• whoisthedoktor@lemmy.wtf
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    5 months ago

    There was a beautiful time back when I was young where we tried to change to metric and schools taught us nothing but. Now I’m ~50 years old and don’t even know how many pints are in a gallon. Or feet in a mile. Always forget whether it’s 12 or 16 that’s inches in a foot / ounce to pound. Always have to look that shit up. Because they didn’t teach us that garbage. Ever.

    Guess what I NEVER have to look up? The measurements that tell you in their fucking prefixes how many X are in Y. What a concept.

    • candybrie@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Don’t worry. You likely wouldn’t remember even if you were taught. 5280 feet/mile is just not worth the brain space. Neither is 8 pints/gallon. I don’t think you would convert between the two often enough to make it useful information to just know.

      And I do have to look up those prefixes for the less used ones. It’s exa then peta or peta then exa and what’s bigger than them? What’s smaller than nano? I don’t remember because it rarely comes up. But I’m in tech, so it’s starting to more.

      • linja@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I remember 5280 despite being Australian because I saw that stupid mnemonic tweet. I remember the SI prefixes because of xkcd.

    • bluewing
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      5 months ago

      Don’t sweat it. It all about using the proper scale of measurement. An astronomer doesn’t care how many miles or kilometers it is to a star. They use light years because the scale is too big for either miles or kilometers.And no one cares how many decimeters there are in a kilometer either.