“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” ― Josh Bazell, Wild Thing
5 tomatoes
Submitted 10 hours ago by ickplant@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/161b9c27-c875-4317-bdac-d3d1b9fc0030.jpeg
Comments
CAVOK@lemmy.world 45 minutes ago
Pulptastic@midwest.social 32 minutes ago
Do we have meter cola?
antler@feddit.online 49 minutes ago
And to remember the number of yards in a mile: 1 San Francisco
One-seven-six-oh
ToiletFlushShowerScream@lemmy.world 49 minutes ago
So whose foot exactly?
hperrin@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
I’m always disappointed that megameter isn’t a common word. People will say “one thousand kilometers” instead of just “one megameter”.
Tyr_Raidho_Othala@reddthat.com 10 hours ago
Make it a gigameter for my 1000 megameter needs
fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 hours ago
The only bad thing about metric is that billionaires technically do have giga dollars.
exu@feditown.com 10 hours ago
Is kibimeter a technically allowed measurement? That would be fun!
SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 1 hour ago
Yes, the same way that kiloinches is technically allowed.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Can anyone say it isn’t? You’re using a valid prefix, so people will understand what you’re saying, if they have no idea in hell why you’re measuring out 1024 meters.
Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
How about kilo-klick?
Johanno@feddit.org 6 hours ago
Megameter gigameter,
Next thing is one astronomical unit.
And then we are using light years.
Not very linear those last two.
And I am sure that gigameters would still be better than light years.
SaltyIceteaMaker@lemmy.ml 4 hours ago
well neither astronomical unit nor light years use meters as a reference. and one of those isnt even accurate (AU)
warm@kbin.earth 9 hours ago
I'm more disappointed the world renamed one thousand million from milliard to billion.
chellomere@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
“the world”?
If you came over to the other side of the pond, you’d find that most of Europe is still using milliard, billiard, trilliard etc.
TeNppa@sopuli.xyz 9 hours ago
When translating to Finnish it’s confusing sometimes: Billion = miljardi = 1 000 000 000 Trillion = biljoona = 1 000 000 000 000 Quintillion = triljoona = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 You can tell how bad a news site is when they translate billion to biljoona and thus making the amount 1000 times higher.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 8 hours ago
hating on milliardaries doesn’t feel as impactful and cathartic.
boboliosisjones@feddit.nu 8 hours ago
In Scandinavia we have “mil” which everyone uses, 1 mil, or Scandinavian mile as it is known in English, is 10km. Cuts down ln zeroes. I love this but no one else(outside of Scandinavia) uses it.I typically get a lot of pushback mentioning it to my international peers.
ArcaneGadget@lemmy.world 45 minutes ago
Sweden and Norway only. Few people in Denmark know what a mil is. And virtually no one here uses it.
Yeah-yeah; something something Denmark. I know…
python@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
People will say “one thousand kilometers”
Will they though? I don’t talk about distances that large anywhere near often enough to really need a shorthand for it, personally. Had to even look up what things are approximately 1000km apart to even know what to imagine it as (it’s about the distance between Paris and Berlin).
guy@piefed.social 10 minutes ago
Sweden is quite long, so talking about traveling>1 000 km is not uncommon, but here we have mil, which is equal to 10 km. So on my vacation I traveled 120 mil is more useful and common
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
Comes up a literal metric ass load (8 bushels) when your talking about travel in the USA.
We big
hperrin@lemmy.ca 7 hours ago
Yes, every time I’ve ever heard someone use metric to describe distances of >999km, they keep using kilometers.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Car mileage (or kilometerage, is that a word?)
People don’t say the car has 200 megameter on the odometer, but 200 000 km. Or 200k km?..
Octavio@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Fair, but I lived in Denver for 26 years. I will never forget the number of feet in a mile. 😂
ickplant@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Heeey, I’m currently living in Northglenn. Same, it’s forever etched in my memory.
HoopyFrood@lemmy.zip 51 minutes ago
What the heck does this mean? Is the number 5280 just painted all over billboards in Denver?
kamen@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
The only positive thing I see about imperial is that things are easily divisible by 3 and 6, but that’s about it. Then again, if doing the same with metric, you’re usually fine rounding to the nearest millimetre, and if that isn’t accurate enough, it’s probably not supposed to be done by hand anyway.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 hours ago
Base 12 is easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 44 minutes ago
If an alien species has 12 fingers to our 10, would they work in base 12 as normally as we use 10s? Like would their whole system end (or start) with a 0 or equivalent and not end all different?
