Fair, but I lived in Denver for 26 years. I will never forget the number of feet in a mile. 😂
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.
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
Just remember God giving you a single grain of sand. “One thou sand”.
Not a easy to remember as 5 tomatoes.
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.
Base 12 is easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12
5,280 ft in a mile is fucking nonsense though
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.
What are you even trying to say here? Yeah, in real-life use we use “close enough”. I don’t need to know that it’s 1,546 metres to the nearest supermarket. 1.5 km is close enough.
But nobody is suggesting it because it’s “so accurate”. Any system can be accurate, depending on how many sig figs you use. The advantage of metric is on how easy it is to convert between different scales. Use millimetres, metres, or kilometres for the appropriate case, depending on the need you have for precision. And just move the decimal point if you decide you don’t need as much precision…or need more. In archaic measurements, you can’t do that. If you’ve got 342 feet and decide you actually only need to be accurate to the chain, you have to memorise the arbitrary number of 3 feet to a yard, and 22 yards to a chain, and divide 342 by those numbers, to arrive at 5.2 chains.
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.
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, …
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
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.
1 BTU heats 1 pound of water 1 degree Fahrenheit.
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.
It helps to memorize million and billion both ways since those are what you’ll be using most, and are good signposts.
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.
Maybe think in numbers if you’re more inclined to think like that? 10 million is 7 zeroes, in base-3 means the you “buy” the 6 zero unit and you got one (10) left; In base-4 you “buy” the 4 zero unit and you get 3 (1000) left.
I hate to point this out, and will likely be shunned for it - but it is base 12 and kinda easier.
Found the Summerian astronomer.
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
Did someone say feet?
Imperial actually makes sense if there system was invented by someone who only had polyhedral dice to count with.
I’m always disappointed that megameter isn’t a common word. People will say “one thousand kilometers” instead of just “one megameter”.
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.
well neither astronomical unit nor light years use meters as a reference. and one of those isnt even accurate (AU)
I’m a fan of light nanosecond, which works out to roughly 30 cm.
Infinitely cooler than a “foot”
Which is also approximately 30 cm
Exactly, but those foot fetishists with their stinky units seem to think otherwise.
Make it a gigameter for my 1000 megameter needs
The only bad thing about metric is that billionaires technically do have giga dollars.
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).
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?..
In Sweden we say 20 000 mil. I always have to stop for a second to convert when people use km.
Yes, every time I’ve ever heard someone use metric to describe distances of >999km, they keep using kilometers.
Is kibimeter a technically allowed measurement? That would be fun!
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.
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.
but there is already decameteredit: nevermind i didnt see the “k” after the 10
Decameter is 10 meter, not 10 kilometer. 10km would be a myriadmeter. (SI prefix names are based on greek, and myriad is the greek-based name for 10 000).
i did correct myself like 3 minutes after posting
but according to wikipedia there is no prefix for 10 000 in the SI system. only for 1 000 and 1 000 000
How about kilo-klick?
I’m more disappointed the world renamed one thousand million from milliard to billion.
“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.
I think that’s one thing that’s actually fine about the English language though. Constantly switching between something ending with “ion” to “iard” instead of just counting up doesn’t make much sense to me personally.
Million (1A), Milliard (1B), Billion (2A), Billiard (2B) seems odd compared to Million (1), Billion (2), Trillion (3), Quadrillion (4)
I suppose the upside is that you don’t have to learn as many prefixes, but it’ll take another few years of inflation and wealth centralization (at least with currencies like the Euro, Dollar, or Pound) until Quadrillion is relevant in the financial sector and Mathematicians generally use letters. I suppose it makes other natural sciences a tiny bit easier, but there it’s usually written in scientific notation anyways.
The million-milliard system means a billion has double the zeroes compared to million, trillion has triple the zeroes, etc. In the English system, a quadrillion has 15 zeroes, so 4 times 3 plus 3? A quadrillion should have 4*6=24 zeroes.
I must admit I still don’t see the point. Whether it’s double/triple/quadruple of a million or just 3*n+1 doesn’t seem to matter much. Of course it’d be better if a “thousand” was just called a “million” then, since that’d remove the +1, but the million milliard system doesn’t seem to have any notable advantages otherwise, especially considering every “iard” step is a .5 one, which isn’t much cleaner.
1,000 -> 3x0+1 zeroes
1,000,000 -> 3x1+1 zeroes
1,000,000,000 -> 3x2+1 zeroes
vs
1,000,000 -> 1x6 zeroes
(1,000,000,000 -> 1.5x6 zeroes)
1,000,000,000,000 -> 2x6 zeroes
(1,000,000,000,000,000 -> 2.5x6 zeroes)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 -> 3x6 zeroes
Anglocentrism strikes again!
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.
biljoona
Heh that’s a funny word.
The long system with milliard and billiard increases with every potens which makes sense. The short system on the other hand 🤷
You probably want double new lines in your posts. Or two spaces at the end of your paragraphs but that’s usually a bit annoying to do.
Or just \ at the end, like so
Texty text text \ TextBecomes
Like thisSo you escape the newline and you get a newline? That’s some black magic voodoo. But hey if it works. Much simpler to handle than double space since you can see them and your phone doesn’t try to make them into period space instead of space space.
Newlines with double space (or space backslash apparently) also let’s you have newlines in a quote block without exiting the block. I see a lot of people struggle with that on Lemmy. E.g.
> A quote with multiple lines Will eat the the newline Or exit if you don't handle the newlinewill render as:
A quote with multiple lines Will eat the the newline
Or exit if you don’t handle the newline
So you want to do
> A quote with multiple lines \ Will eat the the newline \ Or exit if you don't handle the newlineA quote with multiple lines
Will eat the the newline
Or exit if you don’t handle the newlineOr add space space at the end instead of space backslash.
The inventors of Markdown thought they would do something devastatingly clever and eat newlines if the next line has content. That way, if you’re writing Markdown in the Stone Age and your editor doesn’t support soft-wrap (it’s a stone tablet), you can do your own soft-wrap and Markdown will “helpfully” eat all the newlines (unless there are two or more).
Of course this has done nothing to help and instead caused chaos and confusion for anyone non-technical. Very clever
hating on milliardaries doesn’t feel as impactful and cathartic.
I think that’s just not being used to it.
Again, anglocentrism strikes. Your feeling is strictly based on your personal experience with your own words. It is like when Americans claim fahrenheit is more for humans than celsius, because they are unable to fathom things they have no experience with.
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)
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
A meter is a Baker’s yard. 3 free inches!
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
This has blown my mind
Fucking Dan Brown in the comment section
Lmao your username is awesome
and your username is scary
You should use a rolling release distro and always update to the bleeding edge.
You will not regret using a rolling release distro and always updating to the bleeding edge.
It is not easier for me to sneak backdoors into your system when you are using a rolling release distro and are always updating to the bleeding edge.
🙂
Thank you, kind stranger on the internet!
You’re welcome, @VolumetricShitCompressor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 💖
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.
I just go with 1.6 because its still easy enough to do in your head.
Eg. 60mi = 60 + (60/2) + (60/10) = 96km
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.
You don’t have to use it though. Reject it.
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.
If Americans don’t stop the foot thing soon I will bring back the havoc and destruction of using local measure!!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
Whose feet‽
Why not just keep it simple and use the 5.4 microseconds * speed of light approximation? People just love making things overly complicated.
Especially when you just set c = 1
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