• Bianca_0089@lemmy.today
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    5 months ago

    I just wish people would step up to a bigger scale when it’s needed or to a smaller scale for the same reason. I hate seeing big massive boats measured in thousands upon thousands of centimeters instead of just using meters or feet, and it’s annoying when people say their height in hundreds of millimeters.

    Or when knife-blade thickness gets measured in hundredths of decimal inches or weird fractional measurements instead of just using millimeters since it’s a smaller unit.

    • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 months ago

      I hear americans measure tire thread depth in 32ths of an inch?? I mean it’s nice that you’re using powers of two but huh?

    • gentooer@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      Yeah, I never heard anyone tell their height in centimetres. It’s always like “I’m 1 metre 71” or so.

      • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 months ago

        IDK about english-speaking places, but in Hebrew we’d say “meter 70”. I never thought about whether this is strictly grammatical in Hebrew, but by the descriptive approach I guess it must be because it’s commonly used.

        Edit: but it doesn’t really work when you want to write it as a number so you’d have to write either 1.70m or 170 cm (if you prefer 1m 70cm that’s fine but it’s two numbers)

      • srecko@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        In my language 100 is just tree letters so most of the people just say 170 insteand of meter 70 because its shorter