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The dialogue you refer to is Meno and the idea is a solution to “Meno’s Paradox”.

Japan’s national bird (green pheasant) is, IIRC, the only national bird that’s also a game bird. There’s not many stories or symbolism with green pheasants (as opposed to, say, cranes) and it’s mostly known in the country as food. I’ve seen it argued that it was selected because it’s delicious (though the official line seems to be their ability to recognize earthquakes)

By “two held out hands”, do you mean a person’s wingspan? Is there something similar for centimeters? I’m asking out of genuine curiosity and not antagonizing. I would love to have more tools at my disposal. An inch, for example, is the length of the first digit of the index finger. [0]

With length, I find that most of my use cases are division into equal parts as opposed to scaling. The imperial system was designed for this (frequently using base 12) [1]. I understand that this may be due to my framing.

I agree with the sibling comment about temperature granularity. Fahrenheit set 0 degrees to the coldest temperature in his hometown, then used freezing water and body temperature as reference points. 100 degrees is about body temperature, and around as hot as ambient temperature gets for many people.

[0] Useless trivia: an acre is one chain (66’) by one furlong (660’) and was supposed to be the amount a field a single ox could plow in a day. Neither of the latter two measures are commonly used anymore but a mile was redefined from 5000’ to 5280’ to make it an even 8 furlongs.

[1] Apparently this is the reason that the French failed twice to establish Metric Time

Having lived in the UK, I found the balance between systems to be quite nice. I think that the Imperial System is actually underrated for daily use: most of the measurements are intuitive (based on sensory information and easily visualizable objects) and align better with common uses of measurements (rough approximations and division into equal parts). I think the metric system is beautiful and elegant, but for non-scientific tasks I don’t think it’s as valuable.

Miles and kilometers can be estimated by the Fibonacci Sequence. The conversion (mi -> km) is very nearly the golden ratio (1.61 and approximately 1.62, respectively, IIRC). For any number in the sequence taken as miles, the subsequent number is the distance in kilometers. Your way is probably quicker, but it’s a fun bit of information.

I appreciate you having a look! I totally understand if it's not enough to make a switch, but I'm glad you were able to see that it's not so bad on this side of things. There's definitely not enough niceties for the average computer user (GUI editing and installing) and some missing for any user (package manager). I will stand by piping as a matter of taste (the biggest benefit for me is it allows for using the tools I'm already familiar with, awk and grep or plain c/zig).

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My interest in neatroff is mostly the code itself. A tiny and opinionated project with readable source that still achieves quite a lot (all that I need anyways). But it's definitely not for everyone! The author doesn't use a windowing system, for example, and instead uses the framebuffer for pdf viewing and editing (both custom implementations). It is ISC, by the way. It's included in the bottom of the readme.

My apologies. I think I misunderstand what you mean by "ecosystem". All of your requirements are fulfilled by the tools I suggested. The guides I provided show complex typesetting (mathematics and otherwise), eqn does complex math expressions (more powerful than TeX according to Lorinda Cherry, the neateqn implementation by Ali Rudi allows for using TeX bracket syntax as well), pic and grap provide complex (2D) graphics, refer and bib2ref/ref2bib provide bibliography management, and all of it installed from a single repository and makefile (maybe this is different than an installer framework?) to under 43MB (including demos and acm fonts). XeTeX/XeLaTeX seem to only add support for utf8 (as I mentioned, natively supported by the plan9 *roffs) and various font formats (at least supported by neatroff, I haven't checked the others). Of course, pretty PDFs was the original point you quoted in the parent.

You should at least check out the neateqn guide for examples of math typesetting (even output in Computer Modern). But the original guide, as well as the others will show many more and different examples. These aren't groff guides. You might be surprised.

In the early days of computing (that is, when computer companies and universities were finding the first people to learn programming) music experience was a strong signal for programming ability! Playing music prepared them for focusing on the low-level details while holding the big picture in their head. [0]

[0] The Dream Machine by Waldrop