Comment on Everyday, as an American
whoisthedoktor@lemmy.wtf 3 weeks ago
There was a beautiful time back when I was young where we tried to change to metric and schools taught us nothing but. Now I’m ~50 years old and don’t even know how many pints are in a gallon. Or feet in a mile. Always forget whether it’s 12 or 16 that’s inches in a foot / ounce to pound. Always have to look that shit up.
Guess what I NEVER have to look up? The measurements that tell you in their fucking prefixes how many X are in Y. What a concept.
candybrie@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Don’t worry. You likely wouldn’t remember even if you were taught. 5280 feet/mile is just not worth the brain space. Neither is 8 pints/gallon. I don’t think you would convert between the two often enough to make it useful information to just know.
And I do have to look up those prefixes for the less used ones. It’s exa then peta or peta then exa and what’s bigger than them? What’s smaller than nano? I don’t remember because it rarely comes up. But I’m in tech, so it’s starting to more.
linja@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I remember 5280 despite being Australian because I saw that stupid mnemonic tweet. I remember the SI prefixes because of xkcd.