Comment on Why a ton, and not a megagram?

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rufus@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Hmm, halfway…

If you take the context away: When you learn that in school, it’s marked as a mistake if you write 10 000m. You should have converted that into 10km to get a perfect score.

But there are certainly contexts where it makes sense to stay with one prefix. For example if you write things into a table.

I’m not sure if it’s necessarily the case for comparing stuff… It’s kind of rare that you have things that are a factor of 10000 or a million apart, so it’s kind of difficult for me to find examples. But I have capacitors that are 470uF or 22pF and resistors that are 220 Ohm or a Mega-Ohm or 150kOhm. I know how to handle that and switch between all of them. So people do switch and that’s kind of the point of having those prefixes. If I type it into my calculator I simply use the key to type it in in scientific notation and once again so it gives me the closest power of ten. I forgot the name of that key. ‘E’ or ‘ENG’.

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