My maths coherence is too high-school for this thinking, but now its in there.
Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
It’s funny how the biggest argument for metric is that it’s so accurate but in real life use it degrades to “close enough”. My main problem with metric is that I can’t get my pencil that sharp.
kamen@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
It’s accurate when you need it to be and gets out of the way when you don’t. And if you do need the accuracy, you have a unit that doesn’t need fractions.
lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
How is “accurate” an argument?? You can use any unit with any amount of decimal places. The argument is that it’s regular. You learn the prefixes once and apply them to length, volume, weight, …
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
The biggest argument for metric is that it’s consistent. It takes 1 calories to heat 1k of water by 1 degree. State something similar in imperial units.
BeardedBlaze@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Most standard measuring tapes have 1/16th of an inch as the smallest fraction on the tape. 1mm is 1/64th. Which is one is “close enough”? Lol
nexguy@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Just remember God giving you a single grain of sand. “One thou sand”.
Not a easy to remember as 5 tomatoes.
Gustephan@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Imagine being so close minded and bad at math that you can only think in base 10 and feel the constant need to degrade people who are good at math in different bases
Bahnd@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
The feet to mile conversion is still in base-10… Its the ratios between the units that are seemingly arbitrary. Come on…
Gustephan@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
This comment brought to you by a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to use a different base numeral
Spezi@feddit.org 1 hour ago
What a weak argument. You shouldn’t have to be good at math to do basic calculations in daily life. Metric is much more accessible in this regard. Even if you lack math skills it is easy to understand.
Gustephan@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Did you read the words I wrote? It looks like youre responding to a “imperial units are better than metric” strawman which you may notice I didnt say or even allude to
Djehngo@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
The only metric to imperial conversion I remember is kilometers to miles since it’s pretty close to the golden ratio.
Even if you don’t remember that the golden ratio is 1.6 and a bit, you can approximate it by using successive terms of the Fibonacci sequence.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …
So 8 miles is about 13km (actually 12.87)
notarobot@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
Forma me it’s the yard. It’s so close to the meter its ridiculous. I just ignore the difference an treat as the same. One yard = 0.9144 meters
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Its 2.54 cm to the inch. Its close to 2.5 and as an engineer in America I am stuck doing that conversion a lot
Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
A meter is a Baker’s yard. 3 free inches!
aarRJaay@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
This has blown my mind
VolumetricShitCompressor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
Fucking Dan Brown in the comment section
Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.de 7 hours ago
I usually just go with 1.5 because adding half/subtracting a third is way easier to do in my head, and I’m not worried about a ~10% error in casual conversation.
Flamekebab@piefed.social 2 hours ago
I wish we had a metric inch because the fuzziness can be useful.
"How small do you need these veggies diced?"
"2.5cm ish" vs. "about an inch"I feel like the implied margin of error is much larger for inches, which make them useful for many things where precision isn't necessarily desirable (hemming, wargaming, moving furniture, etc..). If I'm wargaming having a limit on rounding is useful (half an inch - either round up or down), assuming I'm playing at a scale that uses inches.
Feet I have no use for, with one exception - adult human height between 5' 2" and 6' 2". There I find metric too precise (whereas to the nearest inch accounts for variance in sole thickness, hair volume, etc.).
I wasn't raised on imperial (and I'm baffled that people younger than me in the UK still talk about stones. Sixteen stone is fat, sure, but I've no idea how fat if not told in kilos) but I find inches to have their uses.
