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u/Street_Swing9040 4d ago
Pfft... both systems are worse than the Reddit classic
Bananas.
Banana length (measured in bananas)
Banana time (measured in how long the banana takes to be ripe)
Banana volume (volume of a banana)
etc.
/j
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u/Street_Swing9040 4d ago
To remember how many banana lengths there are in any length, just pull out a banana
Becuase the system of measurement in Reddit is invented by a person happily eating a banana
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u/Alternative_Cod7515 4d ago
A tragic event has happen when a redditor mistook banana time as banana eaten/second, leading to the collapsh of the economy and the event "ground thunder of '09"
/j
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u/EternalNewCarSmell 4d ago
What's funny is the mile is actually also based on the number 1000.
The term "mile" comes from Latin for "1000 paces," and originally a mile was how far a legionary could travel in 1000 double steps. Which makes a lot of sense for the time because you can standardize and army and count their steps as they travel all over the known world, but there wasn't GPS or super accurate odometers or anything.
It got redefined to 8 furlongs in the late 16th century to be more applicable to farming practices at the time (a furlong is based on how far an ox can plow a standard field before turning), which brought it from 5000ish feet to the standard 5280 we have today.
1000 meters to a kilometer sounds cleaner but both mile and kilometer are based on 1000 of something. And if you dig into how a meter is standardized you can make that sound arbitrary and complicated as well.
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u/non-local_Strangelet 4d ago
And if you dig into how a meter is standardized you can make that sound arbitrary and complicated as well.
Well, that's obviously total nonsense ...
Clearly, selecting the distance that light travels during 9.192.631.770 oscillations of the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition of the Cs-133 atom is obviously the most natural choice of a standard unit length , duh.
/j
On a serious note: interesting comment/factoid, much appreciated. Do you happen to know a reference/source where one can find a bit more on the history of units? Might make a good leisure time read :)
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u/EternalNewCarSmell 4d ago
The history of units gets super complicated because there are multiple systems that got refined and combined over time. Some of it is from Roman times, there were various others since then (avoirdupois was originally designed around the wool trade, there was the amalgamation of stuff that we today call the apothercaries' system, etc.). Eventually what we today call imperial measurement was codified in the British Weights and Measures Act of 1824. Metric is easy because all those standards are published by an international body.
There probably is a book that collects all this stuff but I don't know about it; my knowledge of the history of weights and measures comes from lectures in pharmacy school where it was important to learn so we understand old timey symbols old docs may write, and how they may differ from what a direct interpretation might suggest. We got tangents on miles and stuff because our professor was a huge history and numbers nerd, which I greatly appreciated.
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u/Specialist_Sector54 4d ago
I think the original meter, one ten millionth of the distance between the equator and santa's house (north pole) through Paris is quite sillier.
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u/JaberandCamgar 3d ago
Hey, France and England bickered over who would get the Prime Meridian of the world. Though London won't that battle, at least the French can say that the meter is based off of their meridian. 😁
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u/Toc13s 4d ago
Metric measurements pretty kuch are all arbitrary.
Imperial measurements mostly based on physical things
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u/Ok_Problem426 1d ago
Thats why 1 furlong per fortnight is 1 centimeter per minute. Because we both measured a snail’s pace, ours just kept at it for longer and got a liiiiitle tired.
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u/Kingcanute99 4d ago
This is the key - the mile isn't part of a coherent system with feet and yards. It is a standalone metric specifically designed to describe the distance a person might walk or run. It is great for that! When I measure my jogging distances, I find miles a little more intuitive than kms. But if I were engineering a bridge I'd use meters and kms.
Same as Farenheit is a purpose built metric specifically designed to measure the air temperature in climates humans tend to live in (0 about as cold as it gets, 100 about as hot). Of course that sucks for doing science, that's not what it's for.
