A megagram is 1000 kg, by definition. It’s symbol is Mg.
In metric countries, we just use the word “ton” as shorthand/slang for it, since it is an easier term and was well known.
The only reason the US calls it a metric ton, is because they have archaic units (long and short tons).
Metric countries don’t call it a metric ton.
Canada does, because we’re mostly metric but still do enough business with the US that we’re sorta half and half
Yeah, but what about the metric shit-ton?
I always forget- is that 100 fuckloads?
I think it’s 128 fuckloads.
We call it a metric tonne in Canada.
There’s also short ton and long ton which have to be differentiated, but no one ever knows which one they are using.
Damn, you guys might be worse than the British.
Something like this? How to measure like a Brit
I don’t think this is 100% accurate tbh
That’s because you only metricated 40y ago.
deleted by creator
I only use that term when I call a lot of items “a metric fuckton of stuff”
There’s nothing wrong with doing so. Perfectly up to you, and everyone would know how much it is.
I sometimes use millitonne (mt) instead of kilogram to keep people on their toes. I’ve learned that some people doesn’t like to have their weight measured in any kind of tonne.
As someone not born to the metric system but who’s tried to lean into it, this is something I’ve always found a little difficult. “A thousandth of a meter” isn’t a useful concept to me. I don’t think we are good at conceiving of things in their thousands, with good proportionality. I would rather just have a singular name like “squajibbles” for milimeters and memorize an intuitive sense of what that is. I realize I can do that with the word “milimeters” too but my brain sometimes gets stuck on unpacking the math. I was reading Dune last night and the expression “millions of decaliters” really stopped me in my tracks. I felt like I had to start with one liter, a sodastream bottle, and multiply it up. I’d rather have some concept like “fuckajiter” which means an Olympic swimming pool and work with that.
Not really being critical here. Metric is better. But intuitiveness is one of the qualities of a measurements system that makes it more or less appealing and I’ve always found imperial has a slight edge there that makes it harder to just drop as a complete loser of a system.
EDIT: yes, internet, I know the only legal thing to say about metric / imperial is that metric is the only system and imperial is for American asshole cavemen. Oh well. Fuck me for offering thoughts from someone trying to move to metric. I should hide my shame.
I would rather just have a singular name like “squajibbles” for milimeters and memorize an intuitive sense of what that is. I realize I can do that with the word “milimeters” too but my brain sometimes gets stuck on unpacking the math.
This is, in fact, exactly what metric users do in their daily lives… We don’t do math in our heads every time we measure something. We know from experience how large all the units are and pick the one that’s appropriate for a given situation, just like you do.
When you measure something using inches, you don’t then say “it’s this many 1/36ths of a yard” unless you specifically need to convert it into yards for some reason.
Similarly, when we measure something using millimeters, we don’t say “it’s this many 1/1000ths of a meter”. It’s just a millimeter. Don’t get hung up on the prefix, just ignore it and treat it as a unit of a particular size.
I figured that’s what people born to metric do. It’s different when you’re learning it as an outsider, as an adult consciously absorbing the system.
As a Canadian with a living memory of when we made the switch here, I feel your pain. Though to be fair, I was a child at the time and so probably had an easier time of it? But in some ways, I’m still transitioning to this day!
Take temperature, for example. When Canada went metric, all the weather reports switched to Celsius but our indoor thermometers and thermostat were still in Fahrenheit. So I wound up in a situation in which outdoor extreme temperatures became more relatable in C, while typical indoor temperature ranges sounded better in F. I particularly liked winter temperatures in C. It was so intuitive that < 0 means snow and > 0 means rain.
Today, I am more comfortable with C for indoors as well, but not for cooking. I guess that’s because a lot of recipes still say set the oven to 350 or check the meat on the grill is at least 160?
The point isn’t to have an intuitive sense of what a millimeter is just by knowing what a meter is. You have to learn both units individually to have intuition about them. The point is to know that a measurement of 500mm is 0.5m without having to do any math in your head beyond moving a decimal point.
Yes but when you don’t have that intuitive sense through extensive use or being born to it, the math gets in the way as you’re trying to form it.
