this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
151 points (94.2% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35393 readers
6 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Two relevant details:

  • The OG metric system (from the XVIII century) had no prefix for 10⁶. "Mega-" would be only formally acknowledged by the SI in 1960.
  • The ton units (yup, plural) backtrack all the way to a volume unit from the Middle Ages, the amount of liquid that you'd be able to put in a big arse cask*

Based on those two things, I think that the ton was standardised to 10⁶g considerably before the name "megagram" had the chance to appear, to the point that it became the default name across languages.

*I don't know the English name for the cask [EDIT: "tun" acc. to @[email protected] ], but in Portuguese it's "tonel". From that "tonelada" (the unit). It used to be 800kg before the metric system though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

FYI the English name of that cask is "tun".

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

Thanks for the info. (To be honest I couldn't be bothered to look for it.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What units did Portugal use before metric?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm from Brazil but I think that the units were the same anyway. The ones that I recall are (note: approximated values)

  • tonelada (ton) - 800kg
  • arroba - 15kg. Nowadays the word mostly refers to the "@" sign, that used to be the unit's symbol
  • arrátel (pound) - 450g
  • onça (ounce) - 30g
  • milha (mile) - 1.8km
  • vara (rod) - 1.1m
  • pé (foot) - 33cm
  • polegada (inch) - 2.5cm

I don't recall the volume units, but I don't expect them to be too different from the anglo units.

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

Oh interesting. I didn't know each country had its own slightly different version of imperial units

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yup - at least in Europe this backtracks all the way into the Middle Ages. And it was actually a big deal because the units were similar, neither completely identical nor completely different. And that was actually a big deal because people could argue which of those units they meant, specially when buying/selling stuff. (For example, let's say that some Portuguese merchant agrees to sell "five tons of fish" to a random Englishman. Now you get:

  • the merchant arguing "five Portuguese tons", expecting to sell 793*5=3965kg of fish
  • the buyer arguing "five English tons", expecting to buy 1088*5=5440kg of fish

even if both were in good faith they'd feel themselves cheated on the deal.

To make it worse sometimes the units changed inside the same realm, over time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Oh, you are in for a surprise.

Just look at the imperial area measurement unities. Very few countries standardized them, and even on those, people don't really use the standard.