Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale.
dafo@lemmy.world 3 months agoIn Swedish (maybe also Norweigan and Danish too?) we have a"mil" which is 10 km, I wish this was more wide spread because it’s fairly convenient.
It could even be called a mile! We already have ton/tonne which is just an absolute nightmare of a unit, so we might as well add more confusion to “mile”.
basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
Yes, I read about it, it’s also called Scandinavian mile or metric mile.
We still use metricized ton [Tonne] (1Mg / 1000kg) and rarely pound [Pfund] (5hg / 500g) in Germany. And hundredweight/quintal [Zentner], which is 50kg (100 pound) in Germany, but 100kg in Switzerland and Austria.
It’s not more confusion, these kinds of units never had a uniform definition to begin with. The metric system got new unit names to get clear unit definitions. US survey mile was just given up last year. Nautical miles are still different.
The metric system that was invented in France had three main goals: based on decimal numbers, clear definition and to derive measures of length and weight from nature.
The last point is important to have a constant measure that doesn’t slowly change over time and to make it reproducible.
The US mile shrunk by 1⁄8 inch in 1959 after they adopted the international mile, which was agreed upon UK and some of it’s former colonies to resynchronize their units that slowly developed apart over time.