this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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I sometimes use millitonne (mt) instead of kilogram to keep people on their toes. I've learned that some people doesn't like to have their weight measured in any kind of tonne.
This is, in fact, exactly what metric users do in their daily lives... We don't do math in our heads every time we measure something. We know from experience how large all the units are and pick the one that's appropriate for a given situation, just like you do.
When you measure something using inches, you don't then say "it's this many 1/36ths of a yard" unless you specifically need to convert it into yards for some reason.
Similarly, when we measure something using millimeters, we don't say "it's this many 1/1000ths of a meter". It's just a millimeter. Don't get hung up on the prefix, just ignore it and treat it as a unit of a particular size.
As a Canadian with a living memory of when we made the switch here, I feel your pain. Though to be fair, I was a child at the time and so probably had an easier time of it? But in some ways, I'm still transitioning to this day!
Take temperature, for example. When Canada went metric, all the weather reports switched to Celsius but our indoor thermometers and thermostat were still in Fahrenheit. So I wound up in a situation in which outdoor extreme temperatures became more relatable in C, while typical indoor temperature ranges sounded better in F. I particularly liked winter temperatures in C. It was so intuitive that < 0 means snow and > 0 means rain.
Today, I am more comfortable with C for indoors as well, but not for cooking. I guess that's because a lot of recipes still say set the oven to 350 or check the meat on the grill is at least 160?
The point isn't to have an intuitive sense of what a millimeter is just by knowing what a meter is. You have to learn both units individually to have intuition about them. The point is to know that a measurement of 500mm is 0.5m without having to do any math in your head beyond moving a decimal point.
I'm an American in my mid-forties and that has not been my experience at all.
I dont see a Millimeter as a thousandth of a meter, I see it as a tenth of a centimeter
Scale is what matters. when I measure something in meters I dont care about the exact millimeters
Coming from the UK generation that grew up during the decimalisation process, and therefore being equally comfortable with both systems, imperial measures are far less intuitive than metric. Don’t mistake simply being being used to something as it being intuitive.
We use a base 10 numeric system because that’s how many fingers & thumbs we have. Having a system of weights and measures based on that decimal system, is far more intuitive than a system that scales up through orders of distance using different scaling factors at ever order, is so unintuitive as to be absurd.
When I sent some measurements to my uncle to make a bed, I sent it in 200cm x 160cm. Not 2m or 20 dm. You know those exchanges because it's obvious but since people are used to cm for height, it's useful to compare stuff with yourself and that's why cm is the most used measurement for craft.
If whatever you are building fits in a hand, measurements will probably come in mm, because idk why but people enjoy 3 digit measurements.
Me, my wife, my child all have differently sized feet and hands.
Tbh, as an european I kinda absorbed a lot of imperial by just living on the anglophone internet, and honestly have nothing good to say about it.
I can intuitively guesstimate what a mile, yard, foot and inch are in metric, and I do, because it's useful in my particular corner of the Internet, not because it's a good system.
I have no idea what a gallon, stone, lbs or oz are. Volume of itself is kinda unintuitive, same with weight. Can't be bothered.
Intuitiveness comes with usage. When I think of a kilometre, I don't think of a lot of metres, I just think of it as a single unit. A centimetre doesn't send me dividing metres, I just think of a length about the width of a fingernail.
You just named the main advantage of the metric system as unintuitive and the opposite (squajibbles, fuckajiter, feet, toes, elbows) as the main advantage of the imperial system. Yet, you say that metric is better. I don't understand. Why do you find metric better then?
I understand that intuitiveness is subjective and that how a person is raised or lectured alters the view on what is intuitive. From a logical perspective, however, I find the metric system much more intuitive as the names of the metrics denote exactly what we are dealing with (except for the case of tonnes). Yes, maybe the wording is confusing. But from the word itself you can infer what is meant, given you know what milli, giga, mega, nano, pico, etc mean. Its just times or divided by 1000. What is feet in miles or nautical miles? Gotta look that up!
if you actually use the metric system, millimeter would become that "singular name" you memorize for a certain length. but you could also tell from the name alone what's it about roughly, squajibbles on the other hand...
Wait isn't imperial the one with asinine fractions?
Like wtf is a 64th of an inch? Or a thousandth (is that how you spell that?)