Hecto used to be popular in sweden until like 2000 or so, when it came to food. Especially candy and charcuterie were priced and ordered in "hekto" (the "gram" dropped in speech).
In Hungary "dekagram" is the default unit when buying food from actual humans at a deli counter or market. Asking for 30 deka of cheese sounds like a more human-scale number than asking for 300 grams.
Though it's interesting that hecto would be even better for this, as we always use deka in 10s (or at least 5s), so we could just ask for 3 hectograms of cheese for an even more human-scale number :)
That's pretty cool. Makes me think about speaking in ounces locally (NL). "3 ounce of cheese please" will get you 300g. They could ask if they cut it too fat: "mag het een onsje meer zijn?"/"Is it ok if it's a small ounce more?"
The majority of U.S. customary units were redefined in terms of the meter and kilogram with the Mendenhall Order of 1893 and, in practice, for many years before.
They just use weird provincial conversion factors, that's all.
Funny thing is here in the Netherlands some people use pounds and ounces ( pond and ons in Dutch ) when they buy meat at the butcher. 1 pond = 500 gram, 1 ons = 100 gram
A mile is a 1000 paces walked, counting only one foot in most places. Different countries take different steps so a mile is different in each country. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 kilometer is the most common.
A yard is almost one meter, so I'll allow it.
It makes sense for a system where you want to easily divide quantities and only can work with the fingers on one hand.
I've never seen one recipe that uses them. But maybe we just live in different countries.
A millilitre sounds like a crazy level of precision for cooking or baking, though. How is that ever necessary? I guess you're rounding to decilitres in practical use anyway?
If I encountered something like "150 ml" in a recipe, I'd assume it was written by a mad engineer and just use a measurement tool for 1 dl and put about 1½ of those. Makes life easier and the result will be just as good. Different nations have very different approaches to cooking, it seems!
Well yeah it does usually round to 50ml. Idk why use ml but that's what is most often used. I just checked my recipes and about 90% use ml. A couple use dl and one used both dl and cl.
Nah it's more relatable to humans regarding electricity consumption, the consumer would be confused and scared seeing 3.6 megajoules on a bill and not actually understand how power usage of watts of appliances would convert into Joule energy units. That's why electric cars motor powers are still rated in Watts and the bill shows a relatable term.
To add to that, that's why so many metric countries (not USA) still use imperial units colloquially because they are more relatable in real life like lbs and inches and feet. But then would use Km and grams in other contexts quite normally. And knots still always make more sense to pilots and sailors.
How is half a kg more relatable than one kg? Or how are 2½ cm more relatable than 1 cm? Or how are 30 cm more relatable than 10 cm or 100 cm?
I keep seeing your argument here and there, but I just cannot fathom what is meant by it. For me there's nothing relatable at all in "foot". It falls awkwardly between 10 cm and 100 cm and I cannot really make heads or tails about it. Except if I divide it by three, which gives me an approximate number in metres. But then the number could have been in metres in the first place.
Relatable I don't think is the right word. Intuitive in its use and measurement, in specific scenarios.
Measurements always have a scaling and a precision problem. Humans are bad at math and scale, and really struggle mentally with numbers more than a few digits. If the number is too big, someone will either just accept it or ignore it. We like our nice round numbers, and funnily enough like our small prime numbers (1, 2, 3, and 5) and first few multiples of primes (4, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20) and numbers that just shift the decimal point around (10, 100, 1000)
Reference frames are also incredibly useful to us, especially when communicating.
The metric system jumps straight to moving the decimal place around, where imperial let's you play around with other divisors. Let's say I have a single digit of some unit and I want to half it. Generally in metric this is fine, doesn't really add to the mental cognitive load. Half it again, or divide by one of the other primes, and the number of digits starts to explode (or is infinitely repeating). For the scalers within the imperial system, they naturally let you divide down and even re-express the same measurement in a different unit with fewer integer numbers and no precision loss
Edit:
Another example. Computer scientist don't use metric, we bastardized parts of it and then invented extra units that fit the need and intuitiveness of working with them. We don't use deci/deca or centi/centa, we bastardized kilo into 2^10 since 1024 is close to a thousand keeping it a nice power of two, a byte is 8 bits for the same reason and a nibble is 4 bits because halving bytes occasionally is useful. A word typically is 16 except when it is 32 bits, in which case 16 is a half word. Then we have dwords and qwords being twice and four times the size of a words, and then a page historically has been 4096 bytes since 1024 is kinda small, but newer systems sometime say a page is 64KB since 2^16 = 65536
While I think the metric system should be used more, I'll also defend frantional measurements when precision matters. Decimal measurements only increase by a factor of 10. So if your precision is 1/8 of a meter, you have to either round to the nearest meter, overstate your precision (0.125 implies precision to 1mm), or essentially write a sentence ("125mm plus or minus 62.5mm").
With fractional, the precision is built into the denominator. If your measurement of half a meter is precise to half a meter, you record it as "1/2". If it's precise to an pitch of a meter, you record it as "4/8".
Sorry you totally lost me on the second paragraph. What you describe there is basically a British thing. On the continent people use m, kg and such for daily life things.
Knots are used because of historic influences and inertia. Imperial units in some special cases are exclusively used because of the influence of the US and again inertia.
Oh ok just a British thing so the ENTIRE BRITISH EMPIRE. Cool. Oh knots are used for historic influences like... Places that use imperial units colloquially but are official metric? Ohhh cool as well. Thanks for repeating just what I said and agreeing.
If you head actually read what I wrote instead of just making stuff up, you'd know that I was talking about the European contintent, on which, the tiny peninsula of Gibraltar aside, the British Empire had zero possessions after metrication. People there don't use "inches" or "pounds" colloqually. Where I life they also don't use some local old customary units for that, they simply use SI units for weight and dimensions. You are 176 cm tall and weigh 73kg ...
And that does contradict your claim that generally people prefer those old customary units in daily life. They only do if they were raised that way.
The reason why customary units are still more widely used in daily life in regions formerly part of the British Empire is because there metrication was much more delayed, ie happened for real a lot later. The old ways take time to wither away, like they have in regions that had it all a lot earlier. It is ridiculous to suggest that those customary units are more useful to people in daily life but only if transition to metric for real wasn't too long ago.
People are just used to kWh. There's nothing about it that's more intuitive, it's just more familiar. But measuring things in hogsheads and barleycorns used to be familiar too. Sometimes being familiar isn't as important as following standards. Eventually the standard units will become familiar, and since they're standard units, they're much easier to work with.
not actually understand how power usage of watts of appliances would convert into Joule energy units
1 joule per watt each second. It's dead easy. That's why Joules should be used.
That’s why electric cars motor powers are still rated in Watts
Yes, power should be measured in Watts, that's the standard unit for power, just like Joules are the standard unit for energy.
