5 tomatoes
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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 It's about as logical as this point as fahrenheit, which is to say it's outdated nonsense.
To me, Fahrenheit is a lot like inches and feet for carpentry. As in it's fine for things like describing the weather and setting my house's thermostat. It mostly falls apart for must other things, though it's still okay for cooking and baking. From a scientific perspective, any temperature scale that isn't zero at absolute zero is nonsense, so it's pretty much Kelvin or bust.
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I don't think that was the idea when the second was created.
The solar rotation cycle is naturally divided into 365 rotations of Earth (give or take), each daily rotation was divided into 24 segments called hours, each hour was further divided into 60 units called minutes, and each minute was then further divided into 60 units which we call seconds.
In the modern era, we have refined how we measure a second by a very stable natural phenomenon, the emissions of cesium (which we also refer to as an "atomic" clock). But we got there first by dividing one of Earth's rotations by 86400. It just so happens that 9 192 631 770 oscillations from cesium also equals 1/86400th of one rotation of Earth.
Additionally, neither a "second" nor even "one rotation of Earth" would have any meaning to someone who has never been to earth before.
It doesn't matter how these units were originally defined. They have all been redefined as science progressed. As long as you relate the arbitrary unit to a constant it can be translated.
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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.
How do you do weight measurements? I noticed a lot of Americans use grams
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Most people who deal in imperial units know off the top of their head that 1/3 of a mile is 1760 feet. They don’t have to calculate it. After a while you see that number come up often enough and it’s committed to memory.
I’m not saying that metric isn’t better, it is, and I wish we would hurry up and switch to it. I’m just saying that the numbers involved aren’t a handicap once you have worked with the imperial system for a while. If you have a set of sockets that you work with every day, you know instantly that 3/8” is bigger than 19/64”. Hell, even 5/16” is bigger than 19/64”.
And, you must admit, 333 meters is not one third of a kilometer. It is one third of 999 meters. The number 5280, for all its awkwardness, is beautiful in the sense that it is evenly divisible by 12, Meaning that it can be exactly divided into quarters, thirds, or halves without a fractional part.
How would you convert to e.g nautical miles?
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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?
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How do you do weight measurements? I noticed a lot of Americans use grams
We use both. Body weight is in pounds, but nutrition is in grams.
In general we use metric more for smaller, more precise weights and imperial for everything else. I don't think I've ever heard anyone measure anything except cocaine in kilograms.
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Nobody said impossible, just that you can't directly relate any of those quantities.
Can't we just agree that metric is superior?
But they are just as directly related.
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But they are just as directly related.
Ok, so rewrite the statement using imperial instead. Let's compare them.
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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
If it makes you feel any better, most pipe standards around the world are based on the American system, as well as bloody valve coefficients.
I am far too aware that 1" is 25.4 mm
And I'm in Australia. Grumble
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I’m always disappointed that megameter isn't a common word. People will say “one thousand kilometers” instead of just “one megameter”.
I'll never forgive the French for going from grave to gram to kg as the base unit of mass.
All my other base units don't have a prefix
Such a pity.
BRING BACK THE GRAVE
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How do you do weight measurements? I noticed a lot of Americans use grams
wrote last edited by [email protected]Drugs are done in grams i think, methric
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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....
We are talking about cutting vegetables maybe meat, the room for error is enormous...
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Because your power is billed in kWh. Figuring out the kWh cost of a 77 watt TV is straight forward, but a lot of consumer labeling standards are about quick and easy side by side comparisons as opposed to perfect application of units. Easiest way to give a comparison that's accurate enough and doesn't involve odd numbers is to convert that way.
Whilst this answer is correct, it's not entirely accurate, because it is dismissive of the root cause. The logical follow-up question is: "Why is energy billed in kWh?". If the question/cycle answer continues down this line there will probably be an answer like "because <some person> had to make a decision once, and they chose this because of <some reason>, and now we're all stuck with it because of convention."
Anyone who doesn't understand what joules are probably doesn't understand what kWh are either. If the billing convention (and every other power consumption label) used joules (of course MJ or GJ) instead, then most people would just accept that as the unit of billing and measurement, and those who understand what the units mean would have an easier time of it.
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How many BTUs are there in a big mac?
No acknowledgement at all that I literally just answered your question?
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No acknowledgement at all that I literally just answered your question?
I see my trap was fallen into.
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Ya know what. I like that tomato shit to remember the conversion. I like SI far more than US customary tho
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How would you convert to e.g nautical miles?
Oh, what’s interesting about a nautical mile is that it wasn’t originally even based on a number of feet or meters or whatever. It represented one minute of latitude (60 minutes in a degree type of minutes). Since the earth is an oblate spheroid instead of a perfect sphere, that meant that traditional nautical miles varied based on your position until they were standardized it in 1929.
I think it’s about 1.85 kilometers, but I wouldn’t have occasion to do the conversion because I’m a landlubber.
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It doesn't matter how these units were originally defined. They have all been redefined as science progressed. As long as you relate the arbitrary unit to a constant it can be translated.
Except an alien species wouldn't know what cesium is... We would need to represent it to them as it's molecular makeup, which is the only absolute representation of it, and would they know what a proton/neutron/electron are? Would they have a deeper understanding of the physics, and thereby have a different understanding of what we consider to be quantum particles?
We only generalize protons, elections and neutrons because we don't really know what those things are made up of. Maybe they do, so when we show them our representation of it, would it be too rudimentary for them to comprehend what we mean?
There's still a lot we don't know. And these are the kinds of questions that tickle my brain.
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We are talking about cutting vegetables maybe meat, the room for error is enormous...
Oh, certainly. I just enjoyed that, in a thread about the vagueness and oddness of the imperial system, the suggestion came up to use a casual approximation for the inch instead of the word "inch".
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I'd assume that if we are ever communicating with aliens and trying to figure out each other's way of expressing numbers and doing math, dimensionless constants like pi, Euler's number (e), the fine structure constant, etc. will be important first steps. As you say, our units of measure are purely human inventions. But the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is the same no matter what units you use to make the measurement.
I like you.
These are all good points. Thank you.
