Oh, it looks like they did exactly that...
http://www.gordonengland.co.uk/conversion/siderived1.htm

But when you try to do any calculus on your data in ad-hoc units, you're just going to have to switch back to radians so the math works.
Your examples are obvious (2pi)*(size_of_arc/size_of_whole_circle_arc), (2pi)/4, Angels are mythical creatures, but the interior angle you're looking for is (2pi)/6.

Degrees are ingrained, but that doesn't make them consistent with metric. SI should have defined the angle unit such that 2*pi metric_arc_units is a circle. 2*pi centimetric_arc_unit is 100th of a circle and so on.

Agreed. It's less that the video card I'm about to buy and I can pretend that the lego is 'educational' if my wife inquires.

>what of the generations of existing trades that rely on imperial? I.E. Carpentry

50mm x 100mm would be closer to the truth than 2"x4" given the actual dimensions of wood sold in the US.

>So we are stuck using 360 degrees or 2Pi radians.

Radians are fine. Anything else is stupid.

If you kill him, he will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

The standard has been through many amendments and revisions with numerous different physical layer specifications of varying bandwidth. So a fine grained frequency specifier is appropriate to work with all RF phys (there was one IR phy).

Really the question should be why present users with the low level frequency channel number as a choice in a user centric UI? Why not just ask 'low, middle or high' and map it to 1, 6 and 11 for 11b or 11n on 2.4GHz unless they switch on 'advanced' mode.

Actually the problem is in three places, which I listed above.

This is true, I hang my head in shame and fully expect to be cast into grammar purgatory on my death. It's still broken in FC17 though.

Set the APs on non-overlapping channels or the same channel. That's what the original poster meant by 1, 6 and 11.
1 - 11 represent frequency slots, but the signal bandwidth is much wider than one slot.

A transmission centered on channel 4 would overlap with a transmission centered on channel 6 for example.

1, 6 and 11 correspond to the low, high and middle frequencies of the 2.4GHz unlicensed band.

I just took a look at Jeff Garzik's notes and it says it has the RdRand extensions, so my expectations are raised a little. Yay.
Here's what I do on FC17..
              1) Install the RdRand enabled rngd
              2) At the command line, type systemctl enable rngd.service
              3) In /usr/lib/system/system/rngd.service, change
                          ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/rngd –f
                    To
                          ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/rngd –W 4096 –t 1 –f –n 0

                    To make it not fail, fill the buffer and have a 1 second interval)
              4) In /etc/sysctl.conf change kernel random pool refill threshold
                          to something sensisble
                                  kernel.random.write_wakeup_threshold = 3072

It's odd that rngd is an 'ambitious new feature. It's been around for years and has never been deployed right.

Three things are wrong
1 - It's not on by default
2 - When you turn it on, the command line options are wrong, so it silently fails.
3 - When you fix the command line options, it barely feeds in entropy during boot time because the wakeup threshold in the kernel is set too low, so you get the boot time entropy starvation problem, even though you have an entropy source and rngd running.

Also, if they don't pick up the RdRand extensions to rngd to support Ivy Bridge's fast/secure RNG, then that is a big fail.

I have low expectations.

I see you've read this: http://www.amazon.com/Milk-Sulphate-Starvation-Martin-Millar/dp/1593762275

The collision avoidance protocol works most efficiently when the devices sharing the spectrum are on the same channel. Having to content with partially overlapping interferes is not going to improve the spectrum usage.

It's not just him. I was there as well. The difference is that over several years roaming IEEE 802, I managed to remove more text from the specs than I added. This is probably my biggest contribution to society.