"Decimal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... declared that there ought to be but one standard of weights and measures, in a country subject to the same laws. The Academy of Sciences was charged to seek and present the best mode of carrying this decree into execution. That society proposed the adoption of the decimal division, by taking for a fundamental unit the ten-millionth part of the quarter of the terrestrial meridian. The motives which determined this choice were the extreme simplicity of decimal calculation, and the advantage of having a measure taken from nature. The latter condition would, in ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... spent on the preliminary survey, he had assessed this cultural equation to the last decimal point of surety. He had absolute faith in these people's superstitions. He knew what to expect; but somewhere the equation had been off. He should have chosen a quieter event, he guessed. The audience had been too well schooled in the acceptance of ...
— The Glory of Ippling • Helen M. Urban
... in. "But never to excess, never to excess. I never see Dodey lit up but once, and that was in Dayton, Ohio, the night we played to the janitor of the hall and his four children. When we came to the place where Dodey is blindfolded and does the decimal fractions stunt on the blackboard the janitor's oldest child fooled Dodey into doing all next week's lessons in arithmetic and Dodey fretted over it, ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... simplest decimal system of computation yet legalised is in use in France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Spain, and other parts of Europe, as well as in Chili, Peru, Mexico, &c., and by 27 and 28 Vic., cap. 117, its use has been rendered legal in this country. As our local trade with the ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... use both the decimal and the duodecimal systems (nowadays we use only the decimal system, which is a great pity). The duodecimal system (ask your father what the word means), accounts for the sixty minutes and the sixty seconds and the twenty-four ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... letter from M. de Chancourtois, accompanying a work by him which contains an elaborate program of a system of geography based on decimal measures, both of time and of angles, and on the adoption of an ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... deal with are not actually those just mentioned. The clown that has a 9 on his body is portrayed just at the moment when two balls which he is juggling are in mid-air. The positions of these balls clearly convert his figure into the recurring decimal .[.9]. Now, since the recurring decimal .[.9] is equal to 9/9, and therefore to 1, it is evident that, although the clown who bears the figure 1 is absent, the man who bears the figure 9 by this simple artifice has for the occasion given his figure the value of the number 1. The ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... their reckoning lay. These things the strangers probably taught the Shumiro-Accads, but at the same time borrowed from them their way of counting. The Turanian races to this day have this peculiarity, that they do not care for the decimal system in arithmetic, but count by dozens and sixties, preferring numbers that can be divided by twelve and sixty. The Chinese even now do not measure time by centuries or periods of a hundred years, but by a cycle or period of sixty ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... of the visible diameter of the disc of the Sun or Moon, which was much more convenient. However, the word is now almost obsolete in both senses, and partial eclipses, alike of the Sun and of the Moon, are defined in decimal parts of the diameter of the luminary—tenths or hundredths according to the amount of precision which is aimed at. Where an eclipse of the Moon is described as being of more than 12 Digits or more than 1.0 ( 1 diameter) it is to be understood that the eclipse will be (or was) not only ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... a really correct apprehension of the principle of decimal notation, for instance, to understand that it is purely arbitrary, and that we might in the same way take any other number than ten as the base of a numerical scale,—that we might increase for instance ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... the articles cost per dozen by 10. which is done by removing the decimal point one ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... feet and Metres English feet and Metres English feet and decimal parts decimal parts ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun |
