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[–] 154 points 1 year ago (48 children)

I’m always disappointed that megameter isn't a common word. People will say “one thousand kilometers” instead of just “one megameter”.

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  • [–] 45 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I'm a fan of light nanosecond, which works out to roughly 30 cm.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Is kibimeter a technically allowed measurement? That would be fun!

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    In Scandinavia we have "mil" which everyone uses, 1 mil, or Scandinavian mile as it is known in English, is 10km. Cuts down ln zeroes. I love this but no one else(outside of Scandinavia) uses it.I typically get a lot of pushback mentioning it to my international peers.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    but there is already decameter

    edit: nevermind i didnt see the "k" after the 10

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Decameter is 10 meter, not 10 kilometer. 10km would be a myriadmeter. (SI prefix names are based on greek, and myriad is the greek-based name for 10 000).

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    People will say “one thousand kilometers”

    Will they though? I don't talk about distances that large anywhere near often enough to really need a shorthand for it, personally. Had to even look up what things are approximately 1000km apart to even know what to imagine it as (it's about the distance between Paris and Berlin).

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Car mileage (or kilometerage, is that a word?)

    People don't say the car has 200 megameter on the odometer, but 200 000 km. Or 200k km?...

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    In Sweden we say 20 000 mil. I always have to stop for a second to convert when people use km.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (19 children)

    I'm more disappointed the world renamed one thousand million from milliard to billion.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    "the world"?

    If you came over to the other side of the pond, you'd find that most of Europe is still using milliard, billiard, trilliard etc.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I think that's one thing that's actually fine about the English language though. Constantly switching between something ending with "ion" to "iard" instead of just counting up doesn't make much sense to me personally.

    Million (1A), Milliard (1B), Billion (2A), Billiard (2B) seems odd compared to Million (1), Billion (2), Trillion (3), Quadrillion (4)

    I suppose the upside is that you don't have to learn as many prefixes, but it'll take another few years of inflation and wealth centralization (at least with currencies like the Euro, Dollar, or Pound) until Quadrillion is relevant in the financial sector and Mathematicians generally use letters. I suppose it makes other natural sciences a tiny bit easier, but there it's usually written in scientific notation anyways.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    The million-milliard system means a billion has double the zeroes compared to million, trillion has triple the zeroes, etc. In the English system, a quadrillion has 15 zeroes, so 4 times 3 plus 3? A quadrillion should have 4*6=24 zeroes.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I must admit I still don't see the point. Whether it's double/triple/quadruple of a million or just 3*n+1 doesn't seem to matter much. Of course it'd be better if a "thousand" was just called a "million" then, since that'd remove the +1, but the million milliard system doesn't seem to have any notable advantages otherwise, especially considering every "iard" step is a .5 one, which isn't much cleaner.

    1,000 -> 3x0+1 zeroes

    1,000,000 -> 3x1+1 zeroes

    1,000,000,000 -> 3x2+1 zeroes

    vs

    1,000,000 -> 1x6 zeroes

    (1,000,000,000 -> 1.5x6 zeroes)

    1,000,000,000,000 -> 2x6 zeroes

    (1,000,000,000,000,000 -> 2.5x6 zeroes)

    1,000,000,000,000,000,000 -> 3x6 zeroes

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    In the long system: Million - 1 000 000¹ Billion - 1 000 000² Trillion - 1 000 000³

    Short system: Million - 1 000² Billion - 1 000³ Trillion - 1 000⁴

    It just doesn't follow as smoothly with the increase in power

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Crazy assumption.

    While the word is still in use in some languages, the short system has mostly replaced the long system for numbering, especially in the English speaking world.

    https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/milliard#Translations

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

    When translating to Finnish it's confusing sometimes:
    Billion = miljardi = 1 000 000 000
    Trillion = biljoona = 1 000 000 000 000
    Quintillion = triljoona = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000
    You can tell how bad a news site is when they translate billion to biljoona and thus making the amount 1000 times higher.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    You probably want double new lines in your posts. Or two spaces at the end of your paragraphs but that's usually a bit annoying to do.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Or just \ at the end, like so

    Texty text text \
    Text
    

    Becomes
    Like this

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    So you escape the newline and you get a newline? That's some black magic voodoo. But hey if it works. Much simpler to handle than double space since you can see them and your phone doesn't try to make them into period space instead of space space.

