yeah i suppose a 25.4 millimeter long dick would sound bigger than 1 inch huh
Jokes on you. I’m into 3D printing.
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?
It’s pretty much the least used SI prefix. Apparently used somewhat frequently in central Europe for “decagrams” (10s of grams)
Interesting, thanks. It’s not familiar to me in my South-Western corner of central Europe. I’ll have to ask my Czech friend if it’s familiar to him.
Am from Hungary, can confirm, all recipes say decagram here.
It also makes sense in a way, you usually don’t eat either kilograms or grams of anything really.
Like you go to the butcher and you won’t ask for 213 grams of meat, or 5 kilos, you ask for 15 decagrams.
Thank you for the datapoint! Exactly like my Czech friend said as well.
It makes a lot of sense to me, that you would put a floor on the precision like that.
We often have the question at the counter, like “It’s a few grams over, is that still okay, or should I take some off?”.
Yeah, us too, just in good Hungarian fashion, that whole sentence is one word.
He got back to me really fast. He says yes!
Yes, you go to shop. To buy a ham for example. And here you fully just say: “10 deka of this”
He also gave me this song text (Michal Tučný - Prodavač with the chorus at 0:41):
Pět deka, deset deka, dvacet deka, třicet deka,
kilo chleba, kilo cukru, jeden rohlík, jedna veka,
všechno máme, co kdo chcete,
obchod kvete, jen si račte říct.
Čtyři kila, deset kilo, dvacet kilo, třicet kilo,
navážíme, zabalíme, klaníme se, to by bylo,
prosím pěkně, mohu nechat o jedenáct deka víc?He also said ordering meat by the gram at the counter sounds super posh and overly precise to him, while it’s just normal for me, very cool!
Dekagram of cocaine
Decagram is used in centeal europe for cooking and groceries, but otherwise probably unused.
It is .0000451 exocelsius outside.
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.
She’ll go 300 hectares on a single tank of kersone!
Put this on the Ronald Reagan did it pile. Jimmy Carter started us on the path to metric and then Reagan halted it.
Metric haters when they realize their electricity is measured in Volts (metric unit), not in “relatable” units like Sparks:
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.
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.
They took the Megagram away from us and called it a ton 😤
Big number good, ooga ooga.
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.
Deka and Hecto are the metric system’s unloved children
Hecto used to be popular in sweden until like 2000 or so, when it came to food. Especially candy and charcuterie were priced and ordered in “hekto” (the “gram” dropped in speech).
Hecto is very used in Italy with food “I’d like 3 hectos of ham, sir”
Deka is too small to be useful tbh, maybe it’s used with medicines or drugs?
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.
That’s because duodecimal is a great system and superior to decimalization.
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.
Pour one out for the deci, even autocorrect attempted to remove it from my message.
We use deci for drinks all the time
So you would know exactly what one is to pour out.
Pretty much. Deci only gets used for drinks and deka only gets used for deli meat/cheese.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just use joules per second :P
Way more intuitive than watts and watt hours
Yes please. I have no fucking IDEA what a mile is. What’s a yard. A foot. Make it make sense
A miles is a furlong squared.
x2
A mile is a 1000 paces walked, counting only one foot in most places. Different countries take different steps so a mile is different in each country. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 kilometer is the most common.
A yard is almost one meter, so I’ll allow it.
It makes sense for a system where you want to easily divide quantities and only can work with the fingers on one hand.
Wait, no, please convince my countryfolk to metricate. I’m an engineer and desperately want to be able to design things in metric. It’s so much better but the average American doesn’t know a meter from a hole in their ass
But they do know litres, because the big soft drink bottles are sold in litres. They know grams if they do drugs or bake. They know prefixes like Mega, Giga and Tera if they are into computers, and they know about “kilo” if they pay an electrical bill. If they’re into military stuff, they know about “clicks”, which are actually… kilometers.
I think it’s slowly creeping in.
So weird phenomenon actually, because our military is fully metricated, you wind up with some of the most die hard American exceptionalist/American nationalist types fully using metric and 24 hour time. A friend was raised in a household like that where they just didn’t use US customary at home because the military doesn’t.
We’re all taught a lot of the basics in school. And yeah we have an instinctive idea of what 2L looks like. Drug users know grams, as do some bakers (a lot of baking is still done by volume here). And other than that I’d say maybe a quarter of Americans know that a meter is kinda close to a yard. Maybe 5% (may be overestimating tbh) know that a liter of water is a kilogram.
Slowly but surely though more things are being roundish numbers in metric here (like 325 mL/12.9 fluid ounces) and I think that’s a vital component of the move to metric. We are actually headed there, we’re just slower than the UK and Canada.
Yeah, that’s funny because the hoo-rah American Exceptionalist types are otherwise very conservative and dislike anything foreign, but they also adore the military, and the military has to be practical, and traditional units are so not practical.
I would guess that in time the US will adopt metric – it will happen much faster if the American Century ends and other countries become more powerful. Since almost everywhere else is mostly metric, the US won’t be able to go it alone anymore.
Normalize it. Use meters and kilograms on your own even before legislation. Convince others to use it. Push back the storm. If a handful of people in your town use it then it goes from something that nobody uses to a thing that a few people (and the rest of the world) use. Be the change you want to see.
