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Comment on Why a ton, and not a megagram?

Try it, count grains of sand in your head whilst you picture them. Unless your a savant, it probably starts getting a little blurry around the high teens, maybe a bit higher. You can use tricks like imaging a grid of ten by ten to picture a hundred, but it’ll still be rather blurry. Picturing a million of something is literally impossible, human minds aren’t designed for that.

If you wanted some sand to line your new brick driveway, would you ask the builders merchant for a few tonnes of sand or a x million grains of sand? It’s the same difference.

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XTL@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
By this logic, a millianything is also completely unimaginable, because you can’t count to less than one. BS.

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- 13esq@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  That’s the point, millis and megas make sense for things that aren’t tangible in real life. That’s exactly why we use tons and not megagrams.
  
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  - Shialac@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    They literally are the same thing. Why would you imagine them differently?
    
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    13esq@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I’ve had this question quite a few times so I think that maybe I haven’t phrased my point of view so well.
    
    What I’m trying to say is that a million of anything is something the mind can’t comprehend, you can understand the idea of it, but you can’t picture it.
    
    It makes sense to say “my car weighs about 2 tons”, because you can compare that to a couple of ton bags of sand or two IBCs of water.
    
    It doesn’t really make sense to say “my car weighs 2megagrams”, because no one can picture two million of anything.
    
    Despite the terms meaning the same thing, the mental imagery is totally different and it makes sense to use a unit that makes the description tangible in the real world.
    
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Shialac@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
When I imagine 1km I don’t imagine 1000 individual meters in my head, I imagine 1km

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- 13esq@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The point is that you can easily estimate a meter.
  
  Look to the horizon and estimate a kilometre and I’ll bet that your error is significant by comparison to your estimate of a meter.
  
  There is a big difference between imagining/understanding a concept and judging it accurately in the real world.
  
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