Just remember God giving you a single grain of sand. “One thou sand”.
Not a easy to remember as 5 tomatoes.
So whose foot exactly?
Some European king or another. We didn’t invent the system, we just decided it was too expensive to bother with changing it.
Cousin Merle’s (including toenails).
Could also be his dad’s feet, but then it’s only the toenails.
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.
We kind of do have metric inches, insofar as machinists work in 'thou’s (thousands of an inch) But that’s kind of specialist
Thousandths of an inch are also used in some engineering applications and are called “mils.” Not to be confused with millimeters.
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
Taking it even further who the fuck uses inches or cms for vegetable cutting measurements anyway, it’s like, one or two fingers thick
Recipes I use regularly say “2cm chunks” and the like. I’ve never seen one measure in fingers.
Do you want to develop imperial measurements? Because that’s how you invent imperial measurements. Next thing you know you’ve got a cup that’s really good for measuring liquids and a couple spoons you like to scoop with…
Why not make it even more ambiguous by specifying the desired cutting width in “circumference of my dick”.
That’s too thin
Would that be flacid dick inches or erect dick inches?
Sure.
It’s to do with how I think about numbers, rounding, and margins of error. I don’t know how to express that better, I’m sorry.
I was not raised using inches for anything. It’s not a cultural thing, it’s a use case I’ve found them useful for.
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
I’m always disappointed that megameter isn’t a common word. People will say “one thousand kilometers” instead of just “one megameter”.
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.
How about kilo-klick?
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 think AUs are just meant to mean “far away (like much much further away than the pub)”.
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.
Yes, the same way that kiloinches is technically allowed.
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).
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
Oh no, over here a mil is 1/1000 of an inch, haha
Yes, every time I’ve ever heard someone use metric to describe distances of >999km, they keep using kilometers.
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.
You should consider adopting metric and avoid these conversion steps.
Comes up a literal metric ass load (8 bushels) when your talking about travel in the USA.
We big
Make it a gigameter for my 1000 megameter needs
The only bad thing about metric is that billionaires technically do have giga dollars.
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.
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…
It’s never too late to change the path you are going down, friend.
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
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.
Anglocentrism strikes again!
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
In the long system: Million - 1 000 000¹ Billion - 1 000 000² Trillion - 1 000 000³
Short system: Million - 1 000² Billion - 1 000³ Trillion - 1 000⁴
It just doesn’t follow as smoothly with the increase in power
Crazy assumption.
While the word is still in use in some languages, the short system has mostly replaced the long system for numbering, especially in the English speaking world.
Crazy assumption. Yes, it’s true for the English speaking world, but it’s much more nuanced outside of it. Here’s a map from Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#/media/File:EScalas_corta_y_larga.svg
Keep in mind that your link to wiktionary only covers languages where it is spelled exactly “milliard”.
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.
i’m not from the us, and the word for billionaire is almost the same in my language.
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.
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.
Thanks! Forgot to do that. Now edited.
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
It would be more useful if there were comments in markdown. Like, it’s helpful when organising your writing and thoughts in LaTeX that you can write one line per sentence, double newline for end of paragraph. It becomes immediately clear when a sentence is too long and comments for collaborators (or yourself) are easier to handle than in something like Word or Google Docs. It’s also simpler to move sentences around which is important for good writing.
The long system with milliard and billiard increases with every potens which makes sense. The short system on the other hand 🤷
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.
We don’t count in base-12. Redesign the numerical system first and get it adopted world wide. I’ll wait.
If only they made a meter equal a yard. Then we could all be bilingual.
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Base 60 is five times better again
Let me tell you about base 5040
If there’s a better base than 10, it is a power of two.
Nah, highly composite number. A product of multiple primes. 10 is 2 and 5. A power of 2 is just multiple 2s. 12 gets you 2, 2, and 3. 60 adds a 5.
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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)
This has blown my mind
Fucking Dan Brown in the comment section
Lmao your username is awesome
Thank you, kind stranger on the internet!
You’re welcome, @VolumetricShitCompressor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 💖
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.
🙂
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
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 yard is about 1.4 litres in my book, or 2.1/2 pints - imperial pints mind, not US ones. I’m not ignoring away that 20% difference; it’s bad enough with all the fucking “pint to brim” glasses these days.
Liters? Pints? How are you converting from distance to volume?
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
A meter is a Baker’s yard. 3 free inches!
2.2 pounds per kilogram. For a rough conversion just multiply or divide by two. For a more precise conversation do the same thing, then wiggle a decimal and do it again.
