= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
MatthewW comments on The Majority Is Always Wrong - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (50)
A friend of mine claims Fahrenheit is more convenient because of "-ties". "Today it will be in the fifties/sixties/thirties/high seventies." Celsius doesn't have conveniently-spoken ranges that give users a general idea of the weather. I countered with high and low teens, low twenties, but I don't think his point is completely invalid.
You say centimeters are better for small things and meters better for large things, but neither are very useful for things that might constitute an arm-load. I'm not sure that sentence is very clear, so I'll try examples. My laptop is 36 centimeters wide, which is an inconveniently large number of units for it to be, but it's only a little more than a foot. This textbook: about a foot square. That hard-drive is half a foot (I'll admit that "six inches" was easier to the tongue, but in reality it's closer to seven, which I wouldn't say). What I'm trying to say is that the unit "foot" is very convenient for things that we might be handling in everyday situations, unless those things are hand-sized.
More generally, the words for the non-metric units are often much more convenient than the words for the metric ones. I think this effect is much stronger than any difference in convenience of the actual sizes of the units.
I think it's the main reason why many of the the non-metric units are still more popular for everyday use than the metric ones in the UK, even though we've all learned metric at school for the last forty years or so.
This too. Centimetre and kilometre are four syllables each, inch and mile one.
Mile is 1.5 syllables, so to speak, at least as most people I know pronounce it.
In a scientific context I have definitely heard some metric units being given one-syllable pronunciations, for example "mg/ml" as "migs per mil" and mg/kg as "migs per kig".