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submitted 2 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com -3 points 2 months ago

then why are feet useful measurements of height when 90% of people are between 4ft and 6ft? They aren’t. You just know the scale in your head, so when someone says they’re 7ft tall you say “dang that’s tall”. That’s it.

to be clear, we use feet and inches, and there is historical precedent for breaking things down once they get past a certain grouping, we only have 10 fingers after all. To me the difference between 200cm and 220 is literally fuck all. You ask me the difference between 4 ft and 6ft and i can pretty quickly tell you.

I find it weird that when measuring height in metric, people using cm exclusively, i've noticed this a lot actually, people will use cm or mm in places where it arguably doesn't make any sense. I could see the justification for doing math maybe, but like, that defeats the whole point of it being metric no?

Shouldn't you be using meters and cm for height specifically? Since most people are a good bit over one meter i feel like it would make sense to do it that way. But then again that's just kind of a shit bucket worth of options you have, ideally you would use decimeters, but nobody uses those things for some reason.

[-] shinratdr@lemmy.ca 10 points 2 months ago

Most of Europe just uses metres for people’s height. 1.67m, like that. I have no mental picture of that, so it doesn’t work for me. But they don’t seem to have any trouble, further evidence that it’s all just what you know.

[-] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 months ago

hm, that's weird, i've seen this first hand in a handful of cases, guess i just get the weird ones. Granted i still see it holding true in things like construction, where i guess it makes more sense, but it seems weirdly arbitrary to me.

[-] TheKingBombOmbKiller@lemm.ee 8 points 2 months ago

I find it weird that when measuring height in metric, people using cm exclusively, i’ve noticed this a lot actually, people will use cm or mm in places where it arguably doesn’t make any sense. I could see the justification for doing math maybe, but like, that defeats the whole point of it being metric no?

Why is that defeating the whole point of being metric? If you know someone is 183 cm tall, you also know that they are 1.83 m tall. If its easier to say the length in cm, you do. No need for "one meter and eighty-three centimeters" or "one point eighty-three meters", just "a hundred and eighty-three centimeters". Often you just skip saying the "centimeters" part as well, because most people can see that you're not the size of a skyscraper without getting a ruler out.

[-] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago

yeah idk, i guess it's just weird to me, because here in the us if you measured someones height in inches alone, you would be chased out of a room. We strictly use feet and inches, and then yards if referring to a more "broad" range. So you can very safely assume something is in feet and inches if its just two numbers stuck together.

I feel like i could very easily get confused with metric if i'm not running a consistent rule for default units. Seems like an easy way to get a random x10 error in there to me.

[-] TheKingBombOmbKiller@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago

As you pointed out previously, nobody uses decimeters, so x10 errors are not that common.

[-] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

i'm just gonna say that the joke here is that it was a 10x error. But that's retroactive, so.

[-] uienia@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

To me the difference between 200cm and 220 is literally fuck all. You ask me the difference between 4 ft and 6ft and i can pretty quickly tell you.

To you. But you are aware that this is not the case for people (almost the rest of the world) who are using metric, right?

[-] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago

To you. But you are aware that this is not the case for people (almost the rest of the world) who are using metric, right?

i mean i would assume so. But i have no direct reference to what 200cm is other than it's somewhere about 6ft or 2 yards. something like 6' 5" i think. I would need to know the height of like 50 other people to be able to make a relative distinction there.