Comment on 5 tomatoes
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agoit’s more when people are almost using the metric system then fuck it up, like the “Watt Hour” for measuring energy use.
Energy is just so important to physics and engineering that it will be measured in whatever unit is most convenient to convert in that particular context: joules as the SI unit, watt hours for electricity usage, calories for certain types of heat or food energy calculations, electron volts in particle physics, equivalent tonnes of TNT for explosion energy, things like that.
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I don’t believe that “watt hours” are more convenient than joules, especially when they’re not just watt hours but kilowatt hours or megawatt hours. At that point just use megajoules or gigajoules.
I can understand things like eV where the scale is so different that you’d have to constantly use tiny and unusual prefixes. But, for most other things like calories, it’s just tradition rather than a well thought out reason.
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 hours ago
Clearly you’ve never had to do the calculations where these things come up, where hours are a much more common unit of measure for time than seconds, so that multiplying and dividing by time is easier when working with hours.
logi@piefed.world 21 hours ago
The real problem here is that there aren't 1000 seconds to the hour. Then this argument would be moot