Fun penis fact: if you tell people you’re 6.5 inches, it sounds like you’re trying too hard to get that last bit of length. If you instead say 17cm, that’s just how long you are.
You’re welcome, fellow penis owners.
But what if I’m 17.5cm
Just use Millimeter, like a professional.
Why would you tell that to anyone?
I feel like people on the bus need to know.
With gusto
Making me divide by 12: that’s a paddlin’.
> console.log(`${Math.trunc(74/12)}' ${74 % 12}"`) 6' 2"I never could understand why they made us learn multiplication tables up to twelve. This is why, isn’t it?
We only went up to ten in germany, so yea probably.
Also my god those things are pointless.
Now if only we used a duodecimal number system. Then I could divide by 2, 3, 4, and 6 while staying within the integers for as long as possible. And someone who is 6’ 2" would just be 6212"
Fuck your freedom units. I’ll stick to sane units of measurement thank you.
Personally I find 6 big unit + 2 small unit easier to visualize compared to a large number of small units 🤷♂️
That’s because your conditioned to do so. If you grow up with cm as your default height measurement it’s just as natural as your 4 foot 6 or whatever. 180cm i can easily visualise, it’s not that either is inherently better (although you know in your heart the metric system is superior 😉)
Yeah, the adult range is roughly 150cm for a tiny woman, up to 200cm for a towering man. 170cm is pretty average for a woman. 180cm is pretty average for a man.
So, 188cm is already a rather tall man.
That’s the joke: 188cm (ignore the mm) are 1m 88, easy as pie. Meanwhile inches to feet…
Use decimetres I guess
everyone is gonna look at you funny but you’ll have your medium sized units
So you use SI units?
Most of them, I hadn’t heard of the term until your reply., never used Kelvin, mole or candela before.
Metric system:
- Tons of great subdivisions
- Continuously and exclusively use the same two or three prefixes for everything ever
Tons of great subdivisions
2,5 and 10 is “Tons”?
The world is flat, birds aren’t real, and there are only three prefixes in the metric system. You get it.
All the prefixes are just base ten though, so who cares? They don’t add more subdivisions.
If you’re trying to make a point, I missed it.
You said the metric system has tons of great subdivision which is objectively false. Prefixes in the metric system only multiply by 10, which by definition does not and cannot add additional sub-divisions. The point is that while the metric system is a useful system of measurement in very limited situations, the biggest advocates for it have no idea why they like it, and are ignorant of it’s deficiency’s.
Let’s try to raise the discourse a bit. Divisors are absolutely the most important part of a human-centric numeric and unit system, and the metric system, being a base 10 system, absolutely sucks at that.
Elaborate on how it’s “objectively false” that there are plenty of subdivisions, especially lots of subdivisions that aren’t frequently used.
This should be good.
10 has 2 divisors, or “subdivisions,” that is not “plenty” that is 2. Thus it is false, objectively, to claim that 2 and 5 are “plenty.”
That’s 0.00934 furlongs!
How I feel about meters per second that gets changed to miles per hour and I just want kilometers per hour
M/s to km/h is nowhere near as bad as any of the imperial conversions though. (M*60*60)/1000… Or, M*3.6 if you want to simplify it.
How dare you make me do math
Do Europeans really give their height in cm? You’d think they short hand it like to like 1.7m or whatever since height is one of those things that doesn’t really need to be exact and will change by a cm or so based on the kind of shoes you are wearing, or wearing shoes at all.
In my native language we say the equivalent of ‘one and eighty-five’ to refer to 185 cm of height, so basically we give it in meters.
Unless you happen to be 2 meters tall, yes, you would give your height in cm. You might round it, but you’d never say you’re 1.8m tall.
Never? Why never?
Never ask why never.
Not when it comes to height measurement.
…Not when it comes to height measurement.
Lol, I guess I touched a nerve somehow, idk
Well, if someone asks you about it, they’d like to hear a more precise number. They can easily estimate your height at a precision of 10cm.
