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.
Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.
Did the metric system kill your family or something?
How do you do weight measurements? I noticed a lot of Americans use grams
Drugs are done in grams i think, methric
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.
Remembering 12, 3, 22, 10 and 8 does indeed sound way easier than remembering 1000.
I know right? it’s such an intuitive system with a convenient unit for every scale you might want to work with.
I genuinely can‘t tell if you are being serious. Could you tell me at face value, I just want to know.
yeah, it sucks. There’s no actual case for imperial over metric. it’s just what I’ve spent years getting used to and I’m not changing now.
The imperial units were created for practical every-day measuring, so if you know how to apply them, they still hold up to the task. Just more difficult to use for large data sets like architectural models etc.
I don’t know glitchdx from Adam, but I say with confidence that they were being sarcastic, and laying it on pretty thick.
Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.
You monster.
The dark side can be a pathway to many abilities some might consider … stupid.
I count a flat 8.
“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” ― Josh Bazell, Wild Thing
“High. You put the stove on high.”
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?
But they are just as directly related.
Ok, so rewrite the statement using imperial instead. Let’s compare them.
I remember reading this quote a few years ago (probably Reddit), but I don’t remember if attribution was given. Kudos to you CAVOK.
I love this quote.
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
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”
I am glad someone else has noticed this. Why is my TV’s power consumption reported in kWh/1000 hours?
Urgh. There’s a unit for that, it’s WATTS. That’s literally 77 Watts.
Honestly that’s the most aggravating part.
Yea but people are idiots.
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.
it’s more when people are almost using the metric system then fuck it up, like the “Watt Hour” for measuring energy use.
Energy is just so important to physics and engineering that it will be measured in whatever unit is most convenient to convert in that particular context: joules as the SI unit, watt hours for electricity usage, calories for certain types of heat or food energy calculations, electron volts in particle physics, equivalent tonnes of TNT for explosion energy, things like that.
I don’t believe that “watt hours” are more convenient than joules, especially when they’re not just watt hours but kilowatt hours or megawatt hours. At that point just use megajoules or gigajoules.
I can understand things like eV where the scale is so different that you’d have to constantly use tiny and unusual prefixes. But, for most other things like calories, it’s just tradition rather than a well thought out reason.
I don’t believe that “watt hours” are more convenient than joules
Clearly you’ve never had to do the calculations where these things come up, where hours are a much more common unit of measure for time than seconds, so that multiplying and dividing by time is easier when working with hours.
The real problem here is that there aren’t 1000 seconds to the hour. Then this argument would be moot
“Because we are free men, we will be free to measure liquids in liters and milliliters… but not all liquids, only soda, wine, and alcohol because for milk and paint we will use gallons, pints, and quarts, god willing”
“How many liters are in a gallon, sir?” “Nobody knows.”
“Why not use meters and kilometers?” “We sill, soldier. But only in certain unpopular sports like track and swimming.”
Metric is used all around the world, but comes from a quarter of it.
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.
What about a nautical mile?
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’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.
…which is based on seconds, which is based on ??? IDFK (neither would they)
“The second, symbol s, is the SI unit of time. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9 192 631 770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1.” https://www.bipm.org/en/si-base-units/second
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.
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
The neat thing about math is it’s built upon universal truths that exist independently of how you describe them. 1+1=2 regardless of how you represent those numbers. Even among humans we have plenty of different ways of describing numbers.
Also, the best thing about science is that physics works the way it does regardless of how you describe it. An atom of hydrogen will always have the same spectral peaks, regardless of what units you describe those peaks in.
It’s these kinds of things we consider when trying to communicate with aliens. Take a look at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
These messages will probably never be received, even if there is intelligent life out there. But if something intelligent does find these messages, they will probably determine they are artificial, and hopefully manage to decode some of it.
See, this is all fascinating for me. I love this stuff.
It’s also a good exercise in recognizing the assumptions we make every day. I’m trying to get to a point where I can articulate my thoughts and I don’t have to struggle through the curse of knowledge.
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.
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
I’m a fan of light nanosecond, which works out to roughly 30 cm.
Infinitely cooler than a “foot”
Which is also approximately 30 cm
Exactly, but those foot fetishists with their stinky units seem to think otherwise.
Make it a gigameter for my 1000 megameter needs
The only bad thing about metric is that billionaires technically do have giga dollars.
Is kibimeter a technically allowed measurement? That would be fun!
