I've often wondered why the kilogram was not called the gram when the former is commonly cited as the official unit of mass? I guess it doesn't really matter much since it's easy to convert between units. That's sort of the point of metric, but still…
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
475 points (94.6% liked)
Showerthoughts
36568 readers
543 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Apparently it was going to be, but they chose the kilogram instead.
Fair enough. But it's interesting right? Like the litre lines up with the kilogram (for fluid measures) but they don't call it a kilolitre for consistency's sake?
This is one of two "warts" that I know of in SI. They wanted a coherent set of units, coherent meaning that no nuisance constants are required to convert between dimensions in the set. The system at the time was gram-centimeter-second. To expand things to all dimensions I suppose it was simpler to use the larger units, like J = kg m^2 / s^2 rather than trying to make a new unit for energy, etc. You'd think they'd have just come up with a new name for mass units and defined it as 1 kg, something like 1 prot = 1 kg, then all of the coherent units would be ones without prefixes. Someone must have really being going to bat for the word "gram" though, because now we have this pretty stupid rule that the coherent units are all of the ones without prefixes, except mass, which has the coherent unit of kg. And then also, prefixes are used to scale the coherent units by appending the appropriate letter to the coherent unit symbol, except for mass, for which g is treated as the coherent unit, even though it's not.
It's not the worst thing, but it's pretty stupid to explain.
load more comments
(6 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
A self-referencing metric tonne should be called a Metagram.
I love that 'ton' has different meanings in different contexts. Sometimes life isnt exciting enough
This is hilariously archaic 😂
More about this and other (un)popular opinions about the metric system: https://www.nayuki.io/page/common-mistakes-when-using-the-metric-system#try-unpopular-prefixes