And to remember the number of yards in a mile: 1 San Francisco
One-seven-six-oh
At first I thought that’s how Americans measure it - in San Franciscos. But given how “San Francisco” doesn’t sound like “One seven six oh” I’m not sure if they don’t.
It’s not a good tip, but this is how I hear it:
1: One
San Fran: Seven
Cisc: Six
O: Oh
I just came up with it off the cuff, but I may use it going forward. I’ve never been able to remember feet or yards in a mile.
Also, we only measure length in bananas and fractions thereof.
I just remember that a mile has 1000 strides in it.
Of course. I was trying to make something less useful than knowing the strides in a mile.
Take heart. You can easily remember that a stride is 5’ 3 9/25” because that’s the height of the typical Roman soldier after adjustment for 15th century English agricultural tax methodology.
If you want to convert between imperial units, going straight from feet to miles is impractical. You’d be better off knowing the chart of survey units, and they’re all small numbers so they’re easy to remember.
12 inches in a foot
3 feet in a yard
22 yards in a chain
10 chains in a furlong
8 furlongs in a mile
Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.
Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.
Did the metric system kill your family or something?
Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.
You monster.
The dark side can be a pathway to many abilities some might consider … stupid.
Remembering 12, 3, 22, 10 and 8 does indeed sound way easier than remembering 1000.
I know right? it’s such an intuitive system with a convenient unit for every scale you might want to work with.
I genuinely can‘t tell if you are being serious. Could you tell me at face value, I just want to know.
I don’t know glitchdx from Adam, but I say with confidence that they were being sarcastic, and laying it on pretty thick.
yeah, it sucks. There’s no actual case for imperial over metric. it’s just what I’ve spent years getting used to and I’m not changing now.
The imperial units were created for practical every-day measuring, so if you know how to apply them, they still hold up to the task. Just more difficult to use for large data sets like architectural models etc.
How do you do weight measurements? I noticed a lot of Americans use grams
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.
I use both in my wood shop. Sometimes it’s easier to lay things out in metric or divide numbers, but other times it’s easier to remember an imperial number to go make a cut.
“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
I remember reading this quote a few years ago (probably Reddit), but I don’t remember if attribution was given. Kudos to you CAVOK.
It might be funny if it were true, but it’s just a sad show of ignorance. It is exactly as possible in one as in the other for obvious reasons. It’s just not as easy to memorize.
To be specific:
- energy required to heat to boiling point 1180 kJ
- energy required to convert to vapor 8420 kJ
- energy required to heat to boiling point and convert to vapor 9600 kJ
Nobody said impossible, just that you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.
Can’t we just agree that metric is superior?
I love this quote.
“High. You put the stove on high.”
It’s not helpful for us seriously distracted people. To remember a number, I must remember a smaller number. Damn, how many was it? Three tomatoes? Eight tomatoes?
Was it even tomatoes? Maybe it was potatoes?
Fair, but I lived in Denver for 26 years. I will never forget the number of feet in a mile. 😂
Heeey, I’m currently living in Northglenn. Same, it’s forever etched in my memory.
What the heck does this mean? Is the number 5280 just painted all over billboards in Denver?
Sounds like they take their distances pretty seriously over there in the mile-high city
Basically yes. We even have a local magazine called 5280.
So many businesses and shops are named 5280. Breweries, coffee shops, bars, transmission shops, interior design shops, animal hospitals, dry cleaners, bakeries…that number is plastered on signs and advertisements everywhere. 😂
Pretty much. If you go to a Broncos game, you’re going to see a graphic saying we’re 5280 feet above sea-level at least a hundred times.
Edit: These are just some examples that in the non-public areas of the stadium to mess with opposing teams.
They’re right. Altitude sickness is absolutely real. I live in CT pretty close to sea level. I hiked the flatirons in Boulder and puked my guts out when I came back down.
The first time I ever took a non-pressurized aircraft to 10,000 feet was an interesting experience. I noticed myself breathing…not heavier, that feels like the wrong word, because I had the opposite problem to “heavy.” I needed to breathe noticeably deeper and faster just sitting still at the controls of the plane doing maybe slightly more work than typing this sentence. Somebody from a lower area going up to Denver (about half the altitude I flew to that day) to play a sport has an elevated chance of Not A Good Day.
You’d think the Rockies would have a better record but they somehow still consistently suck
Management has no incentive to field a competitive team. They are the worst team in baseball, haven’t been any good since 2007, and they are currently 9th in attendance, in a not-so-huge market.