To add to that, that’s why so many metric countries (not USA) still use imperial units colloquially because they are more relatable in real life like
No they're not, it's just that people are used to them. The people whose minds are the hardest to change are the old people who have used some random unit for all their lives and don't want to have to get used to some newfangled standard (a standard that's actually hundreds of years old at this point). Because the old people refuse to change, the country gets stuck using that old unit, even if it's informally, and so that's what the kids learn, then they become old people and are also inflexible.
There's nothing about an inch or a pound that's naturally more intuitive than a centimetre or a kilogram. It's just what you're used to. Go somewhere where people grew up with metric and for them using anything other than metric feels strange and awkward. Pilots and sailors are used to knots, they never had to switch, but when they do complex calculations they mostly avoid using knots because doing conversions with non-SI units is such a massive pain in the ass.
People are just used to kWh. There's nothing about it that's more intuitive, it's just more familiar.
No, you're arguing for a second-based unit in a context where the hour-based unit dominates common use. The reason why we use hours is because hours is much more familiar across the contexts where electrical usage is metered: monthly bills, daily production/consumption cycles. Everyone knows that 3 days is 72 hours but pretty much nobody can come up with the answer in seconds without actually applying a conversion factor and making the calculation.
Energy is especially prone to the problem of how it's calculated, simply because it's such an important quantity to measure or calculate. Sometimes we use calories or electron volts because those make for easier conversions to other quantities in the context of temperature/heat or particle physics, respectively.
Yes, I'm advocating for using hours as a familiar unit, instead of kiloseconds or megaseconds or teraseconds. You'll never get the world on metric time.
Who cares about 3 days
Everyone? If I'm doing calculations for solar panel production, it's a lot easier to work with hours instead of seconds. If I'm dealing with usage patterns across the weekly cycle of business days and weekends, hours is a much easier unit to work with than seconds.
We organize time around hours and days, so it only makes sense for there to be an hour-based unit for easy conversion.
Yes, I’m advocating for using hours as a familiar unit
Like hogsheads per rod.
instead of kiloseconds or megaseconds or teraseconds. You’ll never get the world on metric time.
Those might be used eventually at some point in the future, but right now our life is dominated by the rotation of the earth, the movement of the earth around the sun, etc. So, other units that correspond to those natural events make sense.
But, I'm not advocating anything radical, just use the standard SI unit for energy instead of some awkward non-SI unit based on SI units where the only thing it has going for it is that it's familiar.
If I’m doing calculations for solar panel production
You aren't, I can tell because you advocate for kWh. And your denominator in that case wouldn't be "per 3 days".
We organize time around hours and days
And minutes, and seconds. Most of us use all of these.
so it only makes sense for there to be an hour-based unit for easy conversion.
No, it doesn't. Joules are the unit that makes sense when talking about energy.
Wait, no, please convince my countryfolk to metricate. I'm an engineer and desperately want to be able to design things in metric. It's so much better but the average American doesn't know a meter from a hole in their ass
But they do know litres, because the big soft drink bottles are sold in litres. They know grams if they do drugs or bake. They know prefixes like Mega, Giga and Tera if they are into computers, and they know about "kilo" if they pay an electrical bill. If they're into military stuff, they know about "clicks", which are actually... kilometers.
So weird phenomenon actually, because our military is fully metricated, you wind up with some of the most die hard American exceptionalist/American nationalist types fully using metric and 24 hour time. A friend was raised in a household like that where they just didn't use US customary at home because the military doesn't.
We're all taught a lot of the basics in school. And yeah we have an instinctive idea of what 2L looks like. Drug users know grams, as do some bakers (a lot of baking is still done by volume here). And other than that I'd say maybe a quarter of Americans know that a meter is kinda close to a yard. Maybe 5% (may be overestimating tbh) know that a liter of water is a kilogram.
Slowly but surely though more things are being roundish numbers in metric here (like 325 mL/12.9 fluid ounces) and I think that's a vital component of the move to metric. We are actually headed there, we're just slower than the UK and Canada.
Yeah, that's funny because the hoo-rah American Exceptionalist types are otherwise very conservative and dislike anything foreign, but they also adore the military, and the military has to be practical, and traditional units are so not practical.
I would guess that in time the US will adopt metric -- it will happen much faster if the American Century ends and other countries become more powerful. Since almost everywhere else is mostly metric, the US won't be able to go it alone anymore.
Normalize it. Use meters and kilograms on your own even before legislation. Convince others to use it. Push back the storm. If a handful of people in your town use it then it goes from something that nobody uses to a thing that a few people (and the rest of the world) use. Be the change you want to see.
"The story of the metric system starts, somewhat unexpectedly, in 17th Century England, with the proposal by the natural philosopher John Wilkins for a consistently decimal system of units. The Europe of his time was divided by the use of innumerable different systems of measure, with each country using its own traditional units (and in many cases, a lack of even national standardisation meant that different regions within countries would use their own measures). To remedy this, Wilkins conceived of a single, rational standard, based on the best science of his time, which all nations could equally share. His idea for a “universal Measure” was not adopted in his era, although that very phrase would ultimately (via Greek translation) give us the name of the metre."!
You're talking to an American. They use anything but a logical system. To explain to them what a kilometer is, you need to put yourself in their position and go from that. Let me help:
A kilometer is:
~167 Ford F-150's,
~1,150 dishwashers,
~5,556 bibles,
~5,263 bananas,
~1,250 AR-15's,
~0.62 miles,
~3,281 feet,
~39,370 inches,
etc.
To make sense to an American, you need to not make any sense. This includes swapping the period and comma around in numbers, but you already did that.
usa kicked the Brits out of the usa back in the day but they stole and kept their system of measurements (and of course adapted them over time, like americans do). They avoid the metric system by a country kilometer.
Don't make me start measuring things in decifeet just to be contrary. I have a measuring tape dividing the foot in tenths and I'm not afraid to use it.
We recognize both systems so that government is not metric. Freedom units are still primarily used over metric. Metric is used in science and academia over Imperial.
I actually don't think that the biggest barrier is the average American. I think the barrier is the logistics of replacing millions of signs and other material.
Federal agencies are expected to use the metric system, even if not all of them do. Don't they? That is not quite "we recognize both systems"
I disagree with the obstacles, the main obstacle is politics. The US was already on its way and the rrason it is not to the largest part metric is Reagan. And if replacing signs is such an issue, something countlesd developing and developed nations have managed just fine, that would raise some serious questions.
Centi is familiar to everyone from centi-meter, I have deci in deci-Bel for my optical signals at work, and I know hecto is used for hecto-Pascal which replaced the milli-bar. But I can't think of one for deka, can anyone give an example of a unit where deka is used often?
Pět deka, deset deka, dvacet deka, třicet deka,
kilo chleba, kilo cukru, jeden rohlík, jedna veka,
všechno máme, co kdo chcete,
obchod kvete, jen si račte říct.
