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.