Cursed Units 3: The British Empire Strikes Back

Comments · 4.1K

• CH

  @ChunnyDing · 8 months ago

  I still can't get over the fact that Oliver Smoot, the person who became that length, went on to be the chairman of the American National Standards Institute. How many people could claim to be one of the units that they govern?

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• TR

  @trikerneil · 8 months ago

  The Olympic swimming pool (volume),  London bus (length) and elephant (mass) are regularly used on UK TV.

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• _P

  @_purble · 8 months ago

  The nautical mile and knot definitions are fun, because said one way, a knot is a minute per hour

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• LY

  @lyssako · 7 months ago

  A fun one that is still extremely common in its original country is the Japanese unit for room area, the 帖 (jou), which is the size of one standard tatami mat. A studio apartment might be measured as 6.5 jou, for example. But... the standard tatami mat varies by region. A Nagoya tatami mat is about 1.653m^2, but a Tokyo mat is 1.549m^2. And a Kyoto mat is 1.824m^2. The official government definition is 1.62m^2... which is none of those. Fun!

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• FR

  @FRONGUS-k5f5t · 8 months ago

  The cruise control on my car, made for the European market, works in increments of 1 mile per hour. Mazda decided to label this increment in non-US manuals with an even more cursed unit:<br><br>&quot;a little bit&quot;

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• MC

  @mcjavabelike8320 · 8 months ago

  as an American highschooler, I have never used the slug. when we need to differentiate between mass and weight, we are already using metric.

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• CE

  @Celia_Dawn · 8 months ago

  I worked at a US cornmill where the standard unit for corn intake was consistently Bushels - a unit of measurement that&apos;s apparently equal to exactly &nbsp;1⁠21121/86400⁠ cubic feet.

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• JO

  @josephcoulter6954 · 7 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWbfVcDcfFw&amp;t=984">16:24</a> &quot;I&apos;m giving you a lot of homework&quot; bold of you to assume I haven&apos;t already watched all of those videos

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• MA

  @maxwchase · 8 months ago

  I believe the answers to &quot;How do people from the USA measure mass?&quot; are &quot;We don&apos;t&quot; followed by &quot;We use the metric system&quot;

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• AS

  @astragen0 · 8 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWbfVcDcfFw&amp;t=328">5:28</a> Back when I was taking AP Chemistry (2017-2018), my AP chem teacher told us that if a question in the AP exam didn&apos;t specify which units you should use in your response, you were allowed give your response in any unit so long as the dimensionality was correct and your answer&apos;s value was correct. Before the exam, I memorized the conversion ratio for liters to acre-feet and used mols/acre-foot as the units for one of my answers.

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• SI

  @SiqueScarface · 8 months ago (edited)

  My favorite example of backwards compatibility is the Standard Candle. Often talked about in Astronomy and Astrometry, many astronomers have long forgotten what a Standard Candle actually is. According to the Metropolitan Gas Act of 1860, it is the brightness of a spermaceti candle with the weight of 1/2 pound burning at a rate of 120 grain per hour. And our SI base unit candela is pretty close to the Standard Candle, by a factor of 0.981. Yes, that number again.

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• DI

  @DigitalJedi · 7 months ago (edited)

  I would like to add the fucking &quot;smidge&quot; from very, very old-timers in my field of semiconductor manufacturing. It&apos;s 1 / 2^20 inch. About 20nm, but not quite. From what I am told, it exists because chip circuits used to be hand drawn before being scaled WAY down to etch into the silicon wafers. They used grid paper for the drafts. Grid paper in the united states had lines spaced in fractions of an inch, usually 1/4 or 1/8. The smidge is the result of repeatedly halving that length down to a very, very small size. At the time, they were mostly working with things on the micrometer scale, while we now work in the Angstrom scale, so for the time, something close to 1nm was a very small unit that represented the minimum theoretical division of the space. They didn&apos;t consider that we&apos;d ever be at a scale where sub-nm mattered.<br><br>That being said, allow me to introduce the more cured &quot;process node class&quot; measurement system. This is still used to this day by every major semiconductor company. If you&apos;ve seen a chip marketed as being made on a &quot;5nm&quot; node or something else like that, know that nothing on that chip is actually 5nm across. It&apos;s the width of a planar transistor of approximately equivalent performance to the newer transistors, if you make the assumption that the limits in scaling that forced us away from planar transistors never happened. We are referencing the performance of transistors based on as estimation that can only be accurately made in a parallel universe where the laws of physics work slightly differently.

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