4 ms·
You mean like my feet aren’t a foot long, my thumb isn’t an inch? Ironically, my pinky is a centimeter thick and a meter is when I take a long step.
by Zanfa 1y ago
You mean like my feet aren’t a foot long, my thumb isn’t an inch? Ironically, my pinky is a centimeter thick and a meter is when I take a long step.
- Joker_vD 1y agoThe width of my palm (with my thumb, tightly pressed to it) at its widest is 10 centimeters, which is quite handy. Oh, and my "inch" is almost exactly 3 centimeters.
- capitainenemo 1y agoThere's a couple of convenience approximations I use to work with US Imperial.. 30cm is a "metric foot" (it's actually even closer to 1 light nanosecond which is kinda cool for thinking about distances at computer speeds) 250ml is a "metric cup"
- throwanem 1y agoAnd now the famous triviality of order-of-magnitude and unit conversion goes entirely out the window...
- coxmi 1y agoThat’s where duodecimal comes in…
- throwanem 1y agoDuodecimal metric! Tell me more.
- capitainenemo 1y agoYou do what you can with the limitations of the system. Some rounding helps with a lot of feet/cups. 4 metric cups to the litre..
- lostlogin 1y agoSpeaking of feet - I got irritated when buying shoes and trying to convert shoes sizes. It turns out that UK/US sizes are based on the length of a barley corn. Quite why it isn’t just in centimetres is baffling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe_size
- throwanem 1y agoI'll give you this one, but only with the qualification that inches would be fine too. There's no benefit to the manufacturers in more rational standardization, though. As with women's clothing sizes, why would Levi's (for example) make it easier for me to find something that matches my style and budget, from anyone other than them? Hell, even men's sizes which nominally are in inches do this! I have to go a size up in Levi's vs Wranglers because Levi's size small, the bastards, while Lee mostly run true to size but none of their cuts is really worth wearing. And don't even talk to me about boot sizes! Inches vs. centimeters? Baby stuff. Get on my level. :D
- lrasinen 1y agoI usually go with 240 ml if scaling down and there are fractions involved for slightly cleaner numbers. Another "close enough" value is the binary inch of 25.6 mm. Makes dealing with /32s and /64s oh so much easier.
- capitainenemo 1y agoTrue. At that point you're close to the intent of teaspoons/tablespoons/cups with easier to remember units. tsp = 5ml tblsp = 15ml cup = 240ml with all the handy halvings in between + higher granularity of ml.. 'course I'm usually approximating on a gramme scale anyway. But for larger stuff I round up to 250.