I just say “one sixty five”, and so do most people in the Netherlands (most use different numbers though)
Yes where I live, we use cm usually. Also height is almost always measured without shoes
176cm would be given as “eins-sechsundsiebzig” in German, literally translating to one six and seventy (yeah it’s backwards), which works exactly like currency.
Not European, but from a country that also uses the metric system. We give out our height in meters, as you said. Saying it in cm would be okey for medical reasons I suppose. Also there isn’t much difference in what unit you use, you just have to multiply/divide by 100, which is easily done in your head
Germans do go with meters when talking about their height but they’ll give you two decimal places.
You always do it in cm wherever I’ve been. It’s either directly in cm, as in 172 cm or phrased in meters, as in 1.72 m. You cab say you’re around 170 cm tall or around 1.7 m tall, but the ‘default precision level’ is 1 cm
When using feet and inches, its fine to use precision of 1 inch as it’s much smaller unit than 0.1 m.
If one says that they are 5’11" (180.34 cm), they can be 5’10.5" (179.07 cm) to 5’11.5" (181.61 cm) tall. That’s 1.4% variance.
If using meters with one decimal place, and say they are 1.8 m (5’10.9"), they can be 175 cm (5’8.9") to 185 cm (6’0.8") tall. That’s 5.6% variance.
Thus it’s not really viable to use only one decimal place when using metres as unit, so in many languages it’s easier to just say the length in centimeters compared to use two deeimal places.
That also explains why the guy in the comic is being an ass or an idiot by listing his height to the nearest hundredth of a centimeter. A half inch or whole centimeter are more appropriate precisions for human heights. In your example even, a real-world measurement of 5’ 11" can’t just be blindly translated to 180.34cm because it adds precision that was not there in the 5’ 11" measurement unless otherwise specified. 180cm would be more appropriate but is still overstating the precision a bit. Using SI units without appropriate scientific notation and without respect to significant digits is kind of like watching a 3D movie with one eye closed.
Do North Americans really give their weight in lb? You’d think they’d short hand it like to like 15 stone or whatever since weight is one of those things that doesn’t really need to be exact and will change by a lb or so based on the time of day and what you’ve eaten.
No, we give our weight in pounds instead of ounces because weight is one of those things that doesn’t really need to be exact and will change by a couple dozen ounces or so based on the time of day and what you’ve eaten.
No, see, here ounces compare to millimetres. If height and weight fluctuate over centimetres and pounds, and they do, lesser units should be disregarded, right?
Stone isn’t a measurement in America, it’s inorganic material. The next-heighest commonly known weight is a ton, or 2000 lbs. Not very helpful.
A better example would be if europeans really gave their weight in grams. I don’t think they do, they use kilo’s cause they don’t really need the precision of a gram for something like that.
because grams are small, but 174cm makes more sense than 1.7m
Agreed, since 1.65 and 1.74 both round to 1.7m, but 9cm is a pretty significant height difference.
“Small” is extremely relative, I’d say centimeters are small too.
I guess its just because saying “one-seventy-nine” rolls better off the tongue than “one point seventy nine” or “one point eight”
Japan does too, at least from all the manga etc I’ve read. Not in meters either, just cm.
When the metric system was introduced in the UK, the schools taught decimeters, decameters and hectometers, not knowing that no one would ever bother with those.
You can round it to 10’s or 5’s.
My licence says 183 cm. I’ll usually say 180.
Edit: so the cartoon guy would probably just say 190cm
Mathless morons should be exiled to the middle of the saharan desert with a 5l bottle of water and a metric measure map to the nearest settlement
Jokes on you, the entire US military operates that way.
Maybe thats where i got the idea
He’s 6’2" but I needed a calculator to figure it out.
12
24
36
48
60
72 + 2
74
He wants to do the math twice!