Čtyři kila, deset kilo, dvacet kilo, třicet kilo,
navážíme, zabalíme, klaníme se, to by bylo,
prosím pěkně, mohu nechat o jedenáct deka víc?
He also said ordering meat by the gram at the counter sounds super posh and overly precise to him, while it's just normal for me, very cool!
I do wish we metric places (or at least Canada) were more flexible and familiar with the whole system. Sure we have milliliters and centimeters and kilograms, but people say things all the time like 2000km or 2 million kgs, or even things like 25000mAh. And I get it, people get into a frame of reference and want to stay there, but I wish people had the agility and practice to say 2 megameters, 2 gigagrams, and, well 25 amp hours, and still be understood. That last one's not hard, but packaging still seems to be stupid about it.
Fun coincidence that I was working on making a graph (network) of the relationships between different units yesterday. Here is how it looks in a circle, yellow dots are lengths, mass red and time blue.
It's not perfect on the phone, but here is the link, press the "Refresh All" button to load the network and run the code.
Context: I'm writing a programming language to analyze graphs, so I thought "units are graph relationships, let me see what I can do". It was fun, but also funny because so many relationships are not simple factor multiplications. The network was extracted from the data gnu units uses, but I did it halfhazardly, so it's not perfect.
You can play around with the code if you wanna try your own things, there's user documentation and more examples. The actual network can be viewed using the buttons on the left of the editor.
I've only ever encountered decaliters in Dune, where there's the awkward phrase "38 million decaliters" instead of "380 million liters". It's probably because Frank Herbert was initially thinking in gallons, and it got changed later.
The brief moment of confusion when you hit something using deci- or hecto- and you briefly have to convert to one of the common prefixes is always a little aggravating...
The hangup in the US for a lot of it is the people who would keep trying to convert back into English units instead of just riding with it. Especially silly when it doesn’t change anything.
If faced with the choice of giving up the metric system forever or giving up tiddies forever, I know which one I'd choose. I can get used to a new system of measurements, but without tiddies to measure, what's even the point?
As in, 1 litre of water is 1 kilogram. 1 gram of water is 1 millilitre.
Why couldn't 1 gram be 1 litre?
edit: a better way to phrase this question is as @[email protected] put it:
The question wasnt about water specifically. Theyre trying to ask why does 1e3 mass = 1e0 volume and/or 1e0 mass = 1e-3 volume. Why doesnt 1e0 mass = 1e0 volume
Kilogram is not the metric unit of weight, it’s mass. 1 liter of water has mass of 1kg. 1kg of water weighs 9.81 newtons - at least on earth. Newton is the metric unit of weight.
"Mount Nevado Huascarán in Peru has the lowest gravitational acceleration, at 9.7639 m/s2, while the highest is at the surface of the Arctic Ocean, at 9.8337 m/s2."
Also depends on how much mass the weighed object has so not constant based on the position alone. But 9.81 or 9.8 is generally accepted as the acceleration due to gravity on earth. F=Gm1m2/r^2 if you’d like to be extra specific.
Because units less than a litre are so common. 2ml of syrup, 4dl of flour, 12cl of wine, 0.5l of beer, etc. But things you measure by mass rarely go below 1 gram (in day-to-day life at home). Candy bar is 50g, a packet of cheese is 200g, a chunk of meat is a kilogram. Besides, most people just call it "a kilo" so the common units in the spoken language are "a kilo" when talking about mass and "a litre" when talking about volume
The International System of Units (SI) uses the kilogram as its base unit of mass, so it is 1 thing in SI units = 1 liter, and SI is what most people think that they mean by "metric system" these days. Even though the SI isn't entirely metric. (The Celsius scale isn't, for example.) Also, liters are not SI units; the m^3^ is the SI unit of volume, and the liter was defined in terms of that.
To put it another way, the base unit of mass is a kilo- of something, and it (not quite) equals a metric non-metric-system unit of volume of water. I dunno, the metric system seems all kinds of messed up to me!
The question wasnt about water specifically. Theyre trying to ask why does 1e3 mass = 1e0 volume and/or 1e0 mass = 1e-3 volume. Why doesnt 1e0 mass = 1e0 volume
The gram was originally defined as "the absolute weight of a volume of pure water equal to the cube of the hundredth part of a metre [1 cm3], and at the temperature of melting ice".
Why? Who knows. If they'd already decided on the meter, then the most logical definition of a litre is pretty awkward. You'd think it would be 1 cubic meter of water, because then the unit of volume is 1 unit of length cubed. Then one gram would be one litre of water, which is today 1000 kg, or one metric ton.
But, then for everyday things people would be using microlitres and micrograms.
Really, the metre should have been the replacement for the inch (i.e. the centimeter). Then you could have 1 litre being 1 cubic meter (what is today 1 mL) and then the unit of mass would be the mass of 1 L of water, which would be 1 gram. A person's height would be in hm, and long travel distances would be in Mm.
A litre is a unit of volume and just another way of saying 1 cm^3. It is a unit that is useful in daily life but it is not an SI unit. Since volume is only devrived from lenth you would need to either adjust lenth or weight for it to line up.
Also your question is unclear (to me) would you like the gram or the litre to change so they line up "better"?
Celsius isn't actually metric, per say. Its based on the freezing point of water while farenheight is based on the freezing point of mercury.
Celcius is what most of the world used because 0 is where water freezes and is very relevant to the human condition, hence why its the most used.
It was adopted as part of the metric SI system but unlike all the units developed for metric which actually use the above scale, I do not believe there is any practical use for this with celcius.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that just the scale? It's not the metric system, there's no meters in here, this could be used for bytes of data: gigabytes, terabytes...
I gotta say, I absolutely hate the way data storage is notated. Because colloquially, a _giga_byte is 1024 MB, but that's actually a _gibi_byte, and a proper _giga_byte is only actually 1000 MB.
So storage sellers are technically accurate when they say they're giving you a 1000 gigabytes of storage, but your operating system shows gibibytes as gigabytes, so you don't actually have as much as you think. It's like 7% less at the gigabyte level, and 10% at the terabyte level.
When I returned to pick up my car after dropping it off for a smog check, the tech hadn’t done it. He noticed the odometer was in kilometers and putting that “mileage” in the system would have caused havoc on the car’s history (mileage seeming to go up and down is a red flag).
As annoying as that was, it would have been far worse if he’d just entered the kilometers as miles.
Which is to say that switching now is more than just putting up new speed limit signs.
I use metric daily as an engineer, but in my personal life I find some metric measurements pretty silly. Celsius and L/100km are not useful or show it’s not a great system for everyday use.
Celsius and L/100km are not useful or show it’s not a great system for everyday use.
This is probably just a matter of taste and convention. If everyone knew what 12°C was, then it would be perfectly fine for everyday use. Everywhere else in the world, people are using it for everyday use, and they're doing just fine.
