“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” ― Josh Bazell, Wild Thing
“Because we are free men, we will be free to measure liquids in liters and milliliters… but not all liquids, only soda, wine, and alcohol because for milk and paint we will use gallons, pints, and quarts, god willing”
“How many liters are in a gallon, sir?” “Nobody knows.”
“Why not use meters and kilometers?” “We sill, soldier. But only in certain unpopular sports like track and swimming.”
Me watching a BBC TV show: “The suspect’s home is five miles away.”
shocked pikachu
there’s a very important video on the measurement rules in the UK, if you haven’t seen it: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNh9z3IzG8t/
Without seeing it let me guess: If it is serious --> metric units and if you want to confuse customers --> imperial
All units of measure are abstract.
I like metric because it’s structured around an abstract amount. Even something like Celsius is pretty abstract, because the freezing and boiling point of water changes depending on the atmospheric pressure. The measure of a second? Why is a second, 1 second long? Why is it 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of a day? There’s other stuff based on seconds too, like Hertz, which is literally “cycles per second”
I like to think about how abstract these things are, because if we were to ever try to communicate with a truly alien race, we couldn’t really use numbers, because their base numbering system would be different than ours, their symbols for numbers would be different, their entire understanding of math and how to calculate stuff could be wildly different, possibly because they understand things we do not. We couldn’t even say to them to communicate on a specific frequency of EM, because that frequency is based on Hertz, which is based on seconds, which is based on ??? IDFK (neither would they). We base everything we know on the world around us, and that’s entirely unique to earth. We make so many assumptions about how things are because we’ve only ever experienced life on this planet.
The only thing that kind of makes sense is how many days of the year there are, because it’s based on solid science about our solar system. It’s still unique to earth, but at least it makes sense on a larger scale. Everything else? Who the hell knows. Why is a meter as long as it is? Who defined this? Why? What abstract Earth-based thing was this based on that other societies of individuals would have no point of reference to relate to?
It’s wild we’ve made it this far, to be honest.
Anyways, I kind of got sidetracked… I guess all I’m really trying to say is that metric makes more sense than whatever the USA is doing. Even if it’s just as abstract in its conception.
And to remember the number of yards in a mile: 1 San Francisco
One-seven-six-oh
At first I thought that’s how Americans measure it - in San Franciscos. But given how “San Francisco” doesn’t sound like “One seven six oh” I’m not sure if they don’t.
So whose foot exactly?
Cousin Merle’s (including toenails).
Could also be his dad’s feet, but then it’s only the toenails.
Do we have meter cola?
Fair, but I lived in Denver for 26 years. I will never forget the number of feet in a mile. 😂
Heeey, I’m currently living in Northglenn. Same, it’s forever etched in my memory.
What the heck does this mean? Is the number 5280 just painted all over billboards in Denver?
So many businesses and shops are named 5280. Breweries, coffee shops, bars, transmission shops, interior design shops, animal hospitals, dry cleaners, bakeries…that number is plastered on signs and advertisements everywhere. 😂
Basically yes. We even have a local magazine called 5280.
Pretty much. If you go to a Broncos game, you’re going to see a graphic saying we’re 5280 feet above sea-level at least a hundred times.
Edit: These are just some examples that in the non-public areas of the stadium to mess with opposing teams.
Sounds like they take their distances pretty seriously over there in the mile-high city
Just remember God giving you a single grain of sand. “One thou sand”.
Not a easy to remember as 5 tomatoes.
The only positive thing I see about imperial is that things are easily divisible by 3 and 6, but that’s about it. Then again, if doing the same with metric, you’re usually fine rounding to the nearest millimetre, and if that isn’t accurate enough, it’s probably not supposed to be done by hand anyway.
Base 12 is easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12
5,280 ft in a mile is fucking nonsense though
Base 60 can do 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, and 12.
If an alien species has 12 fingers to our 10, would they work in base 12 as normally as we use 10s? Like would their whole system end (or start) with a 0 or equivalent and not end all different?
My maths coherence is too high-school for this thinking, but now its in there.
There’s really nothing special about base 10 numbering, it just feels natural to us. They probably would use base 12 and just have 2 extra symbols for the digits after 9. Example 10 x 10 = 100 in both base 10 and base 12 math. It’s just the translation of that in base 12 to base 10 looks like 12 × 12 = 144 to us.
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1A, 1B, 20, 21, …, A0, A1, A3, …
You can use your hands to count in base 12 if you want to, and some cultures have done so. Just use the segments on your fingers on one hand, using your thumb to count each segment.
It’s funny how the biggest argument for metric is that it’s so accurate but in real life use it degrades to “close enough”. My main problem with metric is that I can’t get my pencil that sharp.