I don’t get why Americans and some other countries don’t use metric system. Guys! x10, x100, x1000 or mm, m, cm, km is way easier than 🦶, ", ', mile, yard or whatever weapon you use to hurt yourself lol. I know scientists get that, but its easy for them to convert anyway. Imagine that 120 cent is 1$ haha
I’m familiar with both, but only use inch for screen size and for some specific pipes that are made in ". And yeah, the guy from the picture is 188 cm tall or 1,88 m. Don’t think anyone use 10th of the mm for that and even if they did they would probably say 1879,6 mm
There’s no real reason for it other than familiarity (and maybe some silly tribalism among certain people). I think if switching systems was as easy as flicking a light switch, most Americans would be fine with it. However, the mental effort it would take to unlearn the old system (especially for those in construction/carpentry and similar jobs) and the amount of tax money it would take to change signage just doesn’t seem worth it. Personally I’d like to see us slowly update signage to include both measurements and teach only metric in school, but it’s so far down the list of priorities that it’s unlikely to happen any time soon.
I was mostly joking, but to use metric system you don’t have to do much, just learn it. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting I’ll change the world aynway haha
Knowing both is useful and IMO it is the easiest for engineers and construction/production workers. For example here where I am, a lot of measurement tools have both units already (like measuring tape with meters and inches)
Imagine that 120 cent is 1$ haha
It’s not that crazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_the_pound_sterling#Pre-decimal_coinage
- £1 = 20 shillings (20s).
- 1 shilling = 12 pence (12d).
I’m big on metric but there’s nothing weird or wrong about non-decimal subdivisions. People have intuition about whichever system they’re used to. The true sin of so-called imperial units is that they’re ambiguous: a mile can be a nautical mile or a survey mile or any of these other miles. Volume is totally broken: US and UK have incompatible definitions for fl oz, ‘cup’ has many different definitions and is easily confused for “however much liquid fits in your cup” so is basically meaningless, and ‘gallon’ has three values that are wildly different from each other. If you follow a recipe from the other side of the pond, you better make sure you’re using the right foreign measuring cup.
A base 12 system is better then base10 objectively, because divisors are what make numbers useful and avoid decimals and fractions.
How much is that in bananas?
That is one of the many many ways someone gets shot in American schools.
All these comments, and I’m wondering who would ask someone about their height like this…it’s pretty easy to estimate someone’s height just by observation.
Eh, I’ve seen it as a smalltalk topic, to just want to know what the height is precisely, especially when someone is particularly tall.
Question, why do Europeans measure height in meters then centimeters(or just centimeters). It seems to make more sense to use decimeters then centimeters. Just one of those traditional things?
As someone else said, decimeters aren’t actually used by anyone. In fact, other than centimetres and decibels, I can’t think of any commonly-used unit that uses a prefix that isn’t a power of 1000. (kilo, mega, milli, micro, etc. are all powers of 1000)
Hecto-. Hectare.
Hadn’t heard of that - neither the unit nor the prefix. Turns out the prefix is actually hecto meaning 100, and are isn’t a commonly used unit. Thanks for that!
Used in agriculture. Are sometimes also called hundred/sotka. There is also deca- prefix.
Here’s my favorite German boomer humor, because it’s just so crude:
Verbatim translated, it says: Love fades, hectare stays.
Basically, it’s saying you should marry someone not for love, but rather for how many hectare of farmland they have, because in a long marriage, you’ll supposedly benefit more from the latter.
We use it in Canada for land size
Buying a house/zoning will have you come across it
Beer in hectoliters, and for some reason Austrians measure foods in dekagrams.
As someone else said, decimeters aren’t actually used by anyone.
Tell that to the Austrians. You can easily spot Austrian recipes and sizes by the use of dL and dm. In most of the rest of Europe you’d be right. Also maybe only older Austrians use it more frequently.
I’m trying to think of anything measured in decimeters.
M / cm It’s such a large difference in length you’d think decimeters would make sense.
You just shuffle zeroes
It’s not needed, because converting between them takes no effort.
If someone tells you “50 centimeter”, you’ll know immediately that it’s 5 decimeter or 0.5 meter.
Liter
