5 tomatoes
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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.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.
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This has blown my mind
Fucking Dan Brown in the comment section
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We don't count in base-12. Redesign the numerical system first and get it adopted world wide. I'll wait.
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"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!
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Fucking Dan Brown in the comment section
Lmao your username is awesome
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Lmao your username is awesome
Thank you, kind stranger on the internet!
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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 \ Text
Becomes
Like this -
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)
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
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If only they made a meter equal a yard. Then we could all be bilingual.
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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.
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Thank you, kind stranger on the internet!
You’re welcome, @[email protected]
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If only they made a meter equal a yard. Then we could all be bilingual.
I've tried the bi thing - it's just not for me.
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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”.
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.
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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.
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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)
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.
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"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.
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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'm a fan of light nanosecond, which works out to roughly 30 cm.
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Make it a gigameter for my 1000 megameter needs
The only bad thing about metric is that billionaires technically do have giga dollars.
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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.
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.