Works because ratio of km to miles is about the golden ratio.
Lifehacks
Efficiency in all walks of life.
Interesting, but if I have to look up a conversion I’ll just look up the actual conversion rather than an approximation.
The point is you don't have to look it up. Fibonacci is really easy to compute in your head.
Why have brain when have computer
I always used "a little more than half".
5 to 8 is the far simpler pretty exact conversion.
I’m never going to visit the US or UK anyway.
US and Israel are the only places that still use Imperial. While older generations in Canada and UK will speak about weight in Imperial, the official unit system is Metric.
Ah yes, I always remember the Fibonacci sequence and totally wouldn't find it harder to calculate than just doing the conversion the regular way
/sarcasm
"Remember"? Do you also remember all the digits of π?
It's defined as F(0) = 0, F(1) = 1 and F(n) = F(n - 1) + F(n - 2). Which makes more sense than imperial units.
Or I could just do 1.6 km ≈ 1 mile whenever I need to convert from the standard that I use, Metric, to Imperial
Far far far simpler
Edit: I'm not American, I use sensible units, SI Metric
Edit edit: I do fully have dyscalcus, mostly only effects "scary" looking maths, so no, your suggestion doesn't help
I know from running that 5k is 3.1miles so I just go from there
Same!
But woudn't you only need the 3 = 5 part?
isnt it easier to give them simple conversions 1mi=0.6km.
Might want to check your units.
It's rough estimation, a deviation of anything less than 50% is accurate enough for that
Edit: Ooh I thought you were trying to "um actually, it's 1.66", but I just realised they put 0.6 instead of 1.6
or for in your head maths: half + 10%
(though it’s 1km=0.6mi, 1mi=1.6km)
my upvote made 420 upvotes, coincidence?
This is such a cool example of how some recursive algorithms have a closed form. We all know that there's a simple equation to plug miles into to get kilometers, but we don't talk about how the Fibonacci sequence has a closed form. This is so cool.
Wjat does closed form mean? Asking as a stupid botanist, sorry.
Closed form means it can be written out as a specific, finite set of instructions that work the same regardless of what the input to your function is.
For Fibonacci, it is most commonly defined in its recursive form:
f(0) = 0
f(1) = 1
f(x) = f(x-1) + f(x-2) for integer x > 1
But using this form, computing a very large Fibonacci number requires computing all the numbers before it, so it’s not the same finite set of instructions for every number, it takes more computation to generate larger numbers.
However, there is a closed form formula for generating Fibonacci numbers. Using this formula, you can directly compute any large Fibonacci number without having to compute all those intermediate steps. It takes the same amount of work to compute any Fibonacci number.
f(x) = (a^x - b^x)/√5
a = (1+√5)/2
b = (1-√5)/2
(Note that a and b here are constants; I only wrote them separately to avoid a mess of nested parenthesis)
For an example of something that doesn’t have a closed form, we do not know of a closed form for generating prime numbers. There are several known algorithms for generating the nth prime number, but they all depend on computing all the previous prime numbers, making it very difficult to compute very large prime numbers (in fact, how generating large primes is actually done is by making an educated guess and then checking that it’s actually prime). Discovering a closed form formula for prime numbers would have a huge impact on mathematics and cryptography.
🦅🦅🦅
0.54 nmi (nautical miles)
And yet the military uses "clicks"
Just gotta ask any of the 90% of the world who use it to find out. Americans hate this one simple trick!
Fun fact: there's quite a lot of countries that use "mixed metrics", with no real rhyme or reason for what uses old ancient imperial and what uses new shiny metric
UK - Miles for long distances, switch to meters for distances less than a mile, always use km in air and sea. Milk in pints, petrol in liters, water in ml, beer in pints. Human heights in Feet Inches, building heights in Meters. Human weights in a unit even Americans don't use anymore (Stone), animal weights in kg/g.
Really? Do people walk around in the UK and say "I weigh 11 stone"? "I lost 3 stone on this diet"?
Canadian here, I watch some UK fitness shows, can confirm.
Yessir, stone and lbs usually.
So 12 stone 8 for example. 14lbs to the stone.
This is because fibonacci numbers approach golden ratio which is approximately 1,618033... and one mile is 1,609344 kilometres exactly.
PIN THIS
You can use kilometres
Nah, that's too difficult for USAians. They can memorize fibonacci numbers much more easily.
To be fair, kilometers make a lot more sense to me, as an American. However, everything is written in miles, and everyone speaks in miles. Estimating distance for me is easier in metric, but it isn't really acceptable.
(I play milsims, which is why I'm more used to it. Most Americans have almost zero experience with metric.)
To go from km to mi I always leaned “multiply by 6 and move the decimal one to the left”. So 6km is ~3.6mi. Or 10km is just about 6mi.
Honestly divide by 5 and multiply by 8 usually isn't too difficult and just gives you the right answer.
I remember it by 200mph is 320kph.
Thank you, will definitely use this now on
or add half and then 10% (because it’s 1.6km to the mile): easier than multiplying decimals or large numbers by 6, and the inverse is 0.6mi=1km so easy to remember both ways (same thing but don’t “add” just start from 0)
glad I did not learn conversion in school. Nobody uses miles where i live