this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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Unnecessary conversion factors are cringe.
To illustrate with angle measurements
Converting between units of time (seconds, minutes, hours, days) requires factors of 60 or 24. Factor 60 is simply a position shift in base-60 but not so neat in base-10. All those arbitrary units for the same dimension (time) are redundant: the only natural unit in the whole scheme is day, and the rest are arbitrary subdivisions. Metric prefixes of SI (eg, micro-, milli-, centi-) with day would simplify base-10 calculations.
Units such as second or day, however, bear no special significance in natural laws, so they complicate the values of physical constants arbitrarily. Natural unit systems of measurement that select units to simplify physical constants to 1 may be the most based systems of all: they eliminate unnecessary factors from physical laws.