this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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How long is that thing?
A foot.
How long is that?
About as long as a foot.
Oh cool, I have two of those to compare right here. Thanks for telling me how long stuff is in an easy to understand way.
What about that thing?
30 centimeters.
How long is a centimeter?
A hundredth as long as a meter.
How long is a meter?
As long as the distance light can travel in a vacuum in 1/299752458 of a second.
Please throw yourself off a bridge for using bizarre measurements developed by frenchmen.
Whose foot? Chances are yours isn't even a good approximation.
Jokes aside, there isn't even such a thing as foot anymore. All these idiotic measurement units like feet and elbows have thankfully been deprecated and are now simply a name for a certain amount of civilized units. Foot is exactly 0.3048 meters since 1959.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(unit)
0.9144 m is 3 feet
TY. I refuse to use idiotic units to such degree, my brain didn't even flinch at completely wrong number I copy/pasted.
Let's go with Ariana Grande's foot. The whole Ariana Grande is already used as a unit of measurement, so this will make the conversions easier.
+/- 20% is good enough for e6 and covers the overwhelming majority of men’s foot lengths.
For making a measurement without a tool +/-20% should be fine.
It’s all fun and games, but I take issue with calling metric “civilized units”. Human civilization developed all kinds of units appropriate to the work being done and calling the ones defined almost in defiance of everyday use the civilized ones is absurd.
Being able to easily convert between various units makes the metric system the only one worth considering civilized.
Every time I see a wrench labeled with some insane fraction like 18/32 my eye starts twitching. I honestly cannot tell which size is bigger without dividing and converting to decimal.
Human civilization developed all kinds of dumb shit we've since discarded. Please let's discard the idiotic units in my lifetime.
I think you mean a 9/16. It’s be pretty crazy to see one labeled 18/32.
When you wanna make fun of sae use an odd number on top so no one can make fun of you for not reducing your fractions like a fourth grader. Or so you whip out 9/12 and get elementary school math mogged anyway.
How is it easier to convert between units under metric? I don’t have any use for a kilogram length of lumber or a meter of gasoline. What unit conversions are you doing?
Actually that's a modern measurement concept based on the original meter. By using this concept, the size of a meter is tied to absolute terms in physics that "anyone" could measure with the right tools, while the original concept was based on a physical object called the meter, which is subject to many things such as heat dilation for example making it not accurate, and if the original object was lost we would not have a way to tell what is a meter (conceptually speaking of course).
The foot on the other hand (lol) is traditionally based on the king's foot size. This of course depends on which country (or realm?), and to make matters worst, who's the king at the time, because yes the official measure would change based on that too.
Of course that's not how it is today, but we can say the original foot was lost long ago.
Ditto for the original meter. We sure are lucky that an approximation of the measurement is built into the name of the foot. It’s frighteningly European to have a measurement name that roughly translates to “measure”
Hey, how many measures is that?
honestly curious, as someone that doesn't intuitively know how long a foot (in terms of measure) is, does it actually compare to the average size of the average foot? Like if you say something is 2 feet long, can you actually walk 2 steps and that's a pretty good approximation?
Its a tad low if you’re barefoot, frighteningly close when you have shoes on. For men’s average shoe sizes.
It’s a man’s man’s man’s foots world.