5 tomatoes
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Me watching a BBC TV show: "The suspect's home is five miles away."
shocked pikachu
there's a very important video on the measurement rules in the UK, if you haven't seen it: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNh9z3IzG8t/
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So whose foot exactly?
Cousin Merle's (including toenails).
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there's a very important video on the measurement rules in the UK, if you haven't seen it: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNh9z3IzG8t/
Without seeing it let me guess:
If it is serious --> metric units and if you want to confuse customers --> imperial -
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.
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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
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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.
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Cousin Merle's (including toenails).
Could also be his dad's feet, but then it's only the toenails.
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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.
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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.
The Babylonian number system was base 12, that's why there are 24 hours in a day and 60 minutes in an hour. Afaik they had the normal number of fingers, they were just smarter about making their numbering system divisible.
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You mean 1 gram of water
I do. Wrong letter.
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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?
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What about a nautical mile?
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The Babylonian number system was base 12, that's why there are 24 hours in a day and 60 minutes in an hour. Afaik they had the normal number of fingers, they were just smarter about making their numbering system divisible.
The just started counting with zero (fist)
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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.
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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?
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the only thing more aggravating than using imperial is having to listen to all the complaining about how metric is better. We get it, bro; it's out of our control at this point
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All units of measure are abstract.
I like metric because it's structured around an abstract amount. Even something like Celsius is pretty abstract, because the freezing and boiling point of water changes depending on the atmospheric pressure. The measure of a second? Why is a second, 1 second long? Why is it 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of a day?
There's other stuff based on seconds too, like Hertz, which is literally "cycles per second"I like to think about how abstract these things are, because if we were to ever try to communicate with a truly alien race, we couldn't really use numbers, because their base numbering system would be different than ours, their symbols for numbers would be different, their entire understanding of math and how to calculate stuff could be wildly different, possibly because they understand things we do not. We couldn't even say to them to communicate on a specific frequency of EM, because that frequency is based on Hertz, which is based on seconds, which is based on ????? IDFK (neither would they).
We base everything we know on the world around us, and that's entirely unique to earth. We make so many assumptions about how things are because we've only ever experienced life on this planet.The only thing that kind of makes sense is how many days of the year there are, because it's based on solid science about our solar system. It's still unique to earth, but at least it makes sense on a larger scale. Everything else? Who the hell knows. Why is a meter as long as it is? Who defined this? Why? What abstract Earth-based thing was this based on that other societies of individuals would have no point of reference to relate to?
It's wild we've made it this far, to be honest.
Anyways, I kind of got sidetracked... I guess all I'm really trying to say is that metric makes more sense than whatever the USA is doing. Even if it's just as abstract in its conception.
I think one useful comparison would be to convert their measurement of the speed of light to our measurement and vice versa. They will use different units of distance and time, but the values themselves will be proportional unless they live in a black hole.
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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.
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My 2 main annoyances with the metric system:
First: The SI unit for mass is the kilogram. That's fucking stupid. A kilogram is 1000 grams, the base unit for something can't be "1000 of this other thing". Because the kilogram is the SI unit for mass, that means that a gram is, by definition, 1/1000th of a kilogram. The stupidity, it burns!
The second one isn't really an issue with the metric system, it's more when people are almost using the metric system then fuck it up, like the "Watt Hour" for measuring energy use. You know, there's already a way of measuring energy use: the "Watt Second", also known as "The Joule"
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I think one useful comparison would be to convert their measurement of the speed of light to our measurement and vice versa. They will use different units of distance and time, but the values themselves will be proportional unless they live in a black hole.
That could work for velocities, but any measure of distance is based on our notion of time, like "light year" (the distance light can travel in one rotation of the Earth around the sun), which is relative.
Even an AU is the distance from Earth to our sun.
To be fair, we don't really have another point of reference with which to measure stuff.
A good way to portray distance could be a blip the length of time it would take light to travel that far. Like an RF signal that lasts as long as it would take for light up travel from one edge of an object to the other edge of the object.
... It's a difficult problem to try to solve even as a mental exercise.
