Fun penis fact: if you tell people you’re 6.5 inches, it sounds like you’re trying too hard to get that last bit of length. If you instead say 17cm, that’s just how long you are.
You’re welcome, fellow penis owners.
But what if I’m 17.5cm
Just use Millimeter, like a professional.
But what if 175.5mm?
Well… no one wants to use the word micro in relation to their penis.
I’m 75,500 micro meters baby
Americans will better understand as 19.5 9mms
1.755e-1 m
Why would you tell that to anyone?
I feel like people on the bus need to know.
With gusto
You can see this was made by an American.
Because why would the European use decimals for their own height? Just so it rounds to the nearest inch? Unlikely.
Particularly one who doesn’t understand significant figures. Are you certain that you’re precisely 74.000 inches, without even a thousandth of an inch of rounding? If not, you don’t get to use 5 sigfigs when converting.
That’s the joke my friend
I thought the joke was that the bald guy only accepts “n feet m inches” (0 ≤ m < 12) and any other format is not allowed
Making me divide by 12: that’s a paddlin’.
> console.log(`${Math.trunc(74/12)}' ${74 % 12}"`) 6' 2"I never could understand why they made us learn multiplication tables up to twelve. This is why, isn’t it?
We only went up to ten in germany, so yea probably.
Also my god those things are pointless.
Now if only we used a duodecimal number system. Then I could divide by 2, 3, 4, and 6 while staying within the integers for as long as possible. And someone who is 6’ 2" would just be 6212"
About 27 Big Macs.
Wait I’ve checked this, a Big Mac is 3,5 inches in height. That’s 94,5 inches not 74.
Seriously, I’m an European and don’t know what I am talking about. Inches, Feet, Legs, Elbows… Lol only in america.
Historians will get the Elbow joke.
Google said a Big Mac was 2.75” in height, 3.75” in diameter. I then had to convert that to civilised units.
We talking promotional photo Big Mac or reality Big Mac?
And did you sit on the bag on the way home?
Gotta capture your brand
Whatever as long as it’s easily convertible to a royale with cheese.
No joke, I used our European websearch qwant and found a link which says 3.5.
Cubits 😁
Use either School buses, or Football fields pls.
Or fridges or rocks?
3 LG fridges. Or one Atlant fridge.
Otherwise known as 1 trump of breakfast burgers
Fuck your freedom units. I’ll stick to sane units of measurement thank you.
Personally I find 6 big unit + 2 small unit easier to visualize compared to a large number of small units 🤷♂️
That’s because your conditioned to do so. If you grow up with cm as your default height measurement it’s just as natural as your 4 foot 6 or whatever. 180cm i can easily visualise, it’s not that either is inherently better (although you know in your heart the metric system is superior 😉)
Yeah, the adult range is roughly 150cm for a tiny woman, up to 200cm for a towering man. 170cm is pretty average for a woman. 180cm is pretty average for a man.
So, 188cm is already a rather tall man.
That’s the joke: 188cm (ignore the mm) are 1m 88, easy as pie. Meanwhile inches to feet…
188cm is 1m + 88cm or 2m - 12cm
Use decimetres I guess
everyone is gonna look at you funny but you’ll have your medium sized units
18 big unit + 7 small unit
So you use SI units?
Most of them, I hadn’t heard of the term until your reply., never used Kelvin, mole or candela before.
I’ve gotten so sick of working with people in multiple timezones that I’ve just started using UTC for everything.
Fuck you for living in a different sliver of the planet. You aren’t gonna make me do all the math. I’m bringing you down with me.
Let’s see them tremble when daylight savings time ends.
Your comment made me realize how we take for granted that everyone at least measures time the same way. Imagine the clusterfuck if there was metric time & imperial time.
