I was watching a TV show the other night and had a thought which progressed into a night later and another show.  The person on the first show was talking about a 360 degree action but for some reason, instead of picturing a circle, I thought about a calendar.  Then it hit me, if a circle is 360 degrees, wouldn’t it make more sense if we have 360 days in a year?  It would certainly simplify things.  My partner argued with me that one is based on mathematics and the other on gregorian, phases of the moon and things like that.  I came back with them both being based in science.

Then just a couple nights later, I was watching the weather and I went right back to the same simplification theory.  They were talking about an EF4 tornado that hit earlier this week.  It made me wonder why we basically use a 10 point scale for so many things but none of them are related.  For example, the Enhanced Fujita Scale (EF) rates a tornado from 0 (little damage) to 5 (catastrophic damage).  An earthquake’s damage is determined by the Richter magnitude scale.  There’s not been a greater magnitude earthquake than 9.5 so you could say that we could probably use a 10 point scale and still be ok.  If it’s more than 10, is it really necessary to say it was an 11?  The damage will be so catastrophic that I don’t think it would really matter.  Even the terror threat scale is based on 5 levels so is there really a need to have so many differentiating scales?  Even when taking surveys, which every receipt that’s given these days has one, it’s based on a 10 point (or less) scale.

Maybe it’s time we simplified our lives a bit and started combining some things.  I know I could use a few less things to remember.  I think that’s just age though.

With so many Europeans begging the US to go metric, I wonder how this theory would fit with that.  Hmmm.