OK, this may be the geekiest thing I've ever blogged about—and consider not only the usual content in this space, but the fact that sentence ended with "I've ever blogged about." This is the apotheosis of geekiness; ahem.
So in my SF book, I thought an interesting aspect of the cultural setting would be the units things are measured in.
The aliens' units are, of course, mostly arbitrary, except their year's length (which is determined by the mass of their star and their home planet's orbit, of course). Oh, and I decided their air pressure at sea level is 85% what ours is, which slightly lowers the boiling point of water, and therefore their temperature scale. Other than that, though, I just thought it'd be fun to have their units be duodecimal, rather than decimal: but still metric. They have five fingers per hand, and their numbers are base-10, but, see, 12 is so much more highly divisible! They're a militocracy, after all, and the reason so many pre-metric European measures are base-12 is because the Romans were practical. It's easier for some military engineer without a calculator to divide by 12, rather than 10, on the fly, since 12s also let you do sixths, thirds, and quarters automatically. All tenths get you is halves and fifths. So, for example, they say water boils at 144 degrees (they also have absolute, Kelvin-style scale, of course). So one of their degrees is 1/144th the liquid temperature range of water in 85 kPa pressure.
A related thing is that, in general, the aliens prefer fractions to decimals, and express angle measures as fractions of a circle.
As for humans, the metric system is here to stay—or rather, the SI system. I'm sure on Earth there are probably holdovers of the older metric units, but the story takes place in the colonies. Colonials say "megagrams" instead of tons, and "cubic centimeters" instead of milliliters—whiskey comes in 750 cm3 bottles, instead of 750 mL ones. They use Kelvin numbers, too—remember, scientists would have a big influence on space colonization, so it's not weird to say room temperature is 293.
Ah, but this is where I rock. In my setting, the UN uses IMF Special Drawing Rights, simply called "rights", as a currency. Now, since the thing's value is currently derived from the value of a few national currencies, obviously it'll be based on something different—maybe the relative buying power of the five richest nations, or something. Doesn't really matter. But I thought, hey, why not metricize it? So a thousand rights is a kiloright, a million is a megaright, etc. And maybe use the "generic rupee" symbol, ₨, for it; I happen to like the thing. I guess it goes after the number, though, the way the euro sign does in France (7,50 € and that kind of thing). I'd also have it re-denominated so there's no need for any fractional units (no 0.46 or whatever); maybe I'm a Nipponphile but prices in yen just look so clean. So "35,000 rights" would be written "35k₨".
2 comments:
As much as I hate the UN and the IMF, and love the lumpy, human measurements of the English System, your idea about "kilorights" and so forth is awesome!
Please, please, "customary" system: not only did it exist also in France and Spain and elsewhere, but the American version was slightly different from the English one.
An English pint is huge, for one thing; for another, they use the "long" ton (as shipbuilders generally do) while we use the "short" one, since we were mostly landsmen.
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