Thank colonialism
Imagine we determined seasons based on the birds flying into a meadow in Japan
Or we measured days in quarters like Thailand (France forced their neighbours to use 24h time but since Thailand…then Ayutthaya and later Siam were never colonized they kept their weird clocks)
Russia never adopted leap years so that’s why Russian New Year is at a different time than the rest of us
Where did you get that about Russia? It’s incorrect
I should have been clear about it being adoption dates
Well, at least there are global events that correlate to the true seasons - equinoxes and solstices - that can be observed and measured anywhere in the world (except maybe at the geographic north and south poles? Not sure).
Just because it’s interesting, you can scroll through their seasons
There is metric day and UTC day.
This is the sole reason why decimal time, which was also part of the metric system when it was first used, never caught on. The benefits of metric are that it’s unambiguous and standard, but that was already the case for time so there wasn’t any reason for it to change.
Worth noting though, parts of the world use a different calendar system, but AFAIK the Gregorian calendar is unambiguously the one used when communicating internationally. Good thing other calendars don’t share month names with it (I think?) and that no one uses the Julian calendar anymore.
Oh, the French did try to “metric” time for awhile when the metric system was just being developed and introduced. And even they decided that was a very bad idea. Turns out Mother Nature does not care about base10 all that much when it suits her.
On the other hand, it did lead to the saying that “The French follow no one and no one follows the French”
Haha I work with people in the Midwest and west coast and do this too. But I still have to whip out the UTC time converter, so it’s 90% of the work just to be a bit of a pest.
In windows 11 (and possibly windows 10) you can add additional timezones to your clock. Your primary time shows at all times, and the other time zones show when you hover over it.
I had no idea! Thanks! Now I can be a pest with no extra effort
No worries!
If you really want to be a dick, get in the habit of sending out everything in UTC (make sure you are labeling as UTC to avoid confusion), and then when you work exclusively with people in your own timezone (let’s say EDT), you say something like “let’s sync up at 15:30UTC-4.”
I want to use TAI time zone. It’s 37 seconds ahead of UTC and doesn’t have leap seconds.
idk if all my calendars around me have been implementing it wrong, but if not, UTC is also affected by daylight savings, making it the same time zone as GMT
UTC isn’t supposed to be affected by daylight savings, neither is GMT which should be UTC+0. During daylight savings the UK changes to BST, which is GMT+1
That’s 0.00934 furlongs!
0.093 cricket strips.
Oh shit.
Pitches, surely?
Pitches don’t have any standard size, so just the strip.
What? Yeah, they do, it’s 22 yards long and 10 feet wide. The fields don’t have a standard size.
Weird, I thought the pitch was the whole thing, cos people would just call them cricket pitches. No wonder I am exiled from Yorkshire.
Do Europeans really give their height in cm? You’d think they short hand it like to like 1.7m or whatever since height is one of those things that doesn’t really need to be exact and will change by a cm or so based on the kind of shoes you are wearing, or wearing shoes at all.
In my native language we say the equivalent of ‘one and eighty-five’ to refer to 185 cm of height, so basically we give it in meters.
Unless you happen to be 2 meters tall, yes, you would give your height in cm. You might round it, but you’d never say you’re 1.8m tall.
Never? Why never?
Never ask why never.
Not when it comes to height measurement.
…Not when it comes to height measurement.
Lol, I guess I touched a nerve somehow, idk
Well, where I live, 1,85 m is less than average height, 1,90 m is more than average. It’s also a noticable difference, especially if you’re in the same height range.
That doesn’t answer my question at all, but thanks for your input!
The answer is if you round up to 1 digit, these heights are the same. So we give height in cm’s, because otherwise it’s not a usefull metric.
Except numerous people in this thread say they and people they know give their height in meters. So I guess it’s not really never then, huh? Just saying, try not to be so absolute about something so inabsolute.
If they would really give their height in meters, they would almost all be 2 meters except for the very short people.
