American here up voting because sane measurements.
nooooo my teaspoon measurements!
US, UK, Canadian or metric teaspoon? It’s all different measurements.
I guess that’s like tons but damn that is frustrating to learn. You finally did it and all called it the same thing and then just messed it all up. We were so close!
It’s just prefixes, you can use decateaspoons if you want.
Those are tablespoons!
God, I wish we used this here. It is such a better system than our system of potholes being measured in washing machines in some parts of the country.
Me head has a dent the size of two small pollocks, or a couple elderly bonobo tits, if you like.
We do use it where necessary; in science, engineering and the military, for example. Some of our imperial units suck, but others, like pounds and feet and inches are superior because they are more intuitive. The reality is that it’s a non-issue for most people and because of that we will almost always have some version of a mixed system, as do most of the other Anglophone countries.
What you’re too fancy to divide by 25.4 or multiply by .0397?
…1" ≈ 2 ½ cm, 5’ ≈ 1 ½ m, close-enough to convert in your head…
Multiplication by a number smaller than one is division
And then there’re the Americans who point at the Metric system and scream “why not us”. Which is anyone who’s sane and not afraid of change.
Americans
sane
I am by no means sane, but I’m all about metric.
Well in that case, please let me introduce you to the inch. I have a good feeling about this!
Please keep it in your pants, Ron
I don’t think I’ve ever seen thousands separators in decimals
Where are you from if I may ask? As far as I’m aware they are are pretty common, I know only of India which does them differently and maybe US / Canada? Although I think the point and the comma are switched in some countries, so a thousand Euros would be 1.000,00€
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I’m from the US, but I’m not talking about thousands separators in the whole number. I guess a better word would be thousandths separators.
American expat upvoting for science
This is wrong. Some identifiers should start with a lowercase letter (like kilo)
Correct, except in Computing, there the Kilo, Mega, Giga …are in uppercase, to differentiate it from the decimal system as it is based on powers of 2. 1 km is 1000 meters but 1 Kb is 1024 bytes
That is no correct. You are talking about kibi, mebi and gibi. The corresponding identifiers are Ki, Mi and Gi, not K M and G. K would mean Kelvin, M is 10⁶, G is 10⁹
You’re both right, and that’s the problem.
And it only gets more complicated from there.
In storage 1GB is 1000MB and 1MB is 1000KB and 1KB is 1000 bytes… This is almost exclusive to hard drives. The rest of the industry uses what is now known as KiB, MiB and GiB, or kebibytes, mebibytes, and gibibytes. 1GiB is 1024MiB, and 1MiB is 1024KiB, and 1KiB is 1024 bytes.
If you’re not talking about disk storage, then 1MB is 1MiB (1MB can be either 1024KB or 1000KB depending on context). The terms GiB/MiB/KiB were created because of the confusion between 1024 and 1000 for each jump in size, it’s a relatively new term created to increase clarity between the various definitions, where MiB will always be the 1024 KiB version, and MB can be either; in this way, HDD manufacturers don’t need to change anything that they are doing, and the industry can have a pure term, free of the confusion created by the disk drive industry.
To bake your brain even more, datacom uses 1000 instead of 1024 for increments, so 1Kbps is 1000bits/s and 1Mbps is 1000Kbits/s. So data transfer, link speeds and throughputs are generally going by the 10base numbering instead of the powers of 2.
The whole thing is a mess, and everyone wants to be the “will acktually” person to correct people about MB vs MiB and none of it actually matters, it’s an entirely stupid situation created because the data storage jerks wanted to be able to put a slightly bigger number on their box to say how much capacity their drives had by just omitting the extra 24 bytes per KB, and extra 24 KB per MB, etc. So their product would look like it’s bigger than it is.
Arguing about it is pointless.
It is not the result of inflating the data, but the consequence of the base 2 (binary system). 2^2 =4 2^3 = 8 …16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 (1Kb), 2048, 4096, 8192, …
I know of the new designations, but they are in my opinion unnecessary. It is true that K is the abbreviation for Kelvin, but in computing, if you don’t use a liquid-cooled super game computer, it’s clear to anyone that Kb has nothing to do with temperature.
The power of 2 version 2^10 or 1024, is indeed a result of the binary system, and since that’s how computers work, that’s what everyone used, but by listing a 1 billion byte disk as “1GB” instead of its actual, measured quantity, which, in gibibytes, I billion bytes is actually 953.67 MiB, companies can artificially inflate the perceived size of a disk, instead of buying a 953 MB disk, you’re buying a 1GB disk and only getting 953 MiB as a result.
