Spyke
fedia.io

Some people are just more comfortable with good old familiar units like baby elephants per corgi. What do they even use for that in the metric system? Millihectares per decilitre or something? Whatever.

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starikreply
lemmy.zip

“0.012 m^3^ meteor weighing 400 kg hit Texas”

Boooooring.

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Lodespawnreply
aussie.zone

you could also say 12L meteor weighing 400kg .. which is pretty cool, imagine 12 cartons of milk weighing the same as 4 fairly large people

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Klearreply
quokk.au

1.5 fairly large people. You're talking to Americans, remember.

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Lodespawnreply
aussie.zone

I mean they were probably already confused by the L and the cartons of milk ..

6

Soda is generally sold in 2L bottles here, with single liter bottles growing in popularity. Alcohol is usually sold by the ml, though in units like "fifth" and "handle."

Milk though, milk is sold in half-pints (not sure why they don't write cup), pints, quarts, half-gallon, or gallon. I like to pretend a quart is a shrinkflated liter though.

7
lemmy.world

For non-metric users, three gallons of milk is probably more accessible. 400 kg is 880lb, which is roughly 12x as dense as water, which is the wild part (or it feels like it, that could be a totally normal density for stone, I’ve already put too much effort in for napkin math on a shitpost)

4

So palladium is has a density of 12.02, which it's price per ounce a little under 2000 CAD, that "corgi" is worth ~$27,846,525.99 CAD at current prices.

0

In your example of why the American system is bad resort to using the American system because nobody had any context?

Check mate atheists.

3

I mean, it’s basic knowledge isn’t it? If you know e=mc^2^ you’d better also know (be)^4^=c

3

Unironically though more people really need to understand the utility of using highly composite numbers as units of measurement. It's not like the number 12 got picked randomly out of a hat.

1
lemmy.world

Is nobody bothered about how un-corgi-sized the meteor on the picture is?

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pyrereply
lemmy.world

idk how you know that but even so, the news is from Texas which means they're probably just relaying a report from a US agency.

1

I know it because this was circulated around the internet like 5 years ago when it happened, but the actual article was linked instead of just an image captcha. This is old news and an old "Americans will use pretty much anything but the metric system" type response.

1
lemmy.world

Had to check that it's actually plausible.

Assuming a corgi is 0.4m long, 0.3m tall and 0.2m wide and that a baby elephant weighs 120kg that gives the meteor a density of 20000kg/m³.

There are only a few elements denser than that, but it's possible.

9

The meteor was, according to NASA, about 2 feet across and weighed 1000 pounds. So their baby elephants are on the lighter side and their corgis are fairly normal size.

I'm going to assume a sphere, 60 centimeters in diameter, and a weight of 450 kg. Volume of the sphere is 113000cm^3^, which gives us a density of 3,9g/cm^3^. That's heavier than most rocks (silicon at 2.3), but much lighter than iron (7.9).

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zxqwasreply
lemmy.world

Possibly, astrophysics is usually about order of magnitude and while iron is only 8000kg/m³ it's within error margins.

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Agent641reply
lemmy.world

And how malnourished the baby elephants are. I mean, there are 4 of them, that's a big litter for an elephant. Perhaps they aren't all suckling as much as is normal because the mother elephant isn't producing enough milk for 4. Maybe the mother elephant is sickly, after such a difficult birth. God, what if she even died?! The poor things will starve!

8

Considering elephants birth one at a time after like 18 months...

2

A spherical corgi is just a corgi, so that really just complicates it.

3
sh.itjust.works

Corgis (adult) are pretty much one size, but are we talking newborn or year-old baby elephants? At what age does "baby" graduate to "toddler" in a species that stands and walks within an hour of birth?

3
lemmus.org

Mixing units of measurement here; corgis are metric dogs.

8

According to some searching a banana is 100 - 150 cubic centimeters, while this meteor was .012 cubic meters, meaning roughly the volume of 80 - 120 average bananas (mashed). The meteor weighed 400kg while an (again, perfectly average) banana weighs 100 - 130g. This means that the weight of the meteor is between 3076 - 4000 bananas. So let's call it the weight of 3500 bananas in the space of 100, or roughly 35x the density of your average earth banana. (Lemmy bananaticians or bananologists, please correct me if I did bad math.)

5
lemmy.world

You know well that Americans have only a very loose grip on units and reality. That's why they use imperial and "elephants per football field" like units.

5

Someone's clearly below average on bald eagles per gunshot fired and, frankly, I think a little jealous.

4
piefed.zip

A headline created by an Israeli media outlet, aimed culturally at Britons, and run on various European sites? Much American.

2

No you see, everyone else in the world exclusively describes the world in accurate SI units, only Americans are dumbfuck enough to measure things in bullets per cheeseburger. Nobody else in the entire world will casually say "it's the size of a medium dog" because America bad.

4

after immigrating here, I've lived in America for 12 years and I still cannot get used to the whole thing with ounces, pints, gallons, and all the other weird af measurement units we use, like for my manufacturing job, instead of using cm, mm, or um, we have to juggle between using decimal numbers or fractions of an inch

0

IDK, I'm metric all the way, but this is pretty helpful for illustration, and I don't think 0.2m³ and 500kg would necessarily tell me something that corgis and elephants don't.

1

So if a baby elephant weighs 250 lbs (middle of the 200-300 lb range Google gave me) and a corgi is 11 inches tall (and that the extra corgi length is compensated for by the fact that we are assuming that this corgi is spherical), that's 1.43 lb/in^3. I've run out of time to do conversations, but this meteor was apparent at least part neutron star.

1
rugburnreply
fedinsfw.app

Am I wrong for wanting to live in a world with spherical corgis?

4

Yes, you are.

Look at a corgi. Just look. Why would you want to change it?

4

I know right? It's like they're toddlers who never grew up, except in this case they never grew out of Obscurantism.

0
lemmy.world

People clown on these kinds of headlines as if the average metric user has an intuitive feeling of what size 0.012 cubic meters is.

6
dergreply
lemmy.world

That’s 12 liters, or about 3 gallons.

3

So about the size of my bathroom trash can, or the size of my mother-in-law's corgi, then.

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lemmy.dbzer0.com

To be fair, if you pick your scales such that the numbers read ridiculous, nothing has an intuitive feeling. There's nothing much intuitive about a plane flying at an altitude of 16 thousand feet either, no matter how much they closetedly fetishise footstuff, in just about the same way there's nothing much intuitive about measuring the size of a star in meters.

1

Pilot here: in a weird way, a thousand feet is a unit. "Five thousand, Five hundred feet" is processed kind of like 5.5 altitudes. Bonus: traffic patterns are typically flown at 1000 feet AGL, so 1.0 altitudes, so pilots see that distance a lot.

2

Listen, I was raised on the banana scale so all this talk is foreign to me!

4