Hi, I think in metric units, so almost everything is some form of a power of 10, like a kilogram is a 1000 grams, etc.
Sometimes I will think of an hour and half as 150 minutes before remembering that it is 90 minutes.
Does something similar happen to imperial units users? Because as far as I understand you don’t have obvious patterns that would cause you to make these mistakes, right?
Sometimes I will think of an hour and half as 150 minutes
You’re still thinking of a pattern – but there is a conflation between cardinal numbers and proportion/percentage. An hour and a half is 150% of one hour.
But no, that doesn’t happen with imperial systems, because there just aren’t really patterns to that level.
Except there are repeatable patterns within each Imperial dimension, but by all means continue deci-splaining your superior units to us. (I happen to be ambi-systemic BTW, so it’s whatever)
Imperial works on base 2 nominally ¹, because most units double or quadruple into other units.
- 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts (16 cups) to a gallon
- 16 drams to the ounce, 16 ounces to the pound, 2000 pounds to the ton
- 4 teaspoon to the tablespoon, 16 tablespoons to the cup, see also cups to gallons
Yeah, we have other, less common measures but those don’t matter. An inch is about a thumb’s width, and 12 of those is a foot, which is about the length of one’s foot. When you do actual work on actual farms instead of being all European and just exploit your colonists, these are useful ratios².
But really, don’t be a gatekeeper about units. It doesn’t materially affect your life³.
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- Except where it doesn’t.
- Not really, just being incendiary for the comedy
- Not comedy. Just get over it.
(it’s actually three teaspoons per tablespoon)
As a scientist I’m SI/metric all the way, but I sort of agree. If it works for you that’s good enough.
Measurement is essentially perception of reality… And the accuracy of reality is dependent upon circumstance.
If you need cubits to build a pyramid, and that pyramid is still standing, well, good for you.
As for the European thing. Being British we measure distance in metres but hight in feet. We measure weight by grams except our own which is often stone and pounds. We drive miles per hour too.
There’s still a ton of discrepancy when it comes to purchasing drugs too.
You guys did Brexit and renounced your Europeen. Kinda like being circumcised which, eh, you do you.
Viva L’impériale, hey? Keep that sun a’shining
We left the European union, we didn’t stop being European.
I mean, at least until the folk on the east coast row harder and we can drift into the Atlantic a bit more. Still have to navigate around Ireland, but I’ve a feeling they’ll scooch over and let us pass.
Time units being base 12, 24, 60 are fairly convenient in that you can divide them evenly in many ways. I find this highly advantageous, turns out lots of folks did too and that’s why we use it today.
I used to get confused doing arithmetic between AM/PM until I switched my life over to a 24 hour clock. Also why folks who do time math often like in hospitals or military use that system. It’s comes down to convenience.
I tend to lean into fractions naturally, so time fits into that well. But like, I design quite a bit in FreeCAD for 3d printing and only work with metric for stuff like that. I hate that we have not switched to metric in the USA.
I never have, personally speaking.
no
only time is with some like a microwave where you type in multiple units for the same input
ie 90 is equivalent to 130It can be kind of confusing since seconds are part of SI, but hours and minutes are not. So you are kind of mixing frogs with oranges here. Even with metric units it’s not always linear and intuitive. Take for example decibel scale which is logarithmic, which is something that throws people off. Same with Richter scale. Having earthquake at scale of 3 is not half the strength of 6. It’s thousand times weaker than 6.
So in short, time keeping is done for convenience sake because 60 is divisible by a lot of numbers many times over. It can throw you off a bit if you are converting from metric to time format but there’s a simple formula for that and with some training you can do the calculation in your head. It’s a matter of practice.
Time sucks ass. How many seconds in a day? 86400 or something. The whole thing feels like imperial units. I’d prefer if we’d just have percentages instead and work on fractions with special names for them.
Full disclosure, I’m a programmer.
Living in the US, I know what mph, inches, feet, yards and pounds all mean. Anything else I’ll end up looking up, and yes, I’ve lived here my whole life. I don’t make any mistakes because I always end up checking how my cups are in a quart or whatever.