I’m an American in my mid-forties and that has not been my experience at all.
deleted by creator
I dont see a Millimeter as a thousandth of a meter, I see it as a tenth of a centimeter
Scale is what matters. when I measure something in meters I dont care about the exact millimeters
Coming from the UK generation that grew up during the decimalisation process, and therefore being equally comfortable with both systems, imperial measures are far less intuitive than metric. Don’t mistake simply being being used to something as it being intuitive.
We use a base 10 numeric system because that’s how many fingers & thumbs we have. Having a system of weights and measures based on that decimal system, is far more intuitive than a system that scales up through orders of distance using different scaling factors at ever order, is so unintuitive as to be absurd.
Right but if basing things on our hands makes them intuitive, it’s hard to beat “hands” and “feet” for human scale relatability.
As a craftsman, I live milimeters for precision. Very useful and easy to work with. I hate not having anything between centimeters and meters though. I know decimeters exist but nothing’s ever listed that way and so it isn’t something I’ve developed any intuitive sense of.
When I sent some measurements to my uncle to make a bed, I sent it in 200cm x 160cm. Not 2m or 20 dm. You know those exchanges because it’s obvious but since people are used to cm for height, it’s useful to compare stuff with yourself and that’s why cm is the most used measurement for craft.
If whatever you are building fits in a hand, measurements will probably come in mm, because idk why but people enjoy 3 digit measurements.
Me, my wife, my child all have differently sized feet and hands.
Tbh, as an european I kinda absorbed a lot of imperial by just living on the anglophone internet, and honestly have nothing good to say about it.
I can intuitively guesstimate what a mile, yard, foot and inch are in metric, and I do, because it’s useful in my particular corner of the Internet, not because it’s a good system.
I have no idea what a gallon, stone, lbs or oz are. Volume of itself is kinda unintuitive, same with weight. Can’t be bothered.
Intuitiveness comes with usage. When I think of a kilometre, I don’t think of a lot of metres, I just think of it as a single unit. A centimetre doesn’t send me dividing metres, I just think of a length about the width of a fingernail.
if you actually use the metric system, millimeter would become that “singular name” you memorize for a certain length. but you could also tell from the name alone what’s it about roughly, squajibbles on the other hand…
You just named the main advantage of the metric system as unintuitive and the opposite (squajibbles, fuckajiter, feet, toes, elbows) as the main advantage of the imperial system. Yet, you say that metric is better. I don’t understand. Why do you find metric better then?
I understand that intuitiveness is subjective and that how a person is raised or lectured alters the view on what is intuitive. From a logical perspective, however, I find the metric system much more intuitive as the names of the metrics denote exactly what we are dealing with (except for the case of tonnes). Yes, maybe the wording is confusing. But from the word itself you can infer what is meant, given you know what milli, giga, mega, nano, pico, etc mean. Its just times or divided by 1000. What is feet in miles or nautical miles? Gotta look that up!
Well metric is obviously better for conversions which helps a great deal. I think my intuition problem either goes away with extensive use or being born to it.
I do really like the “foot” as a highly human-relatable unit. At 4 feet tall, a man is aberrantly small or a dwarf. At 5 feet tall, a man is normal but short. At six feet high, a man is tall. At 7 feet tall, he is aberrantly big. It’s a highly usable human scale thing and there isn’t a great analogue in metric. Maybe you get used to decimeters (wait… decameters?) too but they are less commonly used. Giving someone’s height in centimeters has never gotten familiar for me. And the deca/deci thing I think undermines your intuitive point a little. These are easily confused.
I think millimeters and milliliters are great for precision. Imperial sucks below 1 inch or 1 ounce. All fraction bullshit.
So each system has its pluses on intuition. But metric has the conversions advantage and the precision advantage so that’s what wins for me.
Wait isn’t imperial the one with asinine fractions?
Like wtf is a 64th of an inch? Or a thousandth (is that how you spell that?)
I noticed this with vehicles. Odo has 100,000 km on it? Nah, it’s 100 megameters. It just sounds cooler
0.1 gigameters
deleted by creator
Units closer related to everyday stuff are those that stick around. Like horse power or km. People don’t use Mm but instead 1’000s of km, even into the million km for cars. Even in space they still tend to use km like for the distance to the moon or sun. Only once the distances get absurdly large is there a shift to either another unit (light years) or the use of different notation (like 3.14E12 m).
