You must log in or register to comment.
- 7 hours
Centi is familiar to everyone from centi-meter, I have deci in deci-Bel for my optical signals at work, and I know hecto is used for hecto-Pascal which replaced the milli-bar. But I can’t think of one for deka, can anyone give an example of a unit where deka is used often?
- Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish7 hours
It’s pretty much the least used SI prefix. Apparently used somewhat frequently in central Europe for “decagrams” (10s of grams)
- 5 hours
Decimeter is used often enough.
All of these can be used with any measure, and that’s the point.
Decagram is used in centeal europe for cooking and groceries, but otherwise probably unused.
- 7 hours
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I really like the foot. It’s great because you can divide it by 2, 3 and 4 and even 6 and it still works. I think it’s a lot better to use than the metric system when working with wood.
- RudeOnTuesdays@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
I think that’s more because Canada and the U.S. developed wood sizes for building while using the foot as a measurement. I doubt they would have made 2 x 4s a thing if they were using metric.
- 7 hours
That’s because duodecimal is a great system and superior to decimalization.
- 5 hours
Celsius isn’t actually metric, per say. Its based on the freezing point of water while farenheight is based on the freezing point of mercury.
Celcius is what most of the world used because 0 is where water freezes and is very relevant to the human condition, hence why its the most used.
It was adopted as part of the metric SI system but unlike all the units developed for metric which actually use the above scale, I do not believe there is any practical use for this with celcius.
Kelvin does use this however.
- 5 hours
A set of standard units AND the prefix system
The prefixes can be and are used for anything including non metric units. Americans use the prefixes all the time.
- 1 day
I do wish we metric places (or at least Canada) were more flexible and familiar with the whole system. Sure we have milliliters and centimeters and kilograms, but people say things all the time like 2000km or 2 million kgs, or even things like 25000mAh. And I get it, people get into a frame of reference and want to stay there, but I wish people had the agility and practice to say 2 megameters, 2 gigagrams, and, well 25 amp hours, and still be understood. That last one’s not hard, but packaging still seems to be stupid about it.
- 17 hours
They took the Megagram away from us and called it a ton 😤
- 19 hours
Funnily enough, the base unit of weight is actually kilogram. It doesn’t change the fact that we can use other prefixes with gram, but still.
Put this on the Ronald Reagan did it pile. Jimmy Carter started us on the path to metric and then Reagan halted it.
- 2 days
Now do the same with US customary units. Let’s see what their hourglass looks like 🫠
Trans girl I use to know called herself femto. I assumed it was because of her foot fetish but maybe it was related to the metric system.
1 dayMetric is officially recognized across the US. European minds cannot comprehend this.
We recognize both systems so that government is not metric. Freedom units are still primarily used over metric. Metric is used in science and academia over Imperial.
I actually don’t think that the biggest barrier is the average American. I think the barrier is the logistics of replacing millions of signs and other material.
- 2 days
While we’re on the subject, can we please kill off “kilowatt hours”. Fuckers, those are Joules, 3.6 Megajoules specifically.
Nah it’s more relatable to humans regarding electricity consumption, the consumer would be confused and scared seeing 3.6 megajoules on a bill and not actually understand how power usage of watts of appliances would convert into Joule energy units. That’s why electric cars motor powers are still rated in Watts and the bill shows a relatable term.
To add to that, that’s why so many metric countries (not USA) still use imperial units colloquially because they are more relatable in real life like lbs and inches and feet. But then would use Km and grams in other contexts quite normally. And knots still always make more sense to pilots and sailors.
- 17 hours
Just use joules per second :P
Way more intuitive than watts and watt hours
- 23 hours
People are just used to kWh. There’s nothing about it that’s more intuitive, it’s just more familiar. But measuring things in hogsheads and barleycorns used to be familiar too. Sometimes being familiar isn’t as important as following standards. Eventually the standard units will become familiar, and since they’re standard units, they’re much easier to work with.
not actually understand how power usage of watts of appliances would convert into Joule energy units
1 joule per watt each second. It’s dead easy. That’s why Joules should be used.
That’s why electric cars motor powers are still rated in Watts
Yes, power should be measured in Watts, that’s the standard unit for power, just like Joules are the standard unit for energy.