It makes the disk look larger than it is on paper and almost every newcomer to technology has questioned this at some point, and been disappointed that the x GB disk is nontrivially smaller than they expected.
It’s a technicality that is disengenious, and creates confusion. All the disk makers had to do was conform to the same number of bytes per kB, and kBs per MB… Etc, that literally everyone else was using, but they wanted to deceive people about it, I guess. Make their marketing look better than the competition… There’s a few disk makers out there that are more or less reversing the trend, but the damage is done. It’s why the MiB and GiB (etc) terms even exist.
K being 1024 only makes sense for RAM and ROM which are addressed with a particular number of address lines where the addressable size is 2^(number of address bits). Flash memory, and rotating media have entirely different addressing structures so normal SI units work bettor for them, and just about everything else.
I dislike how Atto breaks the “lowercase=small” convention with the capital A symbol.
The red squiggly underlines make me sad.
Screenshooting a Word document is utterly disgusting.
Screenshooting, lol.
Absolutely! It should be an OpenDocument Spreadsheet
This isn’t the metric system.
I’m an American and I approve this message.
Go to sleep!
I just awoke from 21ks of sleep.
This just made me think, why haven’t those damn commie Europeans with their fancy metric system come up with a better system for measuring time yet?
People like to talk a lot of shit about how subjective the definitions for an inch or a mile are, but I never hear complaints about how a second or an hour are antiquated and based on things that only make sense from an Earth-centric point of view.
I just feel like someone be mad at Americans for still using hours (ugh, trivially decided on the amount of time it takes the Earth to rotate) and not something like the amount of time it takes for 1 kilogram of water to decay via natural radiation when under a vacuum.
By the way, before downvoting, this post is heavy with /s in case it wasn’t obvious.
Edit: I just looked up the formal definition of a second and it is “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom”.
It’s all so arbitrary is funny. People get so passionate, but then I’ll bring up,“Why aren’t we using Swatch Time?” Or, why don’t we have 13 months of exactly 28 days (With a bonus vacation day or two)?
They’ll usually fall back on what people are used to or tradition or something that just supports staying on imperial measurements. To be clear, I don’t give a shit what measurement system is used. It’s not like it takes a big brain to figure out what is going on when you travel.
This can go even further. Why aren’t we using base 12 numbers, which can be divided much more conveniently?
I remember watching the Numberphile video on base 12 a few years ago. I thought it was pretty interesting.
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Measures weren’t standard before the french revolution, so picking something and getting buy-in was easy. Time keeping was well established, and the French moved to a metric calendar, and proposals for metric time were made, but all were eventually rejected.
Honestly, that explains perfectly why America will never likely switch to the metric system.
It will happen because there is so much traction on metric, but it will be slow and both systems will be marked for a long time.
Those sexy sexy parabolas
The metric system is not mathematically proven!
I wait to the day the US rejects the metric completely, and invents a new system for Voltage measurement (proposed unit names: cell, shock, spark).
They’re not serious before they stop using metric for ammunition
We aren’t unitist when it comes to naming ammo. Half (ratio pulled from my ass) gets named based on US Customary units and half on Metric units. Most calibers get named in whatever unit sounds coolest. Seven point six two PRC (or any variation of the 7.62 verbalization) doesn’t have the same ring or implied power as three hundred PRC.
I guess “9mm” really does sound a lot better than “almost 3/8 inch”
Which 9mm ammo?
If the common 9mm cartridge, 9x19 Parabellum, were designed in the US back in 1901 it would be a .38 caliber.
No idea, man, I’m European, I have no idea about ammo. I said 9mm because it’s literally the only one I “know”.
IIRC the US already uses metric (technically). The imperial units are defined in terms of metric units.
Joke’s on you; I’m an insomniac.
And FWIW we use the metric system too. We just tend to mix it with US Customary, like how Canada and The UK does with Metric and Imperial. Except the UK uses more Metric than Imperial. Vice versa for the US. Food is sold using both. Science and computing are always in Metric. And a few other things too but it’s 4am and I’m too tired to think.
Edit: I don’t even know how a CPU’s temperature translates to Fahrenheit, but for weather it makes perfect sense. I know that 100°F is hot for outside, and that 80°C is hot for a processor. But I couldn’t tell you what is what if you swapped the measurements.
If you’d swap those, your CPU would be super cool and outside would be deadly.
For me it’s the reverse. It’s just usus.
As an American, I upvoted.
Edit: Wait, why am I awake at 5am?