What are you even trying to say here? Yeah, in real-life use we use “close enough”. I don’t need to know that it’s 1,546 metres to the nearest supermarket. 1.5 km is close enough.
But nobody is suggesting it because it’s “so accurate”. Any system can be accurate, depending on how many sig figs you use. The advantage of metric is on how easy it is to convert between different scales. Use millimetres, metres, or kilometres for the appropriate case, depending on the need you have for precision. And just move the decimal point if you decide you don’t need as much precision…or need more. In archaic measurements, you can’t do that. If you’ve got 342 feet and decide you actually only need to be accurate to the chain, you have to memorise the arbitrary number of 3 feet to a yard, and 22 yards to a chain, and divide 342 by those numbers, to arrive at 5.2 chains.
Aren’t chains only used by railworkers?
It’s accurate when you need it to be and gets out of the way when you don’t. And if you do need the accuracy, you have a unit that doesn’t need fractions.
How is “accurate” an argument?? You can use any unit with any amount of decimal places. The argument is that it’s regular. You learn the prefixes once and apply them to length, volume, weight, …
The biggest argument for metric is that it’s consistent. It takes 1 calories to heat 1k of water by 1 degree. State something similar in imperial units.
You mean 1 gram of water
100 degrees out is 100% hot. 0 degrees F is 0% hot
And isn’t 1kg of water 1L? And 1L is 1000 cubic cm? So a 10x10x10 cube?
1 BTU heats 1 pound of water 1 degree Fahrenheit.
How many BTUs are there in a big mac?
Most standard measuring tapes have 1/16th of an inch as the smallest fraction on the tape. 1mm is 1/32nd Which is one is “close enough”? Lol
Edit: 1/32, not 1/64
Way off! There are 25.4 millimeters per inch, not 64, and most measuring tapes have 1/32" markings.
Haven’t had my coffee, you’re right it’s closer to 1/32.
Most measuring tapes in US don’t go smaller than a 1/16th though.
I wish we had a metric inch because the fuzziness can be useful.
“How small do you need these veggies diced?”
“2.5cm ish” vs. “about an inch”I feel like the implied margin of error is much larger for inches, which make them useful for many things where precision isn’t necessarily desirable (hemming, wargaming, moving furniture, etc…). If I’m wargaming having a limit on rounding is useful (half an inch - either round up or down), assuming I’m playing at a scale that uses inches.
Feet I have no use for, with one exception - adult human height between 5’ 2" and 6’ 2". There I find metric too precise (whereas to the nearest inch accounts for variance in sole thickness, hair volume, etc.).
I wasn’t raised on imperial (and I’m baffled that people younger than me in the UK still talk about stones. Sixteen stone is fat, sure, but I’ve no idea how fat if not told in kilos) but I find inches to have their uses.
Also miles for cars - because common speeds are ~60 and ~30 mph so a road sign effectively gives the time to arrival (e.g. 13 miles on a motorway = about 13 minutes). I don’t use them for actually measuring distance on a map but they’re handy when driving.
We kind of do have metric inches, insofar as machinists work in 'thou’s (thousands of an inch) But that’s kind of specialist
Why not say ‘2-3 cm’ for the first one? Or ‘a couple centimeters’? It doesn’t feel too different from saying ‘about an inch’ to me
It’s to do with how I think about numbers, rounding, and margins of error. I don’t know how to express that better, I’m sorry.
I was not raised using inches for anything. It’s not a cultural thing, it’s a use case I’ve found them useful for.
Taking it even further who the fuck uses inches or cms for vegetable cutting measurements anyway, it’s like, one or two fingers thick
Recipes I use regularly say “2cm chunks” and the like. I’ve never seen one measure in fingers.
Why not make it even more ambiguous by specifying the desired cutting width in “circumference of my dick”.
That’s too thin
Would that be flacid dick inches or erect dick inches?
Sure.
Somewhat related, but I have the worst time trying to convert numbers in my head from long scale in Japan (used to be used in the UK as well) to how it’s used in the current English speaking world. So basically they put four zeros per comma as opposed to three, and the names of the numbers reflect that. 1, 10, 100, 1000, and 10000 are all unique number names, but after that comes 10 ten thousands, 100 ten thousands, and then 1000 ten thousands before a new number name at 1,0000,0000 (or 100,000,000).
It wouldn’t be so bad to just memorize that 100 thousand is “new number name” if that’s all it was, but numbers like that in daily life are pretty much used to talk about money (or somewhat less commonly populations). So once I get the actual number I have to divide by about 100 (or 150, depending on the strength of the yen vs dollar) to think about what it actually means in units I’m used to, like seeing an article saying a government project costs 1.2 billion yen doesn’t mean much until I think about it like 12 (or 8) million USD instead. So I can never really use big numbers in conversation without manually counting zeros in my head.