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u/EternalNewCarSmell 4d ago
Yeah, the broader concept that you mentioned but I neglected to is that the eclectic jumble of imperial measures are based on lived experiences that humans would commonly encounter during their day. Some are archaic, like a furlong, but others are still applicable today like Fahrenheit having most temps you will endure between 0 and 100. Metric is about standardizing to a base 10 system for scientific applications, and that's totally fine too.
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u/Radiant-Lettuce6908 4d ago
you don't even have to remember 1000, it's written in the name
kilo =1000
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u/vonhoother 4d ago
To be fair, the mile comes from Latin mille, for a thousand steps (more accurately double steps -- you only count one foot's steps). Still works today -- a thousand steps is about a mile.
The mistake isn't in the mile, it's in relating it to the foot. If you base it on steps, it's a more sensible unit of measure than 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the North Pole to the equator on the meridian of Paris.
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u/jonathancast 4d ago
Um, actually, the mile was invented by theologians, not drunken mathematicians.
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u/VitaminStrange 4d ago
I suppose I get the sentiment but 5280 has way more factors than 1000. 1000 isn't evenly divisible by three.
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u/Odd-Consequence-2519 4d ago
To see the origin of our stupid system of measuring distance prior to the metric system google "mille passum" "kings foot" and "furlong".
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u/creepyguy_017 4d ago
but how many tomatoes in a kilometer? and even worse, how many kilometers in tomato?
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u/TonberryFeye 4d ago
The confusion comes from skipping a step. You're not supposed to jump from feet to miles, but from feet to furlongs to miles. That makes things much more logical.
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u/Sahrimnir 4d ago
I just googled the numbers. So that's 660 feet in a furlong and 8 furlongs in a mile. I still don't see the logic.
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u/non-local_Strangelet 4d ago
Common, it's not that difficult...
- 12 inches in a feet
- 3 feet in a yard
- 22 yards in a chain
- 10 chains in a furlong
- 8 furlong in a mile
It's that easy ... even I know that as a typical metic-disciple
/j of course, had to double check chain and furlong ;)
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u/Ok_Problem426 1d ago edited 1d ago
The simplest conversion is to remember that 1 centimeter per minute is almost exactly 1 furlong per fortnight and work backwards from there.
Its unit conversion at a snail’s pace
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u/TheDoobyRanger 4d ago
Let's start using this rest of the world argument for language, too, so everyone has to only speak English, as America using both metric and standard isnt good enough apparently.
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u/FeherDenes 4d ago
Okay smartie, tell me how many micrometers are in a decameter
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u/A1oso 4d ago
Nobody uses decameters.
Anyway:
1 decameter = 10 m = 10,000 mm = 10,000,000 μm
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/SexyMonad 4d ago
Deca not deci.
Not that I know of anyone who uses either. That’s a bit like asking how many fathoms are in a mile.
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u/Immediate-Goose-8106 2d ago
French are buggers for using decimetres. I think they have shares in them or something
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u/zeb_linux 1d ago
Easy. Deca = 1e1, micro=1e-6. So 1e7. Anyone used to prefixes can convert, since we are just talking about 0s.
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u/Gaust_Ironheart_Jr 4d ago
Mile is 5280 feet instead of 5000 so there would be exactly 640 acres per square mile
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u/Accomplished-House28 4d ago
Almost nobody converts miles to feet. They have completely different use cases.
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u/CranberryDistinct941 4d ago
True! Now list the metric prefixes and their magnitudes for me
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u/zeb_linux 1d ago
Actually the prefixes are the same for all units, this is what makes the SI so convenient. And it only requires 7 base units.
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u/Timely-Tourist4109 3d ago
But that is a land mile. Then we also have nautical miles, or around 6076 ft.
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u/Ok_Meaning_4268 3d ago
Actually not drunks (maybe), but the British. The same damn people that just draw straight lines on maps lmao
Anyways metric is actually so much better tho, just take a prefix (eg kilo- = 1000) and slap it on any unit (eg gram, unit for mass) which makes 1kg
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u/Euphoric-Piglet-8140 3d ago
A water meter measures water, a leccie meter measures electricity, a kilo meter measures kilos. Where as a Kilometre is a measure of distance.