To add to that, that’s why so many metric countries (not USA) still use imperial units colloquially because they are more relatable in real life like
No they’re not, it’s just that people are used to them. The people whose minds are the hardest to change are the old people who have used some random unit for all their lives and don’t want to have to get used to some newfangled standard (a standard that’s actually hundreds of years old at this point). Because the old people refuse to change, the country gets stuck using that old unit, even if it’s informally, and so that’s what the kids learn, then they become old people and are also inflexible.
There’s nothing about an inch or a pound that’s naturally more intuitive than a centimetre or a kilogram. It’s just what you’re used to. Go somewhere where people grew up with metric and for them using anything other than metric feels strange and awkward. Pilots and sailors are used to knots, they never had to switch, but when they do complex calculations they mostly avoid using knots because doing conversions with non-SI units is such a massive pain in the ass.
- 16 hours
People are just used to kWh. There’s nothing about it that’s more intuitive, it’s just more familiar.
No, you’re arguing for a second-based unit in a context where the hour-based unit dominates common use. The reason why we use hours is because hours is much more familiar across the contexts where electrical usage is metered: monthly bills, daily production/consumption cycles. Everyone knows that 3 days is 72 hours but pretty much nobody can come up with the answer in seconds without actually applying a conversion factor and making the calculation.
Energy is especially prone to the problem of how it’s calculated, simply because it’s such an important quantity to measure or calculate. Sometimes we use calories or electron volts because those make for easier conversions to other quantities in the context of temperature/heat or particle physics, respectively.
- 12 hours
No, you’re arguing for a second-based unit in a context where the hour-based unit dominates common use
Yes. Common use. You’re making my point for me. It’s what people are more familiar with.
is much more familiar across the contexts where electrical usage is metered
Yes, it’s what people are more familiar with.
Everyone knows that 3 days is 72 hours
Who cares about 3 days? Do you run your hair dryer for 3 days or 60 seconds? Do you cook something on the stove for several minutes, or several days?
Again, it’s just what people are familiar with.
- 7 hours
It’s what people are more familiar with.
Yes, I’m advocating for using hours as a familiar unit, instead of kiloseconds or megaseconds or teraseconds. You’ll never get the world on metric time.
Who cares about 3 days
Everyone? If I’m doing calculations for solar panel production, it’s a lot easier to work with hours instead of seconds. If I’m dealing with usage patterns across the weekly cycle of business days and weekends, hours is a much easier unit to work with than seconds.
We organize time around hours and days, so it only makes sense for there to be an hour-based unit for easy conversion.
- 6 hours
Yes, I’m advocating for using hours as a familiar unit
Like hogsheads per rod.
instead of kiloseconds or megaseconds or teraseconds. You’ll never get the world on metric time.
Those might be used eventually at some point in the future, but right now our life is dominated by the rotation of the earth, the movement of the earth around the sun, etc. So, other units that correspond to those natural events make sense.
But, I’m not advocating anything radical, just use the standard SI unit for energy instead of some awkward non-SI unit based on SI units where the only thing it has going for it is that it’s familiar.
If I’m doing calculations for solar panel production
You aren’t, I can tell because you advocate for kWh. And your denominator in that case wouldn’t be “per 3 days”.
We organize time around hours and days
And minutes, and seconds. Most of us use all of these.
so it only makes sense for there to be an hour-based unit for easy conversion.
No, it doesn’t. Joules are the unit that makes sense when talking about energy.
What makes lbs, inch and feet more relatable?
How is half a kg more relatable than one kg? Or how are 2½ cm more relatable than 1 cm? Or how are 30 cm more relatable than 10 cm or 100 cm?
I keep seeing your argument here and there, but I just cannot fathom what is meant by it. For me there’s nothing relatable at all in “foot”. It falls awkwardly between 10 cm and 100 cm and I cannot really make heads or tails about it. Except if I divide it by three, which gives me an approximate number in metres. But then the number could have been in metres in the first place.
- 23 hours
Relatable I don’t think is the right word. Intuitive in its use and measurement, in specific scenarios.
