I dont see a Millimeter as a thousandth of a meter, I see it as a tenth of a centimeter
Comment on A metric tonne (1000 kg) should be called a megagram (1 Mg).
scarabic@lemmy.world 10 months agoAs someone not born to the metric system but who’s tried to lean into it, this is something I’ve always found a little difficult. “A thousandth of a meter” isn’t a useful concept to me. I don’t think we are good at conceiving of things in their thousands, with good proportionality. I would rather just have a singular name like “squabbles” for milimeters and memorize an intuitive sense of what that is. I realize I can do that with the word “milimeters” too but my brain sometimes gets stuck on unpacking the math. I was reading Dune last night and the expression “millions of decaliters” really stopped me in my tracks. I felt like I had to start with one liter, a sodastream bottle, and multiply it up. I’d rather have some concept like “fuckariter” which means an Olympic swimming pool and work with that.
Not really being critical here. Metric is better. But intuitiveness is one of the qualities of a measurements system that makes it more or less appealing and I’ve always found imperial has a slight edge there that makes it harder to just drop as a complete loser of a system.
Shialac@lemmy.world 10 months ago
PixelOfLife@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I would rather just have a singular name like “squajibbles” for milimeters and memorize an intuitive sense of what that is. I realize I can do that with the word “milimeters” too but my brain sometimes gets stuck on unpacking the math.
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.
gazter@aussie.zone 10 months ago
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.
ben_dover@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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…
Pantoffel@feddit.de 10 months ago
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!
Ghoelian@feddit.nl 10 months ago
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?)
Hector_McG@programming.dev 10 months ago
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.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 10 months ago
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.