Same for L/100km. Oops, you specifically wanted to know how far you were going to go with 1 Liter? You can convert that just fine. But it's just as likely that you're looking at mpg, and you actually wanted to know how many gallons it would take for you to go from A to B, in which case you also need to do a conversion.
How cool is it outside? I dunno, around 10 to 12.778 C I think.
Much better than 50-55 F.
I know I'm being silly, but my brain likes numbers like 5 and 10. I can't imagine saying 10 to 13. And a 5 degree swing in C feels too big.
A good measurement system for humans needs to have roughly fudgeable numbers within the ranges that we regularly experience. Which is to say, whatever temperature system we use to describe outside temperature should go from 0 to 100 in the range of temperatures we experience outside. It's like metric, but for people instead of water. Fahrenheit isn't perfect. The 0 should be colder. The 100 should be hotter. But not by much.
I know I'm being silly, but my brain likes numbers like 5 and 10. I can't imagine saying 10 to 13. And a 5 degree swing in C feels too big.
Yeah, but that's because that's what you're used to with the F scale.
If you were estimating a number of tablespoons of sugar, you wouldn't be estimating in groups of 5, because that's crazy. You're probably more accustomed to estimating one tablespoon at a time. The same with estimating measuring cups of milk.
Or, if you don't cook very much, for estimating walking distances, you're not estimating in groups of 5 miles. You might group by quarter miles and say, "It's a quarter mile away," or a half or something.
There's nothing special about this scale. All of the supposed benefits are the result of your familiarity with it. Had we been using °C the whole time instead, you would be estimating degrees two at a time instead of 5, and everything would be completely normal.
You are fooled by your own habits. Most of the world uses °C just fine and why wouldn' they? The steps of one °C are just what starts to be relevant in daily life. Yes you would totally say it has 13°C and not round up to 5 or 10s. The latter you would only do if your unit system has more precision than is needed.
That said, if you want more precision just say 13.4°C. Some wearher forecasts do that but it is really not very releant what comes after the comma for daily weather forecast needs.
I rarely see the need for less precision. If you don't know the precise temperature you say "around" if you want to describe a range, you just do that "x-y". Easy.
Like I said, you and I are used to our temperature unit systems, neither is inherently more user friendly than the either.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I really like the foot. It's great because you can divide it by 2, 3 and 4 and even 6 and it still works. I think it's a lot better to use than the metric system when working with wood.
I think that's more because Canada and the U.S. developed wood sizes for building while using the foot as a measurement. I doubt they would have made 2 x 4s a thing if they were using metric.
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191 replies
Look at that hourglass figure
O O
Now do the same with US customary units. Let's see what their hourglass looks like 🫠
It's the negative space between two soapy titties.
I think I can see a tiddy or two in that number curve
I'm not 100% sure on the accuracy of this data, but if ever there was a place to paste this information, it is here.
Average Tiddy weight per boob by cup size, in Metric and Lemmy scales
A cup = 0.454kg = 1.1 Tins of Heinz Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce
B cup = 0.78kg =1.9 Tins of Heinz Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce
C cup = 1.023kg = 2.4 Tins of Heinz Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce
D cup = 1.388kg = 3.3 Tins of Heinz Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce
E cup = 1.950kg = 4.6 Tins of Heinz Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce
F cup = 2.35kg = 5.6 Tins of Heinz Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce
[Edit] I'm not sure if this is per boob, or per pair of boobs. More research required.
Omg we've been cursed by big tiddy
55378008
Booblaess?
!5318008
BOOBLESS
GOD I FUCKING HOPE SO
Is. It. SOAPY?
We're not asleep we're just depressed!
That's because of sleep deprivation!
repress your depression!
Deka and Hecto are the metric system’s unloved children
Hecto used to be popular in sweden until like 2000 or so, when it came to food. Especially candy and charcuterie were priced and ordered in "hekto" (the "gram" dropped in speech).
In Hungary "dekagram" is the default unit when buying food from actual humans at a deli counter or market. Asking for 30 deka of cheese sounds like a more human-scale number than asking for 300 grams.
Though it's interesting that hecto would be even better for this, as we always use deka in 10s (or at least 5s), so we could just ask for 3 hectograms of cheese for an even more human-scale number :)
That's pretty cool. Makes me think about speaking in ounces locally (NL). "3 ounce of cheese please" will get you 300g. They could ask if they cut it too fat: "mag het een onsje meer zijn?"/"Is it ok if it's a small ounce more?"
Hecto is very used in Italy with food "I'd like 3 hectos of ham, sir"
Deka is too small to be useful tbh, maybe it's used with medicines or drugs?
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
She’ll go 300 hectares on a single tank of kersone!
Metric haters when they realize their electricity is measured in Volts (metric unit), not in "relatable" units like Sparks:
Last night was so hot, my ac took three sparks per witchburn!
Hey hey, US customary units are metric:
They just use weird provincial conversion factors, that's all.
They could be more metric. Just imagine this wonderful reality:
Funny thing is here in the Netherlands some people use pounds and ounces ( pond and ons in Dutch ) when they buy meat at the butcher. 1 pond = 500 gram, 1 ons = 100 gram
Oh yeah, that'll be fine, I'm sure it will make everything simpler:
1km = 1000yd + 1000hd = 1111yd + 1hdWhat could possibly go wrong.
1 slug = ... ?I redefined 1yd as 1m so 1km = 1000yd = 1kyd
1000 yd = 3000ft + 1000hd = 3333ft + 1hd
I think the inch-feet conversion is used more often than the feet-yard conversion, so I kept the 12:1 and broke the 3:1
lmaooooooo
Yes please. I have no fucking IDEA what a mile is. What's a yard. A foot. Make it make sense
A miles is a furlong squared.
A yard is almost the same as a metre. That one's easy :)
x2
A mile is a 1000 paces walked, counting only one foot in most places. Different countries take different steps so a mile is different in each country. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 kilometer is the most common.
A yard is almost one meter, so I'll allow it.
It makes sense for a system where you want to easily divide quantities and only can work with the fingers on one hand.
Such a satisfying system
First time i see deka with a k instead of deca.
Came here for the "acshully"
Stayed for the learning.
Put this on the Ronald Reagan did it pile. Jimmy Carter started us on the path to metric and then Reagan halted it.
Pour one out for the deci, even autocorrect attempted to remove it from my message.
We use deci for drinks all the time
So you would know exactly what one is to pour out.
Pretty much. Deci only gets used for drinks and deka only gets used for deli meat/cheese.
Deci is used for baking as well, all the time. How is that "only for drinks"?
Idk most recipes I see use mililiters
I've never seen one recipe that uses them. But maybe we just live in different countries.
A millilitre sounds like a crazy level of precision for cooking or baking, though. How is that ever necessary? I guess you're rounding to decilitres in practical use anyway?
If I encountered something like "150 ml" in a recipe, I'd assume it was written by a mad engineer and just use a measurement tool for 1 dl and put about 1½ of those. Makes life easier and the result will be just as good. Different nations have very different approaches to cooking, it seems!
