this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
1314 points (98.1% liked)
memes
10683 readers
1905 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- [email protected] : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- [email protected] : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- [email protected] : Linux themed memes
- [email protected] : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The UK sorta tried switching to metric but didn't do it completely and now has a weird system where the system you use depends on the situation I hate it
You'll love the way we do tyres then. Two of the dimensions are metric and the third is imperial.
The US does it too, the other way around. They use fractions for a lot of things (3/8", half a foot, etc.) and then switch in decimals (like "2.5 inches") when they think you're not looking. Except for bullets for some reason which are in mm.
There's also calibur for bullets, e.g. .357, .45, .22. , 30 aught 6.
Don't forget about drug dealers slinging their grams and kilos.
Fractions and decimals are the same units though. It should be easy enough to convert between them as well
Don't forget 2 liters of soda!
Litercola? Do we sell litercola?
It's for a cop.
don't get me started on bullets.
I end up doing a lot of lazy maths, and remembering rough numbers.
45MPG? That's about 10 miles per litre.
8 inches? Eh, 20cm.
Anything remotely technical, I convert everything to metric (and actually take the time do accurately).
Having the inch-fractions to mm table on the back of a ruler is very useful when using old drill bits and spanners.
stone is my favorite stupid measure
What's wrong with stone?
what's right with it? doesn't make sense it exists at all. it's not 10- based obviously, but it's not even 12- based like other imperial units. it's 14 pounds! 14? who came up with this shit?
Obviously it's stupid compared to metric but it's no worse than the rest of imperial, it's not all 12 based. There's 16 or 20 oz in a pint depending on UK or US. 8 pints in a gallon. 3 yards in a foot. It's all stupid.
I didn't compare it to metric though. and yes all your examples are stupid. I just said stone is my favorite because it feels so out of place for me.
you got the foot-yard backwards but at least 3 is a factor of 12. also inch, foot and yard, while impractical in ratios, are somewhat helpful lengths. like you can easily visualize an inch or foot, probably better than a mm or cm.
the pint/gallon was probably backward standardized, in that they were probably measures used for various drinks or cargo and named for those and got roughly standardized with 8x or 3x feeling appropriate. but stone just... exists it feels like. for no practical reason.