    Newlines with double space (or space backslash apparently) also let's you have newlines in a quote block without exiting the block. I see a lot of people struggle with that on Lemmy. E.g.

    > A quote with multiple lines
    Will eat the the newline 
    
    Or exit if you don't handle the newline
    

    will render as:

    A quote with multiple lines Will eat the the newline

    Or exit if you don't handle the newline

    So you want to do

    > A quote with multiple lines \
    Will eat the the newline \
    Or exit if you don't handle the newline
    

    A quote with multiple lines
    Will eat the the newline
    Or exit if you don't handle the newline

    Or add space space at the end instead of space backslash.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The inventors of Markdown thought they would do something devastatingly clever and eat newlines if the next line has content. That way, if you're writing Markdown in the Stone Age and your editor doesn't support soft-wrap (it's a stone tablet), you can do your own soft-wrap and Markdown will "helpfully" eat all the newlines (unless there are two or more).

    Of course this has done nothing to help and instead caused chaos and confusion for anyone non-technical. Very clever

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    It would be more useful if there were comments in markdown. Like, it's helpful when organising your writing and thoughts in LaTeX that you can write one line per sentence, double newline for end of paragraph. It becomes immediately clear when a sentence is too long and comments for collaborators (or yourself) are easier to handle than in something like Word or Google Docs. It's also simpler to move sentences around which is important for good writing.

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Again, anglocentrism strikes. Your feeling is strictly based on your personal experience with your own words. It is like when Americans claim fahrenheit is more for humans than celsius, because they are unable to fathom things they have no experience with.

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  • "Because we are free men, we will be free to measure liquids in liters and milliliters... but not all liquids, only soda, wine, and alcohol because for milk and paint we will use gallons, pints, and quarts, god willing"

    "How many liters are in a gallon, sir?" "Nobody knows."

    "Why not use meters and kilometers?" "We sill, soldier. But only in certain unpopular sports like track and swimming."

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  • [–] 89 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” ― Josh Bazell, Wild Thing

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    It might be funny if it were true, but it's just a sad show of ignorance. It is exactly as possible in one as in the other for obvious reasons. It's just not as easy to memorize.

    To be specific:

    • energy required to heat to boiling point 1180 kJ
    • energy required to convert to vapor 8420 kJ
    • energy required to heat to boiling point and convert to vapor 9600 kJ
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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Nobody said impossible, just that you can't directly relate any of those quantities.

    Can't we just agree that metric is superior?

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  • [–] 57 points 1 year ago (17 children)

    The only metric to imperial conversion I remember is kilometers to miles since it's pretty close to the golden ratio.

    Even if you don't remember that the golden ratio is 1.6 and a bit, you can approximate it by using successive terms of the Fibonacci sequence.

    1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 ...

    So 8 miles is about 13km (actually 12.87)

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Its 2.54 cm to the inch. Its close to 2.5 and as an engineer in America I am stuck doing that conversion a lot

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    If it makes you feel any better, most pipe standards around the world are based on the American system, as well as bloody valve coefficients.

    I am far too aware that 1" is 25.4 mm :(

    And I'm in Australia. Grumble

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (6 children)
  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Fucking Dan Brown in the comment section

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Lmao your username is awesome

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    You should use a rolling release distro and always update to the bleeding edge.

    You will not regret using a rolling release distro and always updating to the bleeding edge.

    It is not easier for me to sneak backdoors into your system when you are using a rolling release distro and are always updating to the bleeding edge.

    🙂

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Forma me it's the yard. It's so close to the meter its ridiculous. I just ignore the difference an treat as the same. One yard = 0.9144 meters

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    A yard is about 1.4 litres in my book, or 2.1/2 pints - imperial pints mind, not US ones. I'm not ignoring away that 20% difference; it's bad enough with all the fucking "pint to brim" glasses these days.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Liters? Pints? How are you converting from distance to volume?

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