Science Memes

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Burning Up (mander.xyz)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I find it weird that when measuring height in metric, people using cm exclusively, i’ve noticed this a lot actually, people will use cm or mm in places where it arguably doesn’t make any sense. I could see the justification for doing math maybe, but like, that defeats the whole point of it being metric no?

Why is that defeating the whole point of being metric? If you know someone is 183 cm tall, you also know that they are 1.83 m tall. If its easier to say the length in cm, you do. No need for "one meter and eighty-three centimeters" or "one point eighty-three meters", just "a hundred and eighty-three centimeters". Often you just skip saying the "centimeters" part as well, because most people can see that you're not the size of a skyscraper without getting a ruler out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

yeah idk, i guess it's just weird to me, because here in the us if you measured someones height in inches alone, you would be chased out of a room. We strictly use feet and inches, and then yards if referring to a more "broad" range. So you can very safely assume something is in feet and inches if its just two numbers stuck together.

I feel like i could very easily get confused with metric if i'm not running a consistent rule for default units. Seems like an easy way to get a random x10 error in there to me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

As you pointed out previously, nobody uses decimeters, so x10 errors are not that common.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

i'm just gonna say that the joke here is that it was a 10x error. But that's retroactive, so.