[Haskell-cafe] Better writing about Haskell through multi-metaphor learning

[Anthony Clayden]

> Neither [degrees nor radians] is really wrong. Degrees are strange, ...

That sounds like the pot calling the kettle black. 'Irrational' means ...
errm ... strange. 'Transcendental' was the word Leibniz reached for when he
realised he had something stranger than irrationals.

> an artifact of the Babylonian system with no real mathematical
significance.

Hmm? An artefact of being approximately the number of days in a year (which
is as true for us as the Babylonians), and a number which has many factors,
so can happily measure quarter-turns, eighth turns (bracing to keep your
right-angles upright), whole-number of degrees for internal angles of all
the faces needed for the Platonic solids ...

I would have thought there's a teachable moment there about prime numbers,
factorisation, and for bringing fractions into a coherent continuum.

It's not like ignorance of this alleged "mathematical significance" of
radians prevented building Hanging Gardens or Pyramids, Stonehenge, the
fractals of the Walls of Benin, Machu Picchu trapeziums or aqueducts or
anything. (A bit like Category Theory, really.)
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