Can anyone say it isn’t? You’re using a valid prefix, so people will understand what you’re saying, if they have no idea in hell why you’re measuring out 1024 meters.
Yes, the same way that kiloinches is technically allowed.
Megameter gigameter,
Next thing is one astronomical unit.
And then we are using light years.
Not very linear those last two.
And I am sure that gigameters would still be better than light years.
well neither astronomical unit nor light years use meters as a reference. and one of those isnt even accurate (AU)
I think AUs are just meant to mean “far away (like much much further away than the pub)”.
How about kilo-klick?
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.
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.
but there is already decameteredit: nevermind i didnt see the “k” after the 10
Decameter is 10 meter, not 10 kilometer. 10km would be a myriadmeter. (SI prefix names are based on greek, and myriad is the greek-based name for 10 000).
i did correct myself like 3 minutes after posting
but according to wikipedia there is no prefix for 10 000 in the SI system. only for 1 000 and 1 000 000
People will say “one thousand kilometers”
Will they though? I don’t talk about distances that large anywhere near often enough to really need a shorthand for it, personally. Had to even look up what things are approximately 1000km apart to even know what to imagine it as (it’s about the distance between Paris and Berlin).
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
Yes, every time I’ve ever heard someone use metric to describe distances of >999km, they keep using kilometers.
Comes up a literal metric ass load (8 bushels) when your talking about travel in the USA.
We big
Car mileage (or kilometerage, is that a word?)
People don’t say the car has 200 megameter on the odometer, but 200 000 km. Or 200k km?..
In Sweden we say 20 000 mil. I always have to stop for a second to convert when people use km.
You should consider adopting metric and avoid these conversion steps.
I’m more disappointed the world renamed one thousand million from milliard to billion.
“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!
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.
The million-milliard system means a billion has double the zeroes compared to million, trillion has triple the zeroes, etc. In the English system, a quadrillion has 15 zeroes, so 4 times 3 plus 3? A quadrillion should have 4*6=24 zeroes.
I must admit I still don’t see the point. Whether it’s double/triple/quadruple of a million or just 3*n+1 doesn’t seem to matter much. Of course it’d be better if a “thousand” was just called a “million” then, since that’d remove the +1, but the million milliard system doesn’t seem to have any notable advantages otherwise, especially considering every “iard” step is a .5 one, which isn’t much cleaner.
1,000 -> 3x0+1 zeroes
1,000,000 -> 3x1+1 zeroes
1,000,000,000 -> 3x2+1 zeroes
vs
1,000,000 -> 1x6 zeroes
(1,000,000,000 -> 1.5x6 zeroes)
1,000,000,000,000 -> 2x6 zeroes
(1,000,000,000,000,000 -> 2.5x6 zeroes)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 -> 3x6 zeroes
In the long system: Million - 1 000 000¹ Billion - 1 000 000² Trillion - 1 000 000³
Short system: Million - 1 000² Billion - 1 000³ Trillion - 1 000⁴
It just doesn’t follow as smoothly with the increase in power
Crazy assumption.
While the word is still in use in some languages, the short system has mostly replaced the long system for numbering, especially in the English speaking world.
Crazy assumption. Yes, it’s true for the English speaking world, but it’s much more nuanced outside of it. Here’s a map from Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#/media/File:EScalas_corta_y_larga.svg
Keep in mind that your link to wiktionary only covers languages where it is spelled exactly “milliard”.
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.
Thanks! Forgot to do that. Now edited.
Or just \ at the end, like so
Texty text text \ TextBecomes
Like thisSo you escape the newline and you get a newline? That’s some black magic voodoo. But hey if it works. Much simpler to handle than double space since you can see them and your phone doesn’t try to make them into period space instead of space space.
Newlines with double space (or space backslash apparently) also let’s you have newlines in a quote block without exiting the block. I see a lot of people struggle with that on Lemmy. E.g.
> A quote with multiple lines Will eat the the newline Or exit if you don't handle the newlinewill render as:
A quote with multiple lines Will eat the the newline
Or exit if you don’t handle the newline
So you want to do
> A quote with multiple lines \ Will eat the the newline \ Or exit if you don't handle the newlineA quote with multiple lines
Will eat the the newline
Or exit if you don’t handle the newlineOr add space space at the end instead of space backslash.
The inventors of Markdown thought they would do something devastatingly clever and eat newlines if the next line has content. That way, if you’re writing Markdown in the Stone Age and your editor doesn’t support soft-wrap (it’s a stone tablet), you can do your own soft-wrap and Markdown will “helpfully” eat all the newlines (unless there are two or more).