Where I’m from, some people will still use feet/inches only for heights of human beings (weird, I know), but the most common response is in cm. For instance, if you asked me how tall I am I’d say 173cm, but I would say it like “I’m about a hundred and seventy-three” or “one-seven-three” - you don’t really have to say the units. Much the same as you’d say “I’m five foot seven” and you don’t need to specify “inches”.
Well, if someone asks you about it, they’d like to hear a more precise number. They can easily estimate your height at a precision of 10cm.
1.8 is too imprecise. It includes both 1.80 and 1.89. do you think it’s fine to approximate your height to the nearest 4 inches?
Why ever would a 6’ 2" person bother with the 2"?
I just say “one sixty five”, and so do most people in the Netherlands (most use different numbers though)
Same in Sweden.
Germany too
Bayern too
Bremerhaven does this as well
In France it’s generally in meters with two decimals, so basically the same as giving it in cm
Not europe but yes, we do it in cm. Never heard people rounding up or down to the tenth though, so 164cm is 164cm, not 160cm.
176cm would be given as “eins-sechsundsiebzig” in German, literally translating to one six and seventy (yeah it’s backwards), which works exactly like currency.
Yes where I live, we use cm usually. Also height is almost always measured without shoes
Germans do go with meters when talking about their height but they’ll give you two decimal places.
Not European, but from a country that also uses the metric system. We give out our height in meters, as you said. Saying it in cm would be okey for medical reasons I suppose. Also there isn’t much difference in what unit you use, you just have to multiply/divide by 100, which is easily done in your head
Do North Americans really give their weight in lb? You’d think they’d short hand it like to like 15 stone or whatever since weight is one of those things that doesn’t really need to be exact and will change by a lb or so based on the time of day and what you’ve eaten.
No, we give our weight in pounds instead of ounces because weight is one of those things that doesn’t really need to be exact and will change by a couple dozen ounces or so based on the time of day and what you’ve eaten.
No, see, here ounces compare to millimetres. If height and weight fluctuate over centimetres and pounds, and they do, lesser units should be disregarded, right?
Stone isn’t a measurement in America, it’s inorganic material. The next-heighest commonly known weight is a ton, or 2000 lbs. Not very helpful.
A better example would be if europeans really gave their weight in grams. I don’t think they do, they use kilo’s cause they don’t really need the precision of a gram for something like that.
because grams are small, but 174cm makes more sense than 1.7m
Agreed, since 1.65 and 1.74 both round to 1.7m, but 9cm is a pretty significant height difference.
“Small” is extremely relative, I’d say centimeters are small too.
You always do it in cm wherever I’ve been. It’s either directly in cm, as in 172 cm or phrased in meters, as in 1.72 m. You cab say you’re around 170 cm tall or around 1.7 m tall, but the ‘default precision level’ is 1 cm
When using feet and inches, its fine to use precision of 1 inch as it’s much smaller unit than 0.1 m.
If one says that they are 5’11" (180.34 cm), they can be 5’10.5" (179.07 cm) to 5’11.5" (181.61 cm) tall. That’s 1.4% variance.
If using meters with one decimal place, and say they are 1.8 m (5’10.9"), they can be 175 cm (5’8.9") to 185 cm (6’0.8") tall. That’s 5.6% variance.
Thus it’s not really viable to use only one decimal place when using metres as unit, so in many languages it’s easier to just say the length in centimeters compared to use two deeimal places.
That also explains why the guy in the comic is being an ass or an idiot by listing his height to the nearest hundredth of a centimeter. A half inch or whole centimeter are more appropriate precisions for human heights. In your example even, a real-world measurement of 5’ 11" can’t just be blindly translated to 180.34cm because it adds precision that was not there in the 5’ 11" measurement unless otherwise specified. 180cm would be more appropriate but is still overstating the precision a bit. Using SI units without appropriate scientific notation and without respect to significant digits is kind of like watching a 3D movie with one eye closed.
Particularly for folks with long spines, height can change significantly throughout the day.
I use a wheelchair on occasion - when I’m unwell and use my wheelchair I measure about 3cm taller than when I’m well and have been walking!