Also miles for cars - because common speeds are ~60 and ~30 mph so a road sign effectively gives the time to arrival (e.g. 13 miles on a motorway = about 13 minutes). I don't use them for actually measuring distance on a map but they're handy when driving.
deltapi@lemmy.world 14 minutes ago
We kind of do have metric inches, insofar as machinists work in 'thou’s (thousands of an inch) But that’s kind of specialist
colourlessidea@sopuli.xyz 2 hours ago
Why not say ‘2-3 cm’ for the first one? Or ‘a couple centimeters’? It doesn’t feel too different from saying ‘about an inch’ to me
kameecoding@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Taking it even further who the fuck uses inches or cms for vegetable cutting measurements anyway, it’s like, one or two fingers thick
jawa22@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
I hate to point this out, and will likely be shunned for it - but it is base 12 and kinda easier.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Found the Summerian astronomer.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
Somewhat related, but I have the worst time trying to convert numbers in my head from long scale in Japan (used to be used in the UK as well) to how it’s used in the current English speaking world. So basically they put four zeros per comma as opposed to three, and the names of the numbers reflect that. 1, 10, 100, 1000, and 10000 are all unique number names, but after that comes 10 ten thousands, 100 ten thousands, and then 1000 ten thousands before a new number name at 1,0000,0000 (or 100,000,000).
It wouldn’t be so bad to just memorize that 100 thousand is “new number name” if that’s all it was, but numbers like that in daily life are pretty much used to talk about money (or somewhat less commonly populations). So once I get the actual number I have to divide by about 100 (or 150, depending on the strength of the yen vs dollar) to think about what it actually means in units I’m used to, like seeing an article saying a government project costs 1.2 billion yen doesn’t mean much until I think about it like 800 million USD instead. So I can never really use big numbers in conversation without manually counting zeros in my head.
ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
It helps to memorize million and billion both ways since those are what you’ll be using most, and are good signposts.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
Yeah I’m sure it’s not as difficult as I’m making it out to be but it never seems to stick. It’s just as simple as 2 numbers: “million = 100 ten thousands” (hyaku-man) and “billion = 10 hundred millions” (juu-oku).
Let’s just say there a lot of frustrations I have with the language even after decades of studying.
cute_noker@feddit.dk 9 hours ago
If Americans don’t stop the foot thing soon I will bring back the havoc and destruction of using local measure!!
en.m.wikipedia.org/…/German_units_of_measurement
No I will not define it. I will just tell you I ran 2/3 mile and that I am prussian, now you have to look it up, convert it to meters, convert that back to your mile and then you know what I am talking about.
Btw this mile is way easier to remember because a mile is 24000 feet.
guy@piefed.social 6 hours ago
Whose feet‽
UpperBroccoli@lemmy.blahaj.zone 45 minutes ago
It does not matter, all feet have roughly the same size.
– the shoe company
daggermoon@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Did someone say feet?
betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Why not just keep it simple and use the 5.4 microseconds * speed of light approximation? People just love making things overly complicated.
feannag@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
Especially when you just set c = 1
taiyang@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Not in defense of the imperial system, but if you’re curious why it’s so arbitrary, it’s a crazy story about untangling a ton of proprietary guild measurements. The mile itself isn’t quite proprietary (it was defined as 8 furlongs, and you can blame the English for ruining a perfectly good roman measurement) but they needed to make it a certain number of chains, rods, yards, and feet, plus a few other obscure measurements I forget about. Naturally that results in a stupid conversation rate (mostly vs yards and feet since it was basically a different system).
Why we still use it, dunno. I can see an argument for keeping feet and inches for things like carpentry (in the similar way I like hexadecimal in programming) but miles is not that. It’s about as logical as this point as fahrenheit, which is to say it’s outdated nonsense.
unemployedclaquer@sopuli.xyz 7 hours ago
Arguing with the imperial system is like arguing with my mother. She knows her ways and methods are insane, but she will try to explain why she needs each of those eight furlongs. Either ADHD will steal her ability to finish the explanation or the audience will perish from exhaustion. And she still will be the smartest person in the room.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 5 hours ago
You don’t have to use it though. Reject it.
smnwcj@fedia.io 9 hours ago
Metric will never recover from not being base-12. Ease of use and intuitiveness suddenly trumps "objective" design. We'd have metric time right now, smh.
Deme@sopuli.xyz 8 hours ago
We don’t count in base-12. Redesign the numerical system first and get it adopted world wide. I’ll wait.
deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 4 hours ago
Base 60 is for times better again
Opisek@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Let me tell you about base 5040
Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
If only they made a meter equal a yard. Then we could all be bilingual.
markz@suppo.fi 6 hours ago
If there’s base than 10, it is a power of two.
Tikiporch@lemmy.world 2 minutes ago
Me watching a BBC TV show: “The suspects home is five miles away.”
shocked pikachu