It helps to memorize million and billion both ways since those are what you’ll be using most, and are good signposts.
Yeah I’m sure it’s not as difficult as I’m making it out to be but it never seems to stick. It’s just as simple as 2 numbers: “million = 100 ten thousands” (hyaku-man) and “billion = 10 hundred millions” (juu-oku).
Let’s just say there a lot of frustrations I have with the language even after decades of studying.
Maybe think in numbers if you’re more inclined to think like that? 10 million is 7 zeroes, in base-3 means the you “buy” the 6 zero unit and you got one (10) left; In base-4 you “buy” the 4 zero unit and you get 3 (1000) left.
I’m always disappointed that megameter isn’t a common word. People will say “one thousand kilometers” instead of just “one megameter”.
I’m a fan of light nanosecond, which works out to roughly 30 cm.
Infinitely cooler than a “foot”
Which is also approximately 30 cm
Exactly, but those foot fetishists with their stinky units seem to think otherwise.
Megameter gigameter,
Next thing is one astronomical unit.
And then we are using light years.
Not very linear those last two.
And I am sure that gigameters would still be better than light years.
well neither astronomical unit nor light years use meters as a reference. and one of those isnt even accurate (AU)
I think AUs are just meant to mean “far away (like much much further away than the pub)”.
Make it a gigameter for my 1000 megameter needs
The only bad thing about metric is that billionaires technically do have giga dollars.
Is kibimeter a technically allowed measurement? That would be fun!
Yes, the same way that kiloinches is technically allowed.
Can anyone say it isn’t? You’re using a valid prefix, so people will understand what you’re saying, if they have no idea in hell why you’re measuring out 1024 meters.
In Scandinavia we have “mil” which everyone uses, 1 mil, or Scandinavian mile as it is known in English, is 10km. Cuts down ln zeroes. I love this but no one else(outside of Scandinavia) uses it.I typically get a lot of pushback mentioning it to my international peers.
Sweden and Norway only. Few people in Denmark know what a mil is. And virtually no one here uses it.
Yeah-yeah; something something Denmark. I know…
It’s never too late to change the path you are going down, friend.
but there is already decameteredit: nevermind i didnt see the “k” after the 10
Decameter is 10 meter, not 10 kilometer. 10km would be a myriadmeter. (SI prefix names are based on greek, and myriad is the greek-based name for 10 000).
i did correct myself like 3 minutes after posting
but according to wikipedia there is no prefix for 10 000 in the SI system. only for 1 000 and 1 000 000
How about kilo-klick?
People will say “one thousand kilometers”
Will they though? I don’t talk about distances that large anywhere near often enough to really need a shorthand for it, personally. Had to even look up what things are approximately 1000km apart to even know what to imagine it as (it’s about the distance between Paris and Berlin).
Sweden is quite long, so talking about traveling>1 000 km is not uncommon, but here we have mil, which is equal to 10 km. So on my vacation I traveled 120 mil is more useful and common
Oh no, over here a mil is 1/1000 of an inch, haha
Comes up a literal metric ass load (8 bushels) when your talking about travel in the USA.
We big
Yes, every time I’ve ever heard someone use metric to describe distances of >999km, they keep using kilometers.
Car mileage (or kilometerage, is that a word?)
People don’t say the car has 200 megameter on the odometer, but 200 000 km. Or 200k km?..
In Sweden we say 20 000 mil. I always have to stop for a second to convert when people use km.
I’m more disappointed the world renamed one thousand million from milliard to billion.
“the world”?
If you came over to the other side of the pond, you’d find that most of Europe is still using milliard, billiard, trilliard etc.
Crazy assumption.
While the word is still in use in some languages, the short system has mostly replaced the long system for numbering, especially in the English speaking world.
Anglocentrism strikes again!
I think that’s one thing that’s actually fine about the English language though. Constantly switching between something ending with “ion” to “iard” instead of just counting up doesn’t make much sense to me personally.
Million (1A), Milliard (1B), Billion (2A), Billiard (2B) seems odd compared to Million (1), Billion (2), Trillion (3), Quadrillion (4)
I suppose the upside is that you don’t have to learn as many prefixes, but it’ll take another few years of inflation and wealth centralization (at least with currencies like the Euro, Dollar, or Pound) until Quadrillion is relevant in the financial sector and Mathematicians generally use letters. I suppose it makes other natural sciences a tiny bit easier, but there it’s usually written in scientific notation anyways.
The million-milliard system means a billion has double the zeroes compared to million, trillion has triple the zeroes, etc. In the English system, a quadrillion has 15 zeroes, so 4 times 3 plus 3? A quadrillion should have 4*6=24 zeroes.