I’m in the USA, and I certainly don’t use the imperial system exclusively — my (domestic) education was in metric (undergrad and grad school), and now I work at an American company and use metric exclusively.
And yes, I get confused sometimes. Often I get time and currency confused, so if something is $1.59 I think it’s a penny shy of $2, for instance.
Explains everything the SNL way.
I think ounces to lbs is the one that gets me, because we regularly talk about half and quarter pounds so 16 to 1 is just weird. Also fl oz to cups is 8 to 1 so…
Frankly I just avoid ounces if at all possible. It’s a shitty unit. Run into it in cooking a lot though. Personally, when I record most of my recipes in my recipe app, I use metric. It makes math a lot easier.
A pint a pound, the world around
Sorry is that a US pint or a UK pint?
Similar to your example, I do sometimes have a “brain fart”, thinking that X:50 means half. So, like if the microwave says 1:50, I might think that means 1.5 minutes left, but I generally catch myself pretty quickly, and it’s never caused any real problems.
I did my undergrad in a science that lends itself to lots of metric measurements, so even though I’m born and raised in the US, I’m pretty comfortable with metric and tend to set my defaults to metric.
I have always found it interesting that typing 150 or 90 in the microwave both set it for 1 & ½ minutes.
I reckon its a bit clever that it allows for both people who think in seconds and people who think is minute+seconds.Maybe we have different microwaves, but I’m pretty sure that on mine, typing 130 is the same as typing 90 (1 min, 30 sec) and typing anything larger than 99 is automatically interpreted as m:ss, so 150 would mean 1 min, 50 sec, not 1.5 min.
I am dumb. I meant to say 130 but i mixed up 1.5 being a minute and a half… We have come full circle.
Not really. I would be curious if other people immersed in SI only have similar issues to yours. Minutes and hours are based off of multiples of 12, and with feet and inches that’s already one we deal with regularly.
I am of the opinion that time should be expressed in base 36, much more subdivideable and allows you to express a given time as a two decimal point number between 0.00 and Z.ZZ
Also as you might have noticed, the latest time in the day is literally the Zs, the clock would be telling you to go the fuck to sleep already.
Much as I think this would be pretty confusing, I love that Z.ZZ thing :-)
I’m trying to work this out though - so what we call 24 hours would now be 36 different blocks of time, 1-12 and A to Z, right?
So a ‘36th’ of a day (or, actually, let’s give it a name… A “Frin”? That’ll do) would be equivalent to 24/36 of an hour = 2/3 of an hour = 40 minutes.
However would subdivisions of a Frin also be in base 36? If so, then the 36… Terps, let’s say… in a Frin, would each last slightly longer than a minute… 40/36 = 10/9 of a minute = 600/9 = 66.666666… of what we call seconds.
But of course the next subdivision would also be in base 36. So each Terp would have 36… Bops… So a Bop would last as long as a 36th of 66.666666… seconds= 66.66666/36 = 1.85185185… seconds per Bop.
36 Bops make a Terp, 36 Terps make a Frin, 36 Frins make a Day.
What a strange world that’d be!
Thanks for doing the math.
36 different blocks of time, 1-12 and A to Z, right?
Not 1-12, but 0-9.
Edit: now that I’ve spelled it out, O/0 and 1/I/L (for uppercase/lowercase letters) may be problematic.
Not 1-12, but 0-9.
Duh, yeah of course, oops! :-)
I’d still call it hours minutes and seconds since it’s the same level subdivision,
It’d follow this progression, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z, part of the reason I like base 36 counting is because of just how many cool things just happen to come together with it, and the fact that the Alphanumeric set perfectly fits into it is one, another one I like is that “10” is a square that is also the product of two other squares.
But back to specifics, an “hour” is 40 present minutes, a “minute” is 66 and 2/3rds of a second, and a “second” is 1.85185… seconds, or 1 and 23/27ths of a second.
If I had it my way this would be paired with the Sym454 calendar to ultra-regularize everything
Yeah, I screwed up saying 1-12, I meant 0-9 but got mixed up while thinking about the next bit!