I guess its just because saying “one-seventy-nine” rolls better off the tongue than “one point seventy nine” or “one point eight”
Japan does too, at least from all the manga etc I’ve read. Not in meters either, just cm.
When the metric system was introduced in the UK, the schools taught decimeters, decameters and hectometers, not knowing that no one would ever bother with those.
Even if they are used rarely, they are still named.
So it is good to know they exist in order to explain the metric system.
I was still taught them back in the day in Belgium.
You can round it to 10’s or 5’s.
My licence says 183 cm. I’ll usually say 180.
Edit: so the cartoon guy would probably just say 190cm
In German, you’d probably say 1 Metre 85 (Ein Meter Fünfundachtzig), or 1 85 (Eins Fünfundachtzig) to be more brief. I’m relatively certain that it very much differs from language to language, and probably regionally within languages.
How I feel about meters per second that gets changed to miles per hour and I just want kilometers per hour
M/s to km/h is nowhere near as bad as any of the imperial conversions though. (M*60*60)/1000… Or, M*3.6 if you want to simplify it.
How dare you make me do math
Mathless morons should be exiled to the middle of the saharan desert with a 5l bottle of water and a metric measure map to the nearest settlement
Jokes on you, the entire US military operates that way.
So that’s why it took them so long to get out of Afghanistan!
Maybe thats where i got the idea
He’s 6’2" but I needed a calculator to figure it out.
I didn’t, but only because I am 6’2".
Those are two separate measurements ladies 😉
12
24
36
48
60
72 + 2
74
6’2"
Dividing by 12 isn’t that difficult
It is if you are in an American public schools. I did not learn how to divide until I was in 3rd grade.
I don’t get why Americans and some other countries don’t use metric system. Guys! x10, x100, x1000 or mm, m, cm, km is way easier than 🦶, ", ', mile, yard or whatever weapon you use to hurt yourself lol. I know scientists get that, but its easy for them to convert anyway. Imagine that 120 cent is 1$ haha
I’m familiar with both, but only use inch for screen size and for some specific pipes that are made in ". And yeah, the guy from the picture is 188 cm tall or 1,88 m. Don’t think anyone use 10th of the mm for that and even if they did they would probably say 1879,6 mm
There’s no real reason for it other than familiarity (and maybe some silly tribalism among certain people). I think if switching systems was as easy as flicking a light switch, most Americans would be fine with it. However, the mental effort it would take to unlearn the old system (especially for those in construction/carpentry and similar jobs) and the amount of tax money it would take to change signage just doesn’t seem worth it. Personally I’d like to see us slowly update signage to include both measurements and teach only metric in school, but it’s so far down the list of priorities that it’s unlikely to happen any time soon.
I was mostly joking, but to use metric system you don’t have to do much, just learn it. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting I’ll change the world aynway haha
Knowing both is useful and IMO it is the easiest for engineers and construction/production workers. For example here where I am, a lot of measurement tools have both units already (like measuring tape with meters and inches)
Imagine that 120 cent is 1$ haha
It’s not that crazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_the_pound_sterling#Pre-decimal_coinage
- £1 = 20 shillings (20s).
- 1 shilling = 12 pence (12d).
I’m big on metric but there’s nothing weird or wrong about non-decimal subdivisions. People have intuition about whichever system they’re used to. The true sin of so-called imperial units is that they’re ambiguous: a mile can be a nautical mile or a survey mile or any of these other miles. Volume is totally broken: US and UK have incompatible definitions for fl oz, ‘cup’ has many different definitions and is easily confused for “however much liquid fits in your cup” so is basically meaningless, and ‘gallon’ has three values that are wildly different from each other. If you follow a recipe from the other side of the pond, you better make sure you’re using the right foreign measuring cup.
A base 12 system is better then base10 objectively, because divisors are what make numbers useful and avoid decimals and fractions.
He wants to do the math twice!