I must admit I still don’t see the point. Whether it’s double/triple/quadruple of a million or just 3*n+1 doesn’t seem to matter much. Of course it’d be better if a “thousand” was just called a “million” then, since that’d remove the +1, but the million milliard system doesn’t seem to have any notable advantages otherwise, especially considering every “iard” step is a .5 one, which isn’t much cleaner.
1,000 -> 3x0+1 zeroes
1,000,000 -> 3x1+1 zeroes
1,000,000,000 -> 3x2+1 zeroes
vs
1,000,000 -> 1x6 zeroes
(1,000,000,000 -> 1.5x6 zeroes)
1,000,000,000,000 -> 2x6 zeroes
(1,000,000,000,000,000 -> 2.5x6 zeroes)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 -> 3x6 zeroes
In the long system: Million - 1 000 000¹ Billion - 1 000 000² Trillion - 1 000 000³
Short system: Million - 1 000² Billion - 1 000³ Trillion - 1 000⁴
It just doesn’t follow as smoothly with the increase in power
When translating to Finnish it’s confusing sometimes:
Billion = miljardi = 1 000 000 000
Trillion = biljoona = 1 000 000 000 000
Quintillion = triljoona = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000
You can tell how bad a news site is when they translate billion to biljoona and thus making the amount 1000 times higher.biljoona
Heh that’s a funny word.
You probably want double new lines in your posts. Or two spaces at the end of your paragraphs but that’s usually a bit annoying to do.
Thanks! Forgot to do that. Now edited.
Or just \ at the end, like so
Texty text text \ TextBecomes
Like thisSo you escape the newline and you get a newline? That’s some black magic voodoo. But hey if it works. Much simpler to handle than double space since you can see them and your phone doesn’t try to make them into period space instead of space space.
Newlines with double space (or space backslash apparently) also let’s you have newlines in a quote block without exiting the block. I see a lot of people struggle with that on Lemmy. E.g.
> A quote with multiple lines Will eat the the newline Or exit if you don't handle the newlinewill render as:
A quote with multiple lines Will eat the the newline
Or exit if you don’t handle the newline
So you want to do
> A quote with multiple lines \ Will eat the the newline \ Or exit if you don't handle the newlineA quote with multiple lines
Will eat the the newline
Or exit if you don’t handle the newlineOr add space space at the end instead of space backslash.
The inventors of Markdown thought they would do something devastatingly clever and eat newlines if the next line has content. That way, if you’re writing Markdown in the Stone Age and your editor doesn’t support soft-wrap (it’s a stone tablet), you can do your own soft-wrap and Markdown will “helpfully” eat all the newlines (unless there are two or more).
Of course this has done nothing to help and instead caused chaos and confusion for anyone non-technical. Very clever
It would be more useful if there were comments in markdown. Like, it’s helpful when organising your writing and thoughts in LaTeX that you can write one line per sentence, double newline for end of paragraph. It becomes immediately clear when a sentence is too long and comments for collaborators (or yourself) are easier to handle than in something like Word or Google Docs. It’s also simpler to move sentences around which is important for good writing.
The long system with milliard and billiard increases with every potens which makes sense. The short system on the other hand 🤷
hating on milliardaries doesn’t feel as impactful and cathartic.
I think that’s just not being used to it.
Again, anglocentrism strikes. Your feeling is strictly based on your personal experience with your own words. It is like when Americans claim fahrenheit is more for humans than celsius, because they are unable to fathom things they have no experience with.
i’m not from the us, and the word for billionaire is almost the same in my language.
Did someone say feet?
The only metric to imperial conversion I remember is kilometers to miles since it’s pretty close to the golden ratio.
Even if you don’t remember that the golden ratio is 1.6 and a bit, you can approximate it by using successive terms of the Fibonacci sequence.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …
So 8 miles is about 13km (actually 12.87)
Forma me it’s the yard. It’s so close to the meter its ridiculous. I just ignore the difference an treat as the same. One yard = 0.9144 meters
A meter is a Baker’s yard. 3 free inches!
Its 2.54 cm to the inch. Its close to 2.5 and as an engineer in America I am stuck doing that conversion a lot
This has blown my mind
Fucking Dan Brown in the comment section
Lmao your username is awesome
and your username is scary
You should use a rolling release distro and always update to the bleeding edge.
You will not regret using a rolling release distro and always updating to the bleeding edge.
It is not easier for me to sneak backdoors into your system when you are using a rolling release distro and are always updating to the bleeding edge.
🙂
Thank you, kind stranger on the internet!
You’re welcome, @[email protected] 💖
I usually just go with 1.5 because adding half/subtracting a third is way easier to do in my head, and I’m not worried about a ~10% error in casual conversation.
I just go with 1.6 because its still easy enough to do in your head.
Eg. 60mi = 60 + (60/2) + (60/10) = 96km