Well yeah it does usually round to 50ml. Idk why use ml but that's what is most often used. I just checked my recipes and about 90% use ml. A couple use dl and one used both dl and cl.
Joke's on OP, this gets me hot. Like watching some foreign, kinky shit.
It's... .°˖✧Exotic✧˖°.
Frau Schmidt sprechen sie metrisch mit mir. Ich bin eine schmutzig Amerikanerin
Missed some fun ones
Also: —
• zepto (symbol z): 10⁻²¹ (one sextillionth)
• yocto (symbol y): 10⁻²⁴ (one septillionth)
• ronto (symbol r): 10⁻²⁷ (one octillionth)
• quecto (symbol q): 10⁻³⁰ (one nonillionth)
While we're on the subject, can we please kill off "kilowatt hours". Fuckers, those are Joules, 3.6 Megajoules specifically.
Nah it's more relatable to humans regarding electricity consumption, the consumer would be confused and scared seeing 3.6 megajoules on a bill and not actually understand how power usage of watts of appliances would convert into Joule energy units. That's why electric cars motor powers are still rated in Watts and the bill shows a relatable term.
To add to that, that's why so many metric countries (not USA) still use imperial units colloquially because they are more relatable in real life like lbs and inches and feet. But then would use Km and grams in other contexts quite normally. And knots still always make more sense to pilots and sailors.
What makes lbs, inch and feet more relatable?
How is half a kg more relatable than one kg? Or how are 2½ cm more relatable than 1 cm? Or how are 30 cm more relatable than 10 cm or 100 cm?
I keep seeing your argument here and there, but I just cannot fathom what is meant by it. For me there's nothing relatable at all in "foot". It falls awkwardly between 10 cm and 100 cm and I cannot really make heads or tails about it. Except if I divide it by three, which gives me an approximate number in metres. But then the number could have been in metres in the first place.
Relatable I don't think is the right word. Intuitive in its use and measurement, in specific scenarios.
Measurements always have a scaling and a precision problem. Humans are bad at math and scale, and really struggle mentally with numbers more than a few digits. If the number is too big, someone will either just accept it or ignore it. We like our nice round numbers, and funnily enough like our small prime numbers (1, 2, 3, and 5) and first few multiples of primes (4, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20) and numbers that just shift the decimal point around (10, 100, 1000)
Reference frames are also incredibly useful to us, especially when communicating.
The metric system jumps straight to moving the decimal place around, where imperial let's you play around with other divisors. Let's say I have a single digit of some unit and I want to half it. Generally in metric this is fine, doesn't really add to the mental cognitive load. Half it again, or divide by one of the other primes, and the number of digits starts to explode (or is infinitely repeating). For the scalers within the imperial system, they naturally let you divide down and even re-express the same measurement in a different unit with fewer integer numbers and no precision loss
Edit: Another example. Computer scientist don't use metric, we bastardized parts of it and then invented extra units that fit the need and intuitiveness of working with them. We don't use deci/deca or centi/centa, we bastardized kilo into 2^10 since 1024 is close to a thousand keeping it a nice power of two, a byte is 8 bits for the same reason and a nibble is 4 bits because halving bytes occasionally is useful. A word typically is 16 except when it is 32 bits, in which case 16 is a half word. Then we have dwords and qwords being twice and four times the size of a words, and then a page historically has been 4096 bytes since 1024 is kinda small, but newer systems sometime say a page is 64KB since 2^16 = 65536
While I think the metric system should be used more, I'll also defend frantional measurements when precision matters. Decimal measurements only increase by a factor of 10. So if your precision is 1/8 of a meter, you have to either round to the nearest meter, overstate your precision (0.125 implies precision to 1mm), or essentially write a sentence ("125mm plus or minus 62.5mm").
With fractional, the precision is built into the denominator. If your measurement of half a meter is precise to half a meter, you record it as "1/2". If it's precise to an pitch of a meter, you record it as "4/8".
Sorry you totally lost me on the second paragraph. What you describe there is basically a British thing. On the continent people use m, kg and such for daily life things.
Knots are used because of historic influences and inertia. Imperial units in some special cases are exclusively used because of the influence of the US and again inertia.
Oh ok just a British thing so the ENTIRE BRITISH EMPIRE. Cool. Oh knots are used for historic influences like... Places that use imperial units colloquially but are official metric? Ohhh cool as well. Thanks for repeating just what I said and agreeing.
If you head actually read what I wrote instead of just making stuff up, you'd know that I was talking about the European contintent, on which, the tiny peninsula of Gibraltar aside, the British Empire had zero possessions after metrication. People there don't use "inches" or "pounds" colloqually. Where I life they also don't use some local old customary units for that, they simply use SI units for weight and dimensions. You are 176 cm tall and weigh 73kg ...
And that does contradict your claim that generally people prefer those old customary units in daily life. They only do if they were raised that way.
The reason why customary units are still more widely used in daily life in regions formerly part of the British Empire is because there metrication was much more delayed, ie happened for real a lot later. The old ways take time to wither away, like they have in regions that had it all a lot earlier. It is ridiculous to suggest that those customary units are more useful to people in daily life but only if transition to metric for real wasn't too long ago.
People are just used to kWh. There's nothing about it that's more intuitive, it's just more familiar. But measuring things in hogsheads and barleycorns used to be familiar too. Sometimes being familiar isn't as important as following standards. Eventually the standard units will become familiar, and since they're standard units, they're much easier to work with.
1 joule per watt each second. It's dead easy. That's why Joules should be used.
Yes, power should be measured in Watts, that's the standard unit for power, just like Joules are the standard unit for energy.
No they're not, it's just that people are used to them. The people whose minds are the hardest to change are the old people who have used some random unit for all their lives and don't want to have to get used to some newfangled standard (a standard that's actually hundreds of years old at this point). Because the old people refuse to change, the country gets stuck using that old unit, even if it's informally, and so that's what the kids learn, then they become old people and are also inflexible.
There's nothing about an inch or a pound that's naturally more intuitive than a centimetre or a kilogram. It's just what you're used to. Go somewhere where people grew up with metric and for them using anything other than metric feels strange and awkward. Pilots and sailors are used to knots, they never had to switch, but when they do complex calculations they mostly avoid using knots because doing conversions with non-SI units is such a massive pain in the ass.
No, you're arguing for a second-based unit in a context where the hour-based unit dominates common use. The reason why we use hours is because hours is much more familiar across the contexts where electrical usage is metered: monthly bills, daily production/consumption cycles. Everyone knows that 3 days is 72 hours but pretty much nobody can come up with the answer in seconds without actually applying a conversion factor and making the calculation.
Energy is especially prone to the problem of how it's calculated, simply because it's such an important quantity to measure or calculate. Sometimes we use calories or electron volts because those make for easier conversions to other quantities in the context of temperature/heat or particle physics, respectively.