As a Swede, using units that give numbers above ~100 starts to get unwieldy. Hence why we use mil (1 Scandinavian mile = 10 km) once we get to triple digits in km. “It’s 60 mil to Stockholm” is immensely more natural than “it’s 600 km to Stockholm”.
That is fascinating! I had heard of the “metric mile” as being 1500m: the closest you can get to running a statute mile at international competitions.
But I like this 10km mile idea! We could use something like that here in Canada. Sometimes we say “klick” here to mean km, so I have tossed around terms like “decaklick” and “hectoklick” but people look at me funny.
We’ve had different mil definitions in Scandinavia before, but at some point Sweden and Norway agreed to unite at 10 km, which is a really useful unit. Denmark just didn’t do it. They’ll give distances in hundreds of kilometers.
I love this! Let’s use all the prefixes!
It’s always been a pet peeve of mine that Sweden is seemingly the only country that uses dl (deciliter) and hg (hectogram, but we just say hekto, just like with kilo), which are to me vastly more useful units as they’re close to what you’re measuring. 2 hg salami or candy or whatever instead of 200 g, and 3 dl water instead of 30 cl or, god forbid, 300 ml.
I see cooking shows from countries that normally use imperial, using metric by measuring everything in milliliters. It makes no sense! No recipe needs that resolution.
The astronomical unit AU is commonly used for things in the solar system. 1 AU is roughly the average distance to the sun, about 150 000 000 km
I measure my fuel consumption in square millimeters, thank you very much.
I get the joke. But it does not actually work. The unit is meter (to some power) but it is not the same meter. One is for a specific liquid, the other for a driving distance. That information was just omitted to begin with, since everyone knows what is meant with the regular units/expression. But when you would want to do that, you need to put that information back at the end.
I know the metre has been defined by earth’s size, or other various things, all rather arbitrary. Wouldn’t it make sense to define it by the speed of light and a light year, divided into even portions? Start by dividing a light year (in a vacuum) by ten, and keep dividing by ten until we get a unit that is close to the useful size we are accustomed to?
That way we could scale up, and I suppose that’s going to be useful in the future.
It’s already defined that way - from Wikipedia "From 1983 until 2019, the metre was formally defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second. After the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, this definition was rephrased to include the definition of a second in terms of the caesium frequency ΔνCs. "
Just because it’s defined as some section of a light year does not mean it’s using a light year as a reference. You could use a foot and find the fraction of a light year that represents it, but that doesn’t mean that the foot is based on a light year.
I’m saying the short measure that we use on a daily basis might be a BASE 10 portion of a light year. Not 1/299792458 of a light second.
P.S. It’s like being on Reddit, being download for conjecturing.
I see what you mean. That is just as arbitrary as using the Earth’s size or any other reference. There’s nothing special about a year.
Touché
My ignorance shows it’s ugly face again.
it’s a hard thing for me to wrap my head around, but it’s cool when you think about it: there’s actually no possible shared reference; even with atomic clocks, based solely on the bouncing of cesium atoms ticking away, the distance travelled is dependent on acceleration in your reference frame.
relativity really is!
Am not sure I completely agree with you. Some of the archaic units are still used because USA is so dominant in both technology and advertisement. People living in other parts of the world know exactly how much inch is or gallon. Just like most of the world knows English, even though it’s not the easiest language to learn. Simply GB was too big and influential and they left their mark.
As far as Mm is concerned, why would you do that? If you were making a small panorama or model you wouldn’t use 0.00001km, would you? You pick units that are most convenient for the purpose. Kilometers are used for cars and things related to traveling because fuel economy is expressed in such unit, car’s own computer measures distance in same unit, speed is measured in same unit. Why would anyone use anything else? 0km until 1000km is perfectly intuitive scale which doesn’t get crossed too much. For the very same reason that’s why we use square meters to measure surface of a home, because they never go into square kilometers. And square milimeters is pointless.
It’s all about practicality. SI system is great because it allows users to use same unit in different scale and have it be intuitive and easy to convert. Also when it comes to astronomy, there are many units you skipped there. LY is too big and rarely used unless it’s to describe distances to other galaxies and size of those. There are AU as some one else mentioned. Earth size, etc. But rest assured when scientists are trying to calculate something, they still revert to good old reliable SI system.
