Comment on A metric tonne (1000 kg) should be called a megagram (1 Mg).

tunetardis@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• Astrealix@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Cuz the gram came before the SI system and the kilogram is a much more useable unit. The original m-g-s are based on physical things, like m being a subdivision of the length from the North Pole to the Equator going through Paris, and s being related to the time of a pendulum with certain length swinging or smth

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  • tunetardis@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I remember in some old astronomy textbooks they used units based on CGS (cm-g-s) as opposed to MKS (m-kg-s). It was pretty weird, as they had terms to go with that system like dynes instead of newtons for force. But at least it wasn’t imperial.

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  • aulin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Which is 1 cm³ of water if we want to stay in SI. And if that’s the basis for it, then why not make a gram = the weight of 1 dm³ of water and then we wouldn’t need a prefix for weights in the stuff-we-usually-carry-around range. It still doesn’t make sense to me to have a prefixed unit being the base unit.

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    • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      A cubic meter of water should have been a liter and weighed a gram.

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• someguy3@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Apparently it was going to be, but they chose the kilogram instead.

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  • tunetardis@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Fair enough. But it’s interesting right? Like the litre lines up with the kilogram (for fluid measures) but they don’t call it a kilolitre for consistency’s sake?

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    • Kethal@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      This is one of two “warts” that I know of in SI. They wanted a coherent set of units, coherent meaning that no nuisance constants are required to convert between dimensions in the set. The system at the time was gram-centimeter-second. To expand things to all dimensions I suppose it was simpler to use the larger units, like J = kg m^2 / s^2 rather than trying to make a new unit for energy, etc. You’d think they’d have just come up with a new name for mass units and defined it as 1 kg, something like 1 prot = 1 kg, then all of the coherent units would be ones without prefixes. Someone must have really being going to bat for the word “gram” though, because now we have this pretty stupid rule that the coherent units are all of the ones without prefixes, except mass, which has the coherent unit of kg. And then also, prefixes are used to scale the coherent units by appending the appropriate letter to the coherent unit symbol, except for mass, for which g is treated as the coherent unit, even though it’s not.

      It’s not the worst thing, but it’s pretty stupid to explain.

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      • hypertext@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        until you realize, that “second” is also not the base unit. it’s not at obvious because it isn’t metric, but second is just the second subdivision of an hour (the first being the minute)

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      • tunetardis@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Okay I’ll bite. What’s the other “wart”?

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