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1. Mans R (mansr@society.oftrolls.com)'s status on Saturday, 22-Jun-2024 14:35:12 UTC Mans R

   in reply to

   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅
   • j_bertolotti
   • John Carlos Baez
   • Arcaik
   • geoffl

   @geoffl @clacke @johncarlosbaez @j_bertolotti @Arcaik I'm going to start confusing people by using unusual units like decigram and hectometre. Or deka- anything (except decadence).

   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 likes this.
   • geoffl (geoffl@mastodon.me.uk)'s status on Saturday, 22-Jun-2024 14:35:17 UTC geoffl

     in reply to

     • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅
     • j_bertolotti
     • John Carlos Baez
     • Arcaik

     @clacke

     The decimeter is almost exactly the same measurement as a "hand" (equal to 4 inches) which is the unit most often used to measure the height of a horse.

     @mansr @johncarlosbaez @j_bertolotti @Arcaik

   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Saturday, 22-Jun-2024 14:35:19 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to

     • j_bertolotti
     • John Carlos Baez
     • Arcaik
     • geoffl

     @johncarlosbaez The decimeter is pretty neat, because it's about the distance between the tips of your lightly outstretched index finger and thumb.

     @mansr @j_bertolotti @geoffl @Arcaik

   • Mans R (mansr@society.oftrolls.com)'s status on Saturday, 22-Jun-2024 14:35:20 UTC Mans R

     in reply to

     • j_bertolotti
     • John Carlos Baez
     • Arcaik
     • geoffl

     @Arcaik @geoffl @j_bertolotti @johncarlosbaez It probably varies between languages, but at least in Swedish, decimetres are quite often used in casual speech when giving an approximate size of something, e.g. "I guess it was a few decimetres, maybe half a metre."

   • John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 22-Jun-2024 14:35:20 UTC John Carlos Baez

     in reply to

     • j_bertolotti
     • Arcaik
     • geoffl

     @mansr - yet another example of how civilized the Swedes are.

     @Arcaik @geoffl @j_bertolotti

   • Arcaik (arcaik@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 22-Jun-2024 14:35:21 UTC Arcaik

     in reply to

     • j_bertolotti
     • John Carlos Baez
     • geoffl

     @geoffl @j_bertolotti @mansr @johncarlosbaez Wait what? Nobody I know uses decimeters in real life, and we use grams for small quantities (e.g. when cooking). Plus, decimeters and kilograms *are* standard units.

   • geoffl (geoffl@mastodon.me.uk)'s status on Saturday, 22-Jun-2024 14:35:22 UTC geoffl

     in reply to

     • j_bertolotti
     • John Carlos Baez

     @j_bertolotti @mansr @johncarlosbaez
     The French also use a crazy system. The base unit of distance is metres (Earth's circumference/40,000 to make it roughly equivalent to a yard) but don't lead directly to volume in litres, you have to remember to do your measurements in decimetres. The unit of weight isn't the gramme but the thousand-gramme (kilogramme). Instead of a cube of sides 1 metre containing one litre and that volume of water weighing 1 gramme, it weighs 1 thousand thousand-grammes. ;)

   • j_bertolotti (j_bertolotti@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 22-Jun-2024 14:35:23 UTC j_bertolotti

     in reply to

     • John Carlos Baez

     @mansr
     The ones stubbornly using weird units are the people in the US, not the French 😉
     @johncarlosbaez

   • Mans R (mansr@society.oftrolls.com)'s status on Saturday, 22-Jun-2024 14:35:24 UTC Mans R

     • John Carlos Baez

     @johncarlosbaez It could have been worse. Imagine if a Frenchman, say, had been working on the same things at the same time, only with the opposite convention, and French physicists then stubbornly stuck with it to this day while everybody else followed Franklin.