Nobody knows what a gallon/yard/… is outside the USA.
English is super easy.
I don’t get your stance on Mm. First you use it for tiny values and say that is stupid. Then you hint that going above 1’000 km the km should not be used anymore. Also, 1’000 km are nothing in terms of vehicles etc., driving that distance in one day is nothing super special. A car does 100s of 1’000 km. Hence my point.
I didn’t skip anything, I named some examples to prove or better explain my point.
Megagram is the official SI term for the weight. Metric tonne is non-SI but happens to be equivalent to a megagram and became the more common parlance (where I am, at least) by historical accident.
Pretty sure they tried to mimic existing units/terms to make it “easier”. So they used tonne to mimic ton.
They didn’t mimic existing units, an imperial ton is close to a metric ton, and the spelling tonne is just an alternative spelling of ton. In some parts ton means imperial ton, and tonne means metric ton, but it’s not standardized. In German, where the word originally comes from, it’s Tonne (btw the e is not silent, it’s [ɛ] as in let. Or in Porsche (no, it’s not pronounced porsh…).)
They mimicked existing terms, otherwise we wouldn’t have ever had the term metric tonne. It would have been called a megagram.
Earth’s circumference is 40 Mm. 1 AU is 14 Gm. I could get used to this.
The moon is 400Mm away. Never say thousand kilometers again, the mega is the way.
Imaging if we started saying millions of kilobytes instead of GB.
The Andromeda galaxy is ~23.6 Zm away. The metric system reaches far.
I like metric wrenches, if my 5mm doesnt fit I can try the 6mm. Most nuts and bolds are not metric, so I end up figuring what comes next if my 1/2" doesn’t fit. is it like 33/64th? 34/64th? 17/32nd?
One magnesium please. yes I’m sure, only one.
One single atom?
one mole ?
What do blind, tunnel burrowing animals have to do with it?
chemistry mole
Who let them have professions?
What is this metric shit? I’m an American! I measure weight in American units like the hundredweight and the truss and the slug!
I don’t know what a hundredweight is, but I’m just guessing based on American experience that it’s a unit of volume equal to 132 quarts.
1 hundredweight = (1 qt * 32) + 100.7, of course. It’s very intuitive.
u guys mesure pressure with elephant stomps per giraffe square feet
You say that like there’s a problem. It’s twenty three ox-marmots to the elephant-giraffe.
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it.
Ar15s per school shooting.
Sounds good to me 👍
Seconded. Who do we need to update?
I’ll call the king!
Ummm… I seem to have misplaced the number.
No worries he prefers email these days
But then what would a metric fuckton be?
A Megafuck.
Yes I require 10 Megafucks of gravel to finish with the landscaping
2.2 shitloads.
After reading the comments, I’ve noticed a point that is missing from the other comments. We like to measure things relative to other things. Therefore we should use a unit of measure which you can compare the entire range of expected values for that question simply.
For example how far away is my nearest town centre? 1km. How far away is the nearest city? 10km. How far is it across the country? 500km, How far is it across the continent? 5,000km. How far is it around the equator? 40,000km.
By using all km in this case it’s easy to get an idea of the relative distances. But you wouldn’t measure your height as 0.0018km. Just my own thoughts!
That’s what unit prefixes are for… you can measure your height in cm
Exactly!
You measure your height in metres as in 1.8m or 180cm and for little things it’s mm (millimetres) or cm if it’s less then 1m.
It scales alot easier then the US measurement system of anything other then the simple metric system.
Lol imagine a country only 500km across.
I’m an engineer, and I make it a point to teach young engineers that “a ton” can mean any one of three things:
- Short ton = 2000 lb
- Long ton = 2240 lb
- Metric ton = 1000 kg = ~2204 lb
And which is being used is often not spelled out, but is just known from context, and usually should be clarified. I once nearly got in trouble by thinking a measurement was in short tons when it was actually metric tons.
So my own act of rebellion is to use “Mg” when I’m writing my personal notes.
There is metric ton and this imperial shit. And thanks to metric being highly systematic, “Mg” (megagrams) is actually correct - “ton” is just a shorthand.
In Italian schools they teach it as Megagram, since ton is an old term which is non compliant with the SI
