Kara Spengler
Queer OccupyE9 Sluni-Goon, any/all pronouns
- Joined
- Sep 20, 2018
- Messages
- 6,140
- Location
- SL: November RL: DC
- SL Rez
- 2007
- Joined SLU
- December, 2008
- SLU Posts
- 23289
Rant mode on!-Metric. I've been using this as a bellwether when dealing with new people. If they can't get over themselves when handed a number in Metric, despite having a planet sized calculator at their fingertips, I take that as sign I might be speaking with an Imperialist Asshole. Three whole countries still use old system, one is/was a military dictatorship, and another elected Trump. The key here is, "able to get over oneself".
In addition to not seeing why anyone would think imperial units were easier (obviously not, sure I could look up the conversions but I can hop between units in a flash with metric, not so with imperial) even CONSTANTS are easier. In physics we always used metric because it was a no duh, just add or subtract 0s but want to take one guess what is the most used constant in your first couple of years of physics? Give you a hint, mechanics feature a LOT in that time. Yes, the force of gravity on earth, which is 9.78something meters/second squared. Or as my prof back then used it without an explanation: 10.
He was right too, for basic classes like that where the key thing is the concept 10 is good enough. Problems we were learning then became a string of adding and subtracting zeros so people could concentrate on things like the mass of the object. Sure, you could not round off like that in industry or at nasa, but that is what calculators are for. In imperial it is 32 feet per second squared. I guess you could add two zeros then divide by 3 to get a rough answer?