Yes. Common use. You're making my point for me. It's what people are more familiar with.
Yes, it's what people are more familiar with.
Who cares about 3 days? Do you run your hair dryer for 3 days or 60 seconds? Do you cook something on the stove for several minutes, or several days?
Again, it's just what people are familiar with.
Yes, I'm advocating for using hours as a familiar unit, instead of kiloseconds or megaseconds or teraseconds. You'll never get the world on metric time.
Everyone? If I'm doing calculations for solar panel production, it's a lot easier to work with hours instead of seconds. If I'm dealing with usage patterns across the weekly cycle of business days and weekends, hours is a much easier unit to work with than seconds.
We organize time around hours and days, so it only makes sense for there to be an hour-based unit for easy conversion.
Like hogsheads per rod.
Those might be used eventually at some point in the future, but right now our life is dominated by the rotation of the earth, the movement of the earth around the sun, etc. So, other units that correspond to those natural events make sense.
But, I'm not advocating anything radical, just use the standard SI unit for energy instead of some awkward non-SI unit based on SI units where the only thing it has going for it is that it's familiar.
You aren't, I can tell because you advocate for kWh. And your denominator in that case wouldn't be "per 3 days".
And minutes, and seconds. Most of us use all of these.
No, it doesn't. Joules are the unit that makes sense when talking about energy.
Do you get this upset about the world using km/h instead of m/s? How about hectares instead of a power of 3 of square meter?
Or electron volts in particle physics? Or calories in food?
People use these because the conversions are easier in the contexts where they're discussed.
Just use joules per second :P
Way more intuitive than watts and watt hours
Wait, no, please convince my countryfolk to metricate. I'm an engineer and desperately want to be able to design things in metric. It's so much better but the average American doesn't know a meter from a hole in their ass
But they do know litres, because the big soft drink bottles are sold in litres. They know grams if they do drugs or bake. They know prefixes like Mega, Giga and Tera if they are into computers, and they know about "kilo" if they pay an electrical bill. If they're into military stuff, they know about "clicks", which are actually... kilometers.
I think it's slowly creeping in.
So weird phenomenon actually, because our military is fully metricated, you wind up with some of the most die hard American exceptionalist/American nationalist types fully using metric and 24 hour time. A friend was raised in a household like that where they just didn't use US customary at home because the military doesn't.
We're all taught a lot of the basics in school. And yeah we have an instinctive idea of what 2L looks like. Drug users know grams, as do some bakers (a lot of baking is still done by volume here). And other than that I'd say maybe a quarter of Americans know that a meter is kinda close to a yard. Maybe 5% (may be overestimating tbh) know that a liter of water is a kilogram.
Slowly but surely though more things are being roundish numbers in metric here (like 325 mL/12.9 fluid ounces) and I think that's a vital component of the move to metric. We are actually headed there, we're just slower than the UK and Canada.
Yeah, that's funny because the hoo-rah American Exceptionalist types are otherwise very conservative and dislike anything foreign, but they also adore the military, and the military has to be practical, and traditional units are so not practical.
I would guess that in time the US will adopt metric -- it will happen much faster if the American Century ends and other countries become more powerful. Since almost everywhere else is mostly metric, the US won't be able to go it alone anymore.
Normalize it. Use meters and kilograms on your own even before legislation. Convince others to use it. Push back the storm. If a handful of people in your town use it then it goes from something that nobody uses to a thing that a few people (and the rest of the world) use. Be the change you want to see.
"The story of the metric system starts, somewhat unexpectedly, in 17th Century England, with the proposal by the natural philosopher John Wilkins for a consistently decimal system of units. The Europe of his time was divided by the use of innumerable different systems of measure, with each country using its own traditional units (and in many cases, a lack of even national standardisation meant that different regions within countries would use their own measures). To remedy this, Wilkins conceived of a single, rational standard, based on the best science of his time, which all nations could equally share. His idea for a “universal Measure” was not adopted in his era, although that very phrase would ultimately (via Greek translation) give us the name of the metre."!
Do they actually know yards? A metre is pretty close to one yard. If you know yard, you know the metre.
I'm wide awake but here's an upvote.
How about a metric ton of tiddies
A full megagram?.
A full mammogram
Trans girl I use to know called herself femto. I assumed it was because of her foot fetish but maybe it was related to the metric system.
Was she 10-¹⁵th on a hotness scale?
I'm an American, WHAT THE FUCK IS A KILOMETER!?
A kilometer is
0.000,000,000,000,001 Exameters
0.000,000,000,001 Petameters
0.000,000,001 Terameters
0.000,001 Gigameters
0.001 Megameters
1 Kilometer
10 Hectometer
100 Dekameter
1,000 Meter
10,000 Decimeter
100,000 Centimeter
1,000,000 Millimeter
1,000,000,000 Micrometer
1,000,000,000,000 Nanometer
1,000,000,000,000,000 Picometer
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 Femtometer
or
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Attometer
You're talking to an American. They use anything but a logical system. To explain to them what a kilometer is, you need to put yourself in their position and go from that. Let me help:
A kilometer is:
To make sense to an American, you need to not make any sense. This includes swapping the period and comma around in numbers, but you already did that.
I would call it an upvote, but I will give you +1 Eagle Scream for the accuracy of your AR-15 unit measurement.
Same accuracy as seen during school shootings, am I right?
(you forgot 3 zeroes in Picometer)
thank you for pointing it out :-)
Thanks man, that really cleared it up. I understand now.
usa kicked the Brits out of the usa back in the day but they stole and kept their system of measurements (and of course adapted them over time, like americans do). They avoid the metric system by a country kilometer.
Don't make me start measuring things in decifeet just to be contrary. I have a measuring tape dividing the foot in tenths and I'm not afraid to use it.
Us surveyors use it every day!
...that was the joke. Surveyors just being contrary enough to do things in decimal feet just so everyone else can be annoyed by it.
Metric is officially recognized across the US. European minds cannot comprehend this.
To be fair, neither can American minds.
If the average American mind only knew about its goverment being metric.
We recognize both systems so that government is not metric. Freedom units are still primarily used over metric. Metric is used in science and academia over Imperial.
I actually don't think that the biggest barrier is the average American. I think the barrier is the logistics of replacing millions of signs and other material.
Federal agencies are expected to use the metric system, even if not all of them do. Don't they? That is not quite "we recognize both systems"
I disagree with the obstacles, the main obstacle is politics. The US was already on its way and the rrason it is not to the largest part metric is Reagan. And if replacing signs is such an issue, something countlesd developing and developed nations have managed just fine, that would raise some serious questions.
american here, enjoy your report and permanent ban buddy, youve just crossed the line big time
Centi is familiar to everyone from centi-meter, I have deci in deci-Bel for my optical signals at work, and I know hecto is used for hecto-Pascal which replaced the milli-bar. But I can't think of one for deka, can anyone give an example of a unit where deka is used often?