Of course this has done nothing to help and instead caused chaos and confusion for anyone non-technical. Very clever
It would be more useful if there were comments in markdown. Like, it’s helpful when organising your writing and thoughts in LaTeX that you can write one line per sentence, double newline for end of paragraph. It becomes immediately clear when a sentence is too long and comments for collaborators (or yourself) are easier to handle than in something like Word or Google Docs. It’s also simpler to move sentences around which is important for good writing.
biljoona
Heh that’s a funny word.
The long system with milliard and billiard increases with every potens which makes sense. The short system on the other hand 🤷
hating on milliardaries doesn’t feel as impactful and cathartic.
I think that’s just not being used to it.
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.
i’m not from the us, and the word for billionaire is almost the same in my language.
The only positive thing I see about imperial is that things are easily divisible by 3 and 6, but that’s about it. Then again, if doing the same with metric, you’re usually fine rounding to the nearest millimetre, and if that isn’t accurate enough, it’s probably not supposed to be done by hand anyway.
Base 12 is easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12
5,280 ft in a mile is fucking nonsense though
It’s not nonsense, just old and focused on priorities that don’t matter anymore. A mile was initially a thousand paces. So you send a group of people out, one counts each time their right foot takes a step and after a thousand times they build a mile marker. Bam, roman road system. 1000 strides per mile, 5 feet per stride.
Later the English used the unit as part of their system of measurement, and built the furlong around it, which is the distance a man with an ox team and plow can plow before the ox need to rest. A mile is eight furlong. This got tied into surveying units, since plots of land were broken up into acres, or the amount of land an ox team can plow a day.
When some unit reconciliation needed to be done, they couldn’t change the vitality of oxen, and changing the survey unit would cause tax havock, so they changed the size of a foot.All the units and their relationships were defined deliberately and intentionally. They just factored in priorities that we don’t care about anymore.
I think a mile is specified in terms of ‘chains’ not really feet or yards. Feet and yards are meant for measuring smaller stuff, like the size of a foot, or a courtyard.
The ‘chain’ was a specific surveyors tool for measuring larger land areas. I imagine defined to be a length of physical chain practically manageable by the surveyor - probably pre-dating optical / triangulation methods before lenses got cheap.
I think an acre was then defined as 10 square chains or something.
But go back in time far enough and different jurisdictions have different lengths of standard chain, so different miles and acres derived from it. But it doesn’t really matter because if you were buying land in Scotland, then you’d probably want to use a Scottish surveyor and his big long chain.
The nautical mile is then a whole other kettle of fish.
Because there’s a extra system of measurement change hiding in the middle. The Inches, Feet and Yards system (with the familiar 12:1 and 3:1 ratios we know and love), and Rods, Chains, Furlongs and Miles system. Their conversation rates are generally “nice”, with ratios of 4 rods : 1 chain, 10 chains : 1 furlong, and 8 furlongs : 1 mile.
So where do we get 5,280 with prime factors of 2^5, 3, 5 and 11? Because a chain is 22 yards long. Why? Because somewhere along the line, inches, feet and yards went to a smaller standard, and the nice round 5 yards per rods became 5 and 1/2 yards per rod. Instead of a mile containing 4,800 feet (with quarters, twelfths and hundredths of miles all being nice round numbers of feet), it contained an extra 480 feet that were 1/11th smaller than the old feet.
The fun one is a nautical mile. Which is 6076.12 feet. How’d we get there? A nautical mile is equal to a minute of latitude, which happens to be just a bit bigger but on the order of magnitude of most “miles” to include the US statute mile.
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.
There’s really nothing special about base 10 numbering, it just feels natural to us. They probably would use base 12 and just have 2 extra symbols for the digits after 9. Example 10 x 10 = 100 in both base 10 and base 12 math. It’s just the translation of that in base 12 to base 10 looks like 12 × 12 = 144 to us.
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)
That gets you base 11, which is what we count on our fingers in now.
They counted, at least for tallying, by putting their thumb on the three finger bones if the other four fingers on the hand. One hand can count to 12, and then you lift a finger in the other when starting over. That method gives you a count of 60’on your fingers. That’s why 12 and 60 still crop up all the time.
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1A, 1B, 20, 21, …, A0, A1, A3, …
You can use your hands to count in base 12 if you want to, and some cultures have done so. Just use the segments on your fingers on one hand, using your thumb to count each segment.