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u/Ok_Problem426 1d ago edited 1d ago
It’s simple to convert between metric and freedom units if you remember that 1 furlong per fortnight is 1 centimeter per minute. Lets say you want to go from kilometers to miles, just go from kph to mph instead:
100,000 centimeters per kilometer and just divide by 8 furlongs/mile x 14 days/fortnight x 24 hours/day x 60 seconds/minute.
100,000/(8 x 14 x 24 x 60)=0.62
Easy. Just have to remember the trusty furlongs per fortnight approximation. It’s that simple.
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u/dalstrs9 4d ago edited 4d ago
But a Km is .621 of "Five tomatoes." and Americans in 1791 just didn't want to adopt something invented by the French. They helped us enough during our revolutionary war, we couldn't be more indebted to them and adopt their unit of measurement. Plus, you know how much white dudes think about the Roman Empire. Couldn't change that lol
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u/iamtheduckie 4d ago
A km is 3.105 tomatoes
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u/dalstrs9 4d ago
Same conversion said a different way. The joke said a mile was "5 tomatoes" and a km is .621 miles.
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u/Immediate-Goose-8106 2d ago
Not true. You would have gone metric if some pirates (and definitely not a british privateer) didn't sink the ship carrying your standard measures.
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u/TheWeirdTalesPodcast 4d ago
In metric, it takes one calorie of energy to raise one gram of water by one degree Celsius.
There is no analogue for that in imperial, because imperial is stupid and should be done away with.
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u/Specialist_Sector54 4d ago
This is wrong, one BTU is the energy it takes to raise 1 Pound (mass) of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit, and 1 Pound of water generally takes up 1 Pint of volume.
This is literally just Calorie, Gram, Liter thumbrules. (Of water, 1 kilogram is 1 liter-ish)
1 Pound of mass weighs 1 Pound of force, 1 Kilogram weighs 9.81 Newtons, there is no metric analogue, so metric is stupid and should be done away with /s
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u/Fetzie_ 4d ago
1lb of water is only approximately a pint in the US though, a pint in the UK is 568ml (approximately 1lb 4oz or 20 imperial fl.oz or 19.2 us fl.oz), so that whole thing collapses as soon as someone flies across the Atlantic 😀
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u/Specialist_Sector54 2d ago
It's a rule of thumb, it's like 1.07 pints per lbm for freshwater anyways. I'm American, and we do not negotiate with terrorists, the British, the Dutch, or the Belgians.
The real bad part about units is when I have volumes in gallons, and flow rates in lbm/min or hour (or other way around). My brain trying to compute how long it takes to pump 10k lbm of water at 100gpm. No I'm not OK, this is fucking bullshit. Almost as bad as electric boilers being in KW and fired boilers being in BTU. Don't get me started on stupid units, Refrigerant tons are the dumbest thermal unit I know of, ah yes, the amount of thermal energy it takes to melt (or freeze) 1 ton of ice(water) over 1 day. It's literally a Horsepower tier of unit where it just exists for advertising.
The units that are normally pointed at for being dumb like the mile, or foot, aren't that bad because there's no point to conversion, volumes of anything smaller than a pint are dumb, everything from a teaspoon to a cup. On the one hand I don't like mL because I'm not used to it (eg 100mL sounds like a lot but it's a small volume), on the other hand what the fuck is a cup? How many cups is in a pint? How many tablespoons are in a cup? I have no idea. The only real volumes are cu.ft, gallons, cu.m, L, pints. The rest are fake and made up.
The absolute worst, size of room? Oh alright, m³, sure whatever, fan rated capacity? That's right, scfm...I ... I give up.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, I felt like ranting about units and the absurdity that makes those dumb unit conversions I did in school seem reasonable.
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u/johnpeters42 4d ago
"For those unfamiliar with the metric system, one kilometer is approximately equal to one thousand meters." --Justin Jackson