Why don't Americans have proper units?

[Zetetic]

There's no metric latitude/longitude measure, is there?

Decimal degrees rather than DMS, sort of?

[Sebastian Cobb]

I like to convert our standard mpg to nautical miles/imperial gallon.

There's no metric latitude/longitude measure, is there?

Dunno.

Wouldn't it be good if sat navs offered routes in the Dymaxion projection though?

[All Surrogate]

Why hasn't time been decimalised yet?, Formula 1 cars qualify down to 1000ths of a second but we keep at 60 seconds minutes 24 hours 7 days 12 months

The French gave it a whirl during the Revolution, but it didn't stick. I admire the ambition.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Why hasn't time been decimalised yet?, Formula 1 cars qualify down to 1000ths of a second but we keep at 60 seconds minutes 24 hours 7 days 12 months

You joke but the biggest and most accepted and portable time format is to represent the timestamp as the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC. Using milliseconds instead if you need more accuracy than that.

[Zetetic]

Oooh, close - it's actually days since 31st December 1899.

[Zetetic]

(Being more serious, it probably is ISO8601 now, thankfully.)

[Sebastian Cobb]

Oooh, close - it's actually days since 31st December 1899.

I reckon Jan 5, 1980 (and it's subsequent rollovers every 19.6 years) is the second most important epoch these days.

[Sebastian Cobb]

(Being more serious, it probably is ISO8601 now, thankfully.)

Yeah if you're building an interface that's generally the best to use but let's face it once it has been deserialised the underlying representation is working in timeinmilis - with convenient gregorian representations on top, if you're lucky.

[touchingcloth]

You joke but the biggest and most accepted and portable time format is to represent the timestamp as the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC. Using milliseconds instead if you need more accuracy than that.

That's not decimalised, though, it's just moving the 0 hour farther from Jesus and closer to Robert Powell.

[Sebastian Cobb]

That's not decimalised, though, it's just moving the 0 hour farther from Jesus and closer to Robert Powell.

Only because it changes the base precision. If I work in milliseconds and you work in seconds you can have decimals and I can have padding and precision loss.

They could've used the start of AD as the precision format but I guess that was considered wasteful given how many bits that would've taken up. Nowadays, it probably wouldn't have mattered (although we still have low-powered modern bespoke electronics that uses bluetooth and just counts milliseconds from midnight or at the start of the handshake, of course that's really trivial as you just deal with the offset).

[touchingcloth]

Only because it changes the base precision. If I work in milliseconds and you work in seconds you can have decimals and I can have padding and precision loss.

If I'm working in seconds then the minutes still change every 60 of them. There's no 23:76:00 UTC

[Goldentony]

because they're ALL WANKERS

[Sebastian Cobb]

If I'm working in seconds then the minutes still change every 60 of them. There's no 23:76:00 UTC

Have you considered using non-si definitions of "minutes"?


Aw shit even the size of the second changes then. This is bullshit.

[touchingcloth]

Having had cause to track trends going back a few years at work cos of the COVIDs, I wish to god that years were decimalised, or that at the very least that the number of days in a week wasn't coprime with the number of days in a year.

The hours of the day seem like they'd be more amenable to decimalising, given that 24 hours is way more arbitrary than 365 days. Once we got used to the 100 hour day, we'd soon sort Dex's decimalongitude out.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Would fuck up all the nicest watches tho. And the Casios.

[touchingcloth]

And for rough counting, I'm not sure what I'd use as 100/24 Mississippis.

[studpuppet]

The best example of this is container shipping which basically the whole world relies on. ISO standard containers are 8ft wide and either 20 or 40ft long because they originated in the US, whereas the pallets that usually get shoved into them are metric because their standard sizes originated from Swedish Railways' need to maximise their loading capacity.

[idunnosomename]

I'm travelling at the speed of shiiiiiite

[touchingcloth]

The best example of this is container shipping which basically the whole world relies on. ISO standard containers are 8ft wide and either 20 or 40ft long because they originated in the US, whereas the pallets that usually get shoved into them are metric because their standard sizes originated from Swedish Railways' need to maximise their loading capacity.

And sticking with the Swedes, there was a long period where IKEA bedding was only compatible with IKEA beds. Imperial-sized bedding would fit with room to spare on their mattresses, but going the opposite way was a recipe for torn sheets.

[Sebastian Cobb]

And sticking with the Swedes, there was a long period where IKEA bedding was only compatible with IKEA beds. Imperial-sized bedding would fit with room to spare on their mattresses, but going the opposite way was a recipe for torn sheets.

Their lighting is generally a bit of a kerfuffle (as I'm sure other European gear is) 'cos it's all E27 fitting rather than bayonet.

[dissolute ocelot]

My favourite US measurement unit is the acre-foot, used to measure large volumes of water (yup, it's a unit of volume). Who needs a cubic metre when you have something so intuitive as the area a horse can plow in a day buried in a foot of liquid?

Imperial units are all defined by reference to metric units anyway, for instance one foot is defined as precisely 0.3048 meters. So when the boffins in Paris change the length of a metre, it changes the length of a foot as well.

[flotemysost]

I believe in the US a "proper unit" is referred to as a "Chad".

[bgmnts]

Off topic but the Chad is anatomically fascinating. Is the massive bulge just dick fat or elephantiasis or what?

[touchingcloth]

It's assbackwarditis.

[flotemysost]

He looks like the blond one from Cartoons as rendered by Tom of Finland. Also I'm obsessed with the phrase tiny beetle-like stride. Which tbf sounds about as useful a unit of measurement as cups or acre-feet

[Gurke and Hare]

Decimal degrees rather than DMS, sort of?

Is that the same as gradians?

Their cookers are weird too, hobs too far apart like the eyes on an inbred person. Like they've got gigantism.

Yeah, much better to have shitty British ones where you basically can't use any two adjacent burners because the pans will bang into each other.

[Cold Meat Platter]

Their pints aren't even proper pints. 473 ml.
Shambles.

[Cuellar]

Off topic but the Chad is anatomically fascinating. Is the massive bulge just dick fat or elephantiasis or what?

It's his enormous dick

[falafel]

I hate all that cup and stick shit.  Fluid ounces and FUCK OFF.

I accept it but inwardly I rage.

Measuring anything other than a liquid by volume is just egregious. Cup of flour? The imprecision boils my blood.

Is the original archetypical cup measure sitting in a controlled environment in a museum in Arkansas, attended periodically by hushed representatives of Pyrex and Tupperware on their biennial benchmarking visit?

No it isn't
Cunts

And then there are all the recipes you get online for "the most amazing chocolate cake ever" and the first thing on the ingredients list is chocolate cake mix, fuck right off, a cup of fucking chocolate cake mix, how the fuck did you guys manage to get people on the moon, you can't make a cake without fucking cake mix

seem to have gone off on a tangent here

[touchingcloth]

Measuring anything other than a liquid by volume is just egregious. Cup of flour? The imprecision boils my blood.

For baking it's the absolute pits, but for things where ratios of volumes rather than weights get the right results I like that it saves me getting the scales out. I use that method to cook dishes as varied as boiled rice, pilaf, and risotto.