5 tomatoes
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Liters? Pints? How are you converting from distance to volume?
A yard of ale is a large beer glass, based on a glass that is quite long probably less than a metre.
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Hope you meant hat the glass is tall
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How do you do weight measurements? I noticed a lot of Americans use grams
Weight is in pounds. Only pounds. don't ask me how much a gram or a ton is.
Volume, though, I still remember "Gallon Man" from 1st grade.
2 cups in a pint
2 pints in a quart
4 quarts in a gallon
What's after gallons? not a clue.
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Base 60 can do 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, and 12.
wrote last edited by [email protected]True.. Honestly never really thought about it, but I guess it kind of is superior
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Oh, get off your high horse
Your basic unit for speed is m/s, but for most day-to-day purposes you use km/hr. The conversion between the two isn't even an integer!
Not only that, but your system, by virtue of being decimal, inherits all the shortcomings of our quite flawed numbering system. You can't divide something by the second smallest prime number without breaking out repeating decimals.
In my opinion, a good measuring system would make up for those shortcomings instead. It should be divisible by at least the numbers you can count on one hand. Decimal covers 2 and 5, so ideally the measurement unit would cover 3 and 4. So that would be a base 12 system. Technically 4, being 2², would be covered too, so 3 would do just fine. Ta-da! 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard.
My ideal would be 21 though, get that 7 factor
If you like intervals of 1000, you'll be delighted (or mortified like me) to know that 7×11×13 is almost exactly 1000 (it's 1001)
wrote last edited by [email protected]Ta-da! 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard.
That is not the win you think it is since metric only has one unit, the meter, to begin with so no conversion needed at all. 12 meters in 12 meters, three meters in three meters.
You can't divide something by the second smallest prime number without breaking out repeating decimals.
You technically don't have to use decimals, you can use fractions too. Ta-da! 1/3 meter. See? No repeating decimals!
Also yall literally use the decimal system for US customary too -
Weight is in pounds. Only pounds. don't ask me how much a gram or a ton is.
Volume, though, I still remember "Gallon Man" from 1st grade.
2 cups in a pint
2 pints in a quart
4 quarts in a gallon
What's after gallons? not a clue.
You use fluid ounces and liters as well tho
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I know right? it's such an intuitive system with a convenient unit for every scale you might want to work with.
Metric? True it's nice to have the scales evenly spread
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Well, the follow up answer is pretty straightforward.
Selling power by the megajoule is silly. You want a unit that puts time in the name and the unit of power that's on appliances. If I run a 35 watt fan for an hour I know I've used 35 watt hours of energy. Or I can say I've used 126 kilojoules.It's not highschool. You don't lose points for not reducing your answer all the way. The goal is to describe reality clearly, not to use the most concise units of measurement.
If I'm running a powerplant I need to know how many joules I get from my fuel and what my customers need and what my generators can deliver. The customer needs to know the efficiency of their appliances, and how how much that costs them. These are the same thing, but life isn't made simpler by having them be the same unit.
Lot's of people are confused by watts and watt-hours tho. I think having the power rating of appliences as a rate (J/s) is more intuitive. If I use a 5MJ/s fan for 10s I used 50MJ of energy. The only inconvenience here comes from our weird time conversions, so I think J/h would be more convenient
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Urgh. There's a unit for that, it's WATTS. That's literally 77 Watts.
Phone batteries are advertised in thousand milliamp-hours
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How do you do weight measurements? I noticed a lot of Americans use grams
Nutrition is in grams on purpose to be confusing to a population corpos knew weren't really raised with it. By 9th grade all Americans have studied the metric system for science class, but it never really becomes intuitive for most people whereas we can hear "a cup of sugar, oh wow that's a LOT of sugar for just one pitcher of liquid" without doing any in-head conversions
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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 can tell how bad a news site is when they translate billion to biljoona and thus making the amount 1000 times higher.
Looks like we have something in common! Hämmästyttävä!
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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”.
Especially with several thousand kilometres.
“Eleven mega metre” rolls off the tongue much better than “eleven thousands kilo metre” IMO.
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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.
Okay, but I don't use a measurement system for close enough, I use a measurement system when I want to be precice.
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Remembering 12, 3, 22, 10 and 8 does indeed sound way easier than remembering 1000.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Than remembering 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10; because metric has more measurements most people don't use as well!
- 10 millimetres to a centimetre
- 10 centimetres to a decimetre
- 10 decimetres to a metre
- 10 metres to a decametre
- 10 decametres to a hectometre
- 10 hectometres to a kilometre
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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"
Or calories on packaging.
Or inches in Europe when talking about a screen from S. Korea, which was designed in cm to begin with.
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Nutrition is in grams on purpose to be confusing to a population corpos knew weren't really raised with it. By 9th grade all Americans have studied the metric system for science class, but it never really becomes intuitive for most people whereas we can hear "a cup of sugar, oh wow that's a LOT of sugar for just one pitcher of liquid" without doing any in-head conversions
When you use a cup, we use a deciliter-cup. I agree that cooking gives intuition on units. But who will buy a deciliter cup if no recipe uses deciliters?
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When you use a cup, we use a deciliter-cup. I agree that cooking gives intuition on units. But who will buy a deciliter cup if no recipe uses deciliters?
Yeah, that's an important point. Someone needs to think of the deciliter cups if they try to get rid of imperial units in the US.