Measurements always have a scaling and a precision problem. Humans are bad at math and scale, and really struggle mentally with numbers more than a few digits. If the number is too big, someone will either just accept it or ignore it. We like our nice round numbers, and funnily enough like our small prime numbers (1, 2, 3, and 5) and first few multiples of primes (4, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20) and numbers that just shift the decimal point around (10, 100, 1000)
Reference frames are also incredibly useful to us, especially when communicating.
The metric system jumps straight to moving the decimal place around, where imperial let’s you play around with other divisors. Let’s say I have a single digit of some unit and I want to half it. Generally in metric this is fine, doesn’t really add to the mental cognitive load. Half it again, or divide by one of the other primes, and the number of digits starts to explode (or is infinitely repeating). For the scalers within the imperial system, they naturally let you divide down and even re-express the same measurement in a different unit with fewer integer numbers and no precision loss
Edit: Another example. Computer scientist don’t use metric, we bastardized parts of it and then invented extra units that fit the need and intuitiveness of working with them. We don’t use deci/deca or centi/centa, we bastardized kilo into 2^10 since 1024 is close to a thousand keeping it a nice power of two, a byte is 8 bits for the same reason and a nibble is 4 bits because halving bytes occasionally is useful. A word typically is 16 except when it is 32 bits, in which case 16 is a half word. Then we have dwords and qwords being twice and four times the size of a words, and then a page historically has been 4096 bytes since 1024 is kinda small, but newer systems sometime say a page is 64KB since 2^16 = 65536
- 24 hours
While I think the metric system should be used more, I’ll also defend frantional measurements when precision matters. Decimal measurements only increase by a factor of 10. So if your precision is 1/8 of a meter, you have to either round to the nearest meter, overstate your precision (0.125 implies precision to 1mm), or essentially write a sentence (“125mm plus or minus 62.5mm”).
With fractional, the precision is built into the denominator. If your measurement of half a meter is precise to half a meter, you record it as “1/2”. If it’s precise to an pitch of a meter, you record it as “4/8”.
- 1 day
Sorry you totally lost me on the second paragraph. What you describe there is basically a British thing. On the continent people use m, kg and such for daily life things.
Knots are used because of historic influences and inertia. Imperial units in some special cases are exclusively used because of the influence of the US and again inertia.
Oh ok just a British thing so the ENTIRE BRITISH EMPIRE. Cool. Oh knots are used for historic influences like… Places that use imperial units colloquially but are official metric? Ohhh cool as well. Thanks for repeating just what I said and agreeing.
- 20 hours
If you head actually read what I wrote instead of just making stuff up, you’d know that I was talking about the European contintent, on which, the tiny peninsula of Gibraltar aside, the British Empire had zero possessions after metrication. People there don’t use “inches” or “pounds” colloqually. Where I life they also don’t use some local old customary units for that, they simply use SI units for weight and dimensions. You are 176 cm tall and weigh 73kg …
And that does contradict your claim that generally people prefer those old customary units in daily life. They only do if they were raised that way.
The reason why customary units are still more widely used in daily life in regions formerly part of the British Empire is because there metrication was much more delayed, ie happened for real a lot later. The old ways take time to wither away, like they have in regions that had it all a lot earlier. It is ridiculous to suggest that those customary units are more useful to people in daily life but only if transition to metric for real wasn’t too long ago.
I’m not 100% sure on the accuracy of this data, but if ever there was a place to paste this information, it is here.
Average Tiddy weight per boob by cup size, in Metric and Lemmy scales
A cup = 0.454kg = 1.1 Tins of Heinz Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce
B cup = 0.78kg =1.9 Tins of Heinz Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce
C cup = 1.023kg = 2.4 Tins of Heinz Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce
D cup = 1.388kg = 3.3 Tins of Heinz Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce
E cup = 1.950kg = 4.6 Tins of Heinz Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce
F cup = 2.35kg = 5.6 Tins of Heinz Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce
[Edit] I’m not sure if this is per boob, or per pair of boobs. More research required.
- 2 days
Metric haters when they realize their electricity is measured in Volts (metric unit), not in “relatable” units like Sparks:
- 2 days
Last night was so hot, my ac took three sparks per witchburn!
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it.