It's pretty much the least used SI prefix. Apparently used somewhat frequently in central Europe for "decagrams" (10s of grams)
Interesting, thanks. It's not familiar to me in my South-Western corner of central Europe. I'll have to ask my Czech friend if it's familiar to him.
Am from Hungary, can confirm, all recipes say decagram here.
It also makes sense in a way, you usually don't eat either kilograms or grams of anything really.
Like you go to the butcher and you won't ask for 213 grams of meat, or 5 kilos, you ask for 15 decagrams.
Thank you for the datapoint! Exactly like my Czech friend said as well.
It makes a lot of sense to me, that you would put a floor on the precision like that.
We often have the question at the counter, like "It's a few grams over, is that still okay, or should I take some off?".
Yeah, us too, just in good Hungarian fashion, that whole sentence is one word.
He got back to me really fast. He says yes!
He also gave me this song text (Michal Tučný - Prodavač with the chorus at 0:41):
He also said ordering meat by the gram at the counter sounds super posh and overly precise to him, while it's just normal for me, very cool!
Dekagram of cocaine
Decimeter is used often enough.
All of these can be used with any measure, and that's the point.
Yeah deci is familiar, but deka I haven't seen.
Of course they can, but its still noticeable that one is way rarer so I got curious where it might be in common use.
Decagram is used in centeal europe for cooking and groceries, but otherwise probably unused.
No yotta-? How do you describe the number of joulles it takes to blow up a planet?
That's the tera tera. Terra terror or Terra tearer, or a trillion terajoules.
Dat hourglass figure
I do wish we metric places (or at least Canada) were more flexible and familiar with the whole system. Sure we have milliliters and centimeters and kilograms, but people say things all the time like 2000km or 2 million kgs, or even things like 25000mAh. And I get it, people get into a frame of reference and want to stay there, but I wish people had the agility and practice to say 2 megameters, 2 gigagrams, and, well 25 amp hours, and still be understood. That last one's not hard, but packaging still seems to be stupid about it.
They took the Megagram away from us and called it a ton 😤
Funnily enough, the base unit of weight is actually kilogram. It doesn't change the fact that we can use other prefixes with gram, but still.
Big number good, ooga ooga.
Fun coincidence that I was working on making a graph (network) of the relationships between different units yesterday. Here is how it looks in a circle, yellow dots are lengths, mass red and time blue.
It's not perfect on the phone, but here is the link, press the "Refresh All" button to load the network and run the code.
https://nadi-system.github.io/playground.html?example=units
Context: I'm writing a programming language to analyze graphs, so I thought "units are graph relationships, let me see what I can do". It was fun, but also funny because so many relationships are not simple factor multiplications. The network was extracted from the data gnu units uses, but I did it halfhazardly, so it's not perfect.
You can play around with the code if you wanna try your own things, there's user documentation and more examples. The actual network can be viewed using the buttons on the left of the editor.
Did you know that Americans use Milli-inches?
Thou.
Mils and Thous are at least decimal, so that's part of the battle right there...
how else are we gonna measure our dangles?
You could measure them in dongles
I've only ever encountered decaliters in Dune, where there's the awkward phrase "38 million decaliters" instead of "380 million liters". It's probably because Frank Herbert was initially thinking in gallons, and it got changed later.
Or just 380 ML (Megalitres).
The brief moment of confusion when you hit something using deci- or hecto- and you briefly have to convert to one of the common prefixes is always a little aggravating...
Why not both? It is time for the exatiddy
Because you end up with the mess us Brits have. And no one wants the mess we have.
indeed...
The most insane part is that British ton is 1016 kg and American is 907 kg
Pints are also much bigger on the east side of the Atlantic than the west.
Canada too.
The only change I'd make is distance
Is it a long distance > no > are you doing DIY > yes > cm, mm, inches > no ( what's currently on the flow chart)
don’t think anyone has used stones for weight since the 80s. I’ve only heard kilograms my entire life
I noticed that they often use stones in the news when talking about weight loss (ex. 1, 2). May be a regional/generational thing.
No one needs SI units. Measuring in dicks or handegg fields FtW111!1oneOne!!
DAd Heard Karl Marx Gave The Proletariat Eleven Zeppelins Yo
I have to say, "da" is a bad prefix. Good thing nobody uses it.
.000000000000001 is clearly the most evil measurement.
Deka and Hecto really didnt stand a chance
I mean, milk, beer and wine are measured in hectolitres. Oh, and oil for heating, I believe.
Is it not centa? Always thought it was like deci and deca.
Ah yes "Micro" Soft. Bill there named the company after himself.
king henry died drinking chocolate milk
It's the only system, the imperial "system" is just some shenanigans on top of metric
As a member of c/sciencememes, you have my sword! (Or, at least my upvote!)
The hangup in the US for a lot of it is the people who would keep trying to convert back into English units instead of just riding with it. Especially silly when it doesn’t change anything.
Not so sure about that, buddy...
If faced with the choice of giving up the metric system forever or giving up tiddies forever, I know which one I'd choose. I can get used to a new system of measurements, but without tiddies to measure, what's even the point?
yeah i suppose a 25.4 millimeter long dick would sound bigger than 1 inch huh
Why is 1 unit of volume 1000 units of weight?
As in, 1 litre of water is 1 kilogram. 1 gram of water is 1 millilitre.
Why couldn't 1 gram be 1 litre?
edit: a better way to phrase this question is as @[email protected] put it:
See, 1 liter isn't 1kg , 1 litre of water weighs 1kg. There's the difference, and as such there is no reasin for 1 litre of water to weigh 1 gram.
Kilogram is not the metric unit of weight, it’s mass. 1 liter of water has mass of 1kg. 1kg of water weighs 9.81 newtons - at least on earth. Newton is the metric unit of weight.
9.76N to 9.83N depending where you are, if you want to be super pedantic.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/1987831-gravity-map-reveals-earths-extremes/
"Mount Nevado Huascarán in Peru has the lowest gravitational acceleration, at 9.7639 m/s2, while the highest is at the surface of the Arctic Ocean, at 9.8337 m/s2."
Also depends on how much mass the weighed object has so not constant based on the position alone. But 9.81 or 9.8 is generally accepted as the acceleration due to gravity on earth. F=Gm1m2/r^2 if you’d like to be extra specific.
You don't seem to have understood the question.
1 kilogram is 1000 grams. Kilo isnused in place of the 1000.
1 litre of water weighs 1000 grams. Why couldn't it be 1 litre of water is 1 gram?