Base 60 can do 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, and 12.
I’ve banged on about this at length before. I prefer woodworking in inches because I have to divide by 3 and 4 a lot more often than divide by 5. It turns out that the fractional inch system evolved alongside woodworking for a very long time and it solves a lot of the problems woodworkers actually face…as long as you’re not a European scraping in the dirt for something to feel superior about.
I do woodworking a bit too, but I normally just do the slanty ruler/tape trick to divide any straight parallel face into n equal lengths. I hate all forms of mental arithmetic; I also avoid measuring as much as possible too. Maybe that’s why everything i make is so shit.
I guess if you’re mass producing things you can’t just manually mark off each and every part though - but even then I’d probably want to work to a template rather than to measure.
A template or jig, yeah. If I’ve got more than one part to make, especially if they need to match in some substantial way, I set up a stop of some kind.
At some point I may attempt to build a project to a scored storey stick rather than to measurements, but on the other hand I may not.
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.
What are you even trying to say here? Yeah, in real-life use we use “close enough”. I don’t need to know that it’s 1,546 metres to the nearest supermarket. 1.5 km is close enough.
But nobody is suggesting it because it’s “so accurate”. Any system can be accurate, depending on how many sig figs you use. The advantage of metric is on how easy it is to convert between different scales. Use millimetres, metres, or kilometres for the appropriate case, depending on the need you have for precision. And just move the decimal point if you decide you don’t need as much precision…or need more. In archaic measurements, you can’t do that. If you’ve got 342 feet and decide you actually only need to be accurate to the chain, you have to memorise the arbitrary number of 3 feet to a yard, and 22 yards to a chain, and divide 342 by those numbers, to arrive at 5.2 chains.
Aren’t chains only used by railworkers?
Not really the point.
But no, it’s not only used by rail workers. At the very least, I know it’s also used in cricket.
It’s accurate when you need it to be and gets out of the way when you don’t. And if you do need the accuracy, you have a unit that doesn’t need fractions.
How is “accurate” an argument?? You can use any unit with any amount of decimal places. The argument is that it’s regular. You learn the prefixes once and apply them to length, volume, weight, …
The biggest argument for metric is that it’s consistent. It takes 1 calories to heat 1k of water by 1 degree. State something similar in imperial units.
1 BTU heats 1 pound of water 1 degree Fahrenheit.
How many BTUs are there in a big mac?
You mean 1 gram of water
I do. Wrong letter.
And isn’t 1kg of water 1L? And 1L is 1000 cubic cm? So a 10x10x10 cube?
100 degrees out is 100% hot. 0 degrees F is 0% hot
Most standard measuring tapes have 1/16th of an inch as the smallest fraction on the tape. 1mm is 1/32nd Which is one is “close enough”? Lol
Edit: 1/32, not 1/64
Way off! There are 25.4 millimeters per inch, not 64, and most measuring tapes have 1/32" markings.
Haven’t had my coffee, you’re right it’s closer to 1/32.
Most measuring tapes in US don’t go smaller than a 1/16th though.
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/
Without seeing it let me guess: If it is serious --> metric units and if you want to confuse customers --> imperial
Just remember God giving you a single grain of sand. “One thou sand”.
Not a easy to remember as 5 tomatoes.
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)
2.2 pounds per kilogram. For a rough conversion just multiply or divide by two. For a more precise conversation do the same thing, then wiggle a decimal and do it again.
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
A meter is a Baker’s yard. 3 free inches!
This has blown my mind
Fucking Dan Brown in the comment section
Lmao your username is awesome
and your username is scary
You should use a rolling release distro and always update to the bleeding edge.
You will not regret using a rolling release distro and always updating to the bleeding edge.
It is not easier for me to sneak backdoors into your system when you are using a rolling release distro and are always updating to the bleeding edge.
🙂
Thank you, kind stranger on the internet!
You’re welcome, @[email protected] 💖
Forma me it’s the yard. It’s so close to the meter its ridiculous. I just ignore the difference an treat as the same. One yard = 0.9144 meters
A yard is about 1.4 litres in my book, or 2.1/2 pints - imperial pints mind, not US ones. I’m not ignoring away that 20% difference; it’s bad enough with all the fucking “pint to brim” glasses these days.
Liters? Pints? How are you converting from distance to volume?
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.
I just go with 1.6 because its still easy enough to do in your head.
Eg. 60mi = 60 + (60/2) + (60/10) = 96km
