I mean, I’m European, on metric and fully agree with you.
But you’re not right about the units. They’re just the most well known, and used ones.
An inch is 3 barleycorns. A barleycorn is 4 poppyseeds. A poppyseed (2.11mm) is six points. A point, 0.35mm is twenty twips. A twip is 17 micrometers. 0.0176mm, roughly the width of a human hair.
Which makes it even dumber, because it shows it’s from a time in people could measure things in twips, yet those people still chose to make a unit called “a twip” instead of just saying “fuck this we’re going metric”. Nevermind I checked and point and twip are both typographical measurements, so it’s less unreasonable.
With most common and best known ones, the same things still exist in metric, but they’re just minimally confusing, as people know it’s prefix+unit. A milliliter is very common. Deciliter as well, but probably less so (someone once told me their country don’t use it as much despite being on metric, can’t remember the country), but something like a decimeter or a decigram would sound pretty weird. Hectogram however, isn’t too unfamiliar, pretty used in the drug world. I’m sure a lot of people would be confused by the prefix “yotta” or “ronna”, which I was too. Yonna is above zetta, above exa, above peta. I’m sure a lot of people on Lemmy know at least “peta” and probably exa.
Discounting those amazingly big prefixes, even if I use a less used combo like, say, “megasecond”, you don’t need additional information to figure out how long that is. But with seconds it’s annoying to transform them into days and hours and minutes, because you have to also use base 60, but still doable.
Here’s a tangentially related example: a nice comparison between millionaires and billionaires; if you earned a dollar a second, you’d be a millionaire in a megasecond, a billionaire in a gigasecond. A megasecond is is 11.57 days. A gigasecond is 32 years.
I mean, I’m European, on metric and fully agree with you.
But you’re not right about the units. They’re just the most well known, and used ones.
An inch is 3 barleycorns. A barleycorn is 4 poppyseeds. A poppyseed (2.11mm) is six points. A point, 0.35mm is twenty twips. A twip is 17 micrometers. 0.0176mm, roughly the width of a human hair.
Which makes it even dumber, because it shows it’s from a time in people could measure things in twips, yet those people still chose to make a unit called “a twip” instead of just saying “fuck this we’re going metric”. Nevermind I checked and point and twip are both typographical measurements, so it’s less unreasonable.
With most common and best known ones, the same things still exist in metric, but they’re just minimally confusing, as people know it’s prefix+unit. A milliliter is very common. Deciliter as well, but probably less so (someone once told me their country don’t use it as much despite being on metric, can’t remember the country), but something like a decimeter or a decigram would sound pretty weird. Hectogram however, isn’t too unfamiliar, pretty used in the drug world. I’m sure a lot of people would be confused by the prefix “yotta” or “ronna”, which I was too. Yonna is above zetta, above exa, above peta. I’m sure a lot of people on Lemmy know at least “peta” and probably exa.
Discounting those amazingly big prefixes, even if I use a less used combo like, say, “megasecond”, you don’t need additional information to figure out how long that is. But with seconds it’s annoying to transform them into days and hours and minutes, because you have to also use base 60, but still doable. Here’s a tangentially related example: a nice comparison between millionaires and billionaires; if you earned a dollar a second, you’d be a millionaire in a megasecond, a billionaire in a gigasecond. A megasecond is is 11.57 days. A gigasecond is 32 years.