closed form mean? Asking as a stupid botanist, sorry.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Closed form means it can be written out as a specific, finite set of instructions that work the same regardless of what the input to your function is.

    For Fibonacci, it is most commonly defined in its recursive form:

    f(0) = 0
    f(1) = 1
    f(x) = f(x-1) + f(x-2) for integer x > 1
    

    But using this form, computing a very large Fibonacci number requires computing all the numbers before it, so it’s not the same finite set of instructions for every number, it takes more computation to generate larger numbers.

    However, there is a closed form formula for generating Fibonacci numbers. Using this formula, you can directly compute any large Fibonacci number without having to compute all those intermediate steps. It takes the same amount of work to compute any Fibonacci number.

    f(x) = (a^x - b^x)/√5
    a = (1+√5)/2
    b = (1-√5)/2
    

    (Note that a and b here are constants; I only wrote them separately to avoid a mess of nested parenthesis)

    For an example of something that doesn’t have a closed form, we do not know of a closed form for generating prime numbers. There are several known algorithms for generating the nth prime number, but they all depend on computing all the previous prime numbers, making it very difficult to compute very large prime numbers (in fact, how generating large primes is actually done is by making an educated guess and then checking that it’s actually prime). Discovering a closed form formula for prime numbers would have a huge impact on mathematics and cryptography.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Thank you. So does that mean that the Fibonacci can help us because just like the miles-km algorithm it is closed form, so we can use it to compute a single number, and at the same time it gives us similarish results because of coincidence?

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  • [–] 33 points 1 year ago (11 children)
  • [+] 12 points 1 year ago (9 children)
  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    Fun fact: there's quite a lot of countries that use "mixed metrics", with no real rhyme or reason for what uses old ancient imperial and what uses new shiny metric

    UK - Miles for long distances, switch to meters for distances less than a mile, always use km in air and sea. Milk in pints, petrol in liters, water in ml, beer in pints. Human heights in Feet Inches, building heights in Meters. Human weights in a unit even Americans don't use anymore (Stone), animal weights in kg/g.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

    Really? Do people walk around in the UK and say "I weigh 11 stone"? "I lost 3 stone on this diet"?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Yeah, but does the kilometer have a cool origin like the mile? Checkmate math nerd.

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  • [+] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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    [–] 14 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    To go from km to mi I always leaned “multiply by 6 and move the decimal one to the left”. So 6km is ~3.6mi. Or 10km is just about 6mi.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    or add half and then 10% (because it’s 1.6km to the mile): easier than multiplying decimals or large numbers by 6, and the inverse is 0.6mi=1km so easy to remember both ways (same thing but don’t “add” just start from 0)

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    I always used "a little more than half".

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Interesting, but if I have to look up a conversion I’ll just look up the actual conversion rather than an approximation.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Works because ratio of km to miles is about the golden ratio.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Cool! I wish I would have known this in the 70's when Canada changed over from British Imperial units to the Metric system. Maybe this is the incentive needed to push the usa into the rest of the metric system world!

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    If every measurement being a factor of ten of a smaller or bigger unit isn't going to convince Americans of the ease of metric then the Fibonacci sequence isn't going to convince them.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    isnt it easier to give them simple conversions 1mi=0.6km.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago
    [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    5 to 8 is the far simpler pretty exact conversion.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

    Ah yes, I always remember the Fibonacci sequence and totally wouldn't find it harder to calculate than just doing the conversion the regular way

    /sarcasm

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    "Remember"? Do you also remember all the digits of π?

    It's defined as F(0) = 0, F(1) = 1 and F(n) = F(n - 1) + F(n - 2). Which makes more sense than imperial units.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    Or I could just do 1.6 km ≈ 1 mile whenever I need to convert from the standard that I use, Metric, to Imperial

    Far far far simpler

    Edit: I'm not American, I use sensible units, SI Metric

    Edit edit: I do fully have dyscalcus, mostly only effects "scary" looking maths, so no, your suggestion doesn't help

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Tbh, the last sentence was just a silly jab at the imperial units.

    I was mostly just making fun of the fact that you implied the Fibonacci sequence can be memorized, when it is infinite. I'm not saying that referring to it is simpler than dividing/multiplying by a constant, no.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    I’m never going to visit the US or UK anyway.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    US and Israel are the only places that still use Imperial. While older generations in Canada and UK will speak about weight in Imperial, the official unit system is Metric.

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  • [+] 0 points 1 year ago* (1 child)
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    my upvote made 420 upvotes, coincidence?

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