Because units less than a litre are so common. 2ml of syrup, 4dl of flour, 12cl of wine, 0.5l of beer, etc. But things you measure by mass rarely go below 1 gram (in day-to-day life at home). Candy bar is 50g, a packet of cheese is 200g, a chunk of meat is a kilogram. Besides, most people just call it "a kilo" so the common units in the spoken language are "a kilo" when talking about mass and "a litre" when talking about volume
The International System of Units (SI) uses the kilogram as its base unit of mass, so it is 1 thing in SI units = 1 liter, and SI is what most people think that they mean by "metric system" these days. Even though the SI isn't entirely metric. (The Celsius scale isn't, for example.) Also, liters are not SI units; the m^3^ is the SI unit of volume, and the liter was defined in terms of that.
To put it another way, the base unit of mass is a kilo- of something, and it (not quite) equals a metric non-metric-system unit of volume of water. I dunno, the metric system seems all kinds of messed up to me!
(/j)
It's like the reason 0 is freezing water temp and 100 is boiling water.
They used water as a standard when deciding what things ought to mean.
The question wasnt about water specifically. Theyre trying to ask why does 1e3 mass = 1e0 volume and/or 1e0 mass = 1e-3 volume. Why doesnt 1e0 mass = 1e0 volume
Exactly. No one seems to understand the question but I don't know how else to ask it.
Yeah another reply specified the water thing.
The gram was originally defined as "the absolute weight of a volume of pure water equal to the cube of the hundredth part of a metre [1 cm3], and at the temperature of melting ice".
Why? Who knows. If they'd already decided on the meter, then the most logical definition of a litre is pretty awkward. You'd think it would be 1 cubic meter of water, because then the unit of volume is 1 unit of length cubed. Then one gram would be one litre of water, which is today 1000 kg, or one metric ton.
But, then for everyday things people would be using microlitres and micrograms.
Really, the metre should have been the replacement for the inch (i.e. the centimeter). Then you could have 1 litre being 1 cubic meter (what is today 1 mL) and then the unit of mass would be the mass of 1 L of water, which would be 1 gram. A person's height would be in hm, and long travel distances would be in Mm.
A litre is a unit of volume and just another way of saying 1 cm^3. It is a unit that is useful in daily life but it is not an SI unit. Since volume is only devrived from lenth you would need to either adjust lenth or weight for it to line up.
Also your question is unclear (to me) would you like the gram or the litre to change so they line up "better"?
It doesn't matter which one you change, the question is why are they not aligned. It seems like an obvious shortcoming.
Like 1 megalitre of water could have weighed 1 megagram and so on.
It is .0000451 exocelsius outside.
Celsius isn't actually metric, per say. Its based on the freezing point of water while farenheight is based on the freezing point of mercury.
Celcius is what most of the world used because 0 is where water freezes and is very relevant to the human condition, hence why its the most used.
It was adopted as part of the metric SI system but unlike all the units developed for metric which actually use the above scale, I do not believe there is any practical use for this with celcius.
Kelvin does use this however.
I want to upvote metric, but downvote "tiddies". 😡
Jokes on you. I'm into 3D printing.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that just the scale? It's not the metric system, there's no meters in here, this could be used for bytes of data: gigabytes, terabytes...
I gotta say, I absolutely hate the way data storage is notated. Because colloquially, a _giga_byte is 1024 MB, but that's actually a _gibi_byte, and a proper _giga_byte is only actually 1000 MB.
So storage sellers are technically accurate when they say they're giving you a 1000 gigabytes of storage, but your operating system shows gibibytes as gigabytes, so you don't actually have as much as you think. It's like 7% less at the gigabyte level, and 10% at the terabyte level.
I changed my car to metric.
When I returned to pick up my car after dropping it off for a smog check, the tech hadn’t done it. He noticed the odometer was in kilometers and putting that “mileage” in the system would have caused havoc on the car’s history (mileage seeming to go up and down is a red flag).
As annoying as that was, it would have been far worse if he’d just entered the kilometers as miles.
Which is to say that switching now is more than just putting up new speed limit signs.
I use metric daily as an engineer, but in my personal life I find some metric measurements pretty silly. Celsius and L/100km are not useful or show it’s not a great system for everyday use.
This is probably just a matter of taste and convention. If everyone knew what 12°C was, then it would be perfectly fine for everyday use. Everywhere else in the world, people are using it for everyday use, and they're doing just fine.
Same for L/100km. Oops, you specifically wanted to know how far you were going to go with 1 Liter? You can convert that just fine. But it's just as likely that you're looking at mpg, and you actually wanted to know how many gallons it would take for you to go from A to B, in which case you also need to do a conversion.
How cool is it outside? I dunno, around 10 to 12.778 C I think.
Much better than 50-55 F.
I know I'm being silly, but my brain likes numbers like 5 and 10. I can't imagine saying 10 to 13. And a 5 degree swing in C feels too big.
A good measurement system for humans needs to have roughly fudgeable numbers within the ranges that we regularly experience. Which is to say, whatever temperature system we use to describe outside temperature should go from 0 to 100 in the range of temperatures we experience outside. It's like metric, but for people instead of water. Fahrenheit isn't perfect. The 0 should be colder. The 100 should be hotter. But not by much.
Yeah, but that's because that's what you're used to with the F scale.
If you were estimating a number of tablespoons of sugar, you wouldn't be estimating in groups of 5, because that's crazy. You're probably more accustomed to estimating one tablespoon at a time. The same with estimating measuring cups of milk.
Or, if you don't cook very much, for estimating walking distances, you're not estimating in groups of 5 miles. You might group by quarter miles and say, "It's a quarter mile away," or a half or something.
There's nothing special about this scale. All of the supposed benefits are the result of your familiarity with it. Had we been using °C the whole time instead, you would be estimating degrees two at a time instead of 5, and everything would be completely normal.
nah, tablespoons you estimate in groups of four. teaspoons in groups of three.
You are fooled by your own habits. Most of the world uses °C just fine and why wouldn' they? The steps of one °C are just what starts to be relevant in daily life. Yes you would totally say it has 13°C and not round up to 5 or 10s. The latter you would only do if your unit system has more precision than is needed.
That said, if you want more precision just say 13.4°C. Some wearher forecasts do that but it is really not very releant what comes after the comma for daily weather forecast needs.
What would you say if you wanted less precision? Would you give a range?
I rarely see the need for less precision. If you don't know the precise temperature you say "around" if you want to describe a range, you just do that "x-y". Easy.
Like I said, you and I are used to our temperature unit systems, neither is inherently more user friendly than the either.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I really like the foot. It's great because you can divide it by 2, 3 and 4 and even 6 and it still works. I think it's a lot better to use than the metric system when working with wood.
That's because duodecimal is a great system and superior to decimalization.
You can eyeball the .333 mm and be fine
I think that's more because Canada and the U.S. developed wood sizes for building while using the foot as a measurement. I doubt they would have made 2 x 4s a thing if they were using metric.
That's not the metric system
What do you think the metric system is?
A set of standard units AND the prefix system
The prefixes can be and are used for anything including non metric units. Americans use the prefixes all the time.
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HEY YOU CAN'T DO THAT
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