"1 brick equals about 1kg" - Plain. Boring. No pizazz.
"1 brick equals about 37 baby chicks." - Fun. Whimsical. Oozing pizazz.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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Then there's my favorite cursed unit: the kip! 1 kip=1000 lbs. "Kip" is short for "kilo-pounds." It's a unit used frequently in American civil and structural engineering. And it is so deliciously cursed.
Back in the early days of telephones at&t used kft to measure lines. Yes that is kilofoot
It's also about 31 slugs.
Fun fact: the SI (international system of units) actually defines a multiplier "Ki", but it is not a factor of 1000. A Kisomething is 1024 something. As in 1KiB = 1024B (Kilobytes resp. Bytes).
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But it's really easy. Wanna know how many inches are in a mile? One inch is 0.0254 m. One mile is 1609.344 m. 1609.344 / 0.0254 is 63360. There.
But what if there are no inches in that mile, only yards? Or parsec? Oh, wait...
i tooked astronomy in college a while ago, to know how long is 1 parsec.
or just eagle elbows
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So you admit your precious meter isn't up to the task of being decided by three and you have to find ways to compensate for its inadequacy.
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In the US, we should make things even more confusing to anger the metric folks. I propose we redefine the "foot" every four years. The length of the foot will always correspond to the actual measured foot length of the current US president.
the fact that you think this will anger metric folks who already don't make sense of your dumb system rather than ruin many aspects of your country ... uh ... never mind, you're already ruining many aspects of country. ignore what I was going to say. carry on.
Yeah, and she gonna be mad as fuck about that too!
We should bring back hogsheads, rods, fathoms, etc.
IIRC some of those crazy units are still referenced in certain laws of old...
What if we defined a foot such that a cubic food of some good, say potatoes or something, is a specific amount of money. So it's tied to inflation.
Yeah but can we talk about time?
Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time.
...It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion. โฆ
โRobert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living.
As quoted in the GNU coreurils documentation for date input formats
The units are complicated because our world is complicated. The moon orbits the earth in a certain interval, the earth orbit the sun and the earth revolves around itself. Those are the major points of reference but none of them line up.
Best of all, none of those natural reference values are constant. They drift gradually, and lunar months wonโt be 30 days forever just like a day wonโt be 24 hours in the future.
Hmm, I wonder... our current standard of time might end up being the standard for a long time, primarily because of GPS. Before we had global data networks it wasn't really possible to syncronize clocks all around the world. There used to be a telephone service that you could dial which would tell you "The time is now eight fifty-five PM" or w/e because that was the most effective way to distribute a coordinated time signal, and then you could manually set your local clock/watch to match.
But GPS depends heavily on accurate time information, and keeping it accurate is very complicated. Relativitistic time dilation applies because the satellites are:
- far enough away from Earth (~20000km) that they experience different gravity than devices on Earth's surface, causing local time for the satellite to be be faster, and
- moving so fast in their orbit that they experience a measurable slowing of local time.
(that's right, using GPS on your phone is a real-world demonstration of the theory of relativity in practical effect)
..and all those satellites are constantly checking in with each other and ground stations to make sure they're in agreement.
As a result there is now a de facto standard time reference for the entire world, and all networked devices depend on it for their own timing, and it is accurate to microseconds at worst.
100 years ago people were still winding mechanical clocks every day, and setting them by the local churchbell.
Yep. This stuff is surprisingly complicated, and thatโs why we need to measure the day using a standardized unit instead of defining the unit with the day.
Incidentally, Wikipedia has a nice graph about the variation of the length of day. Itโs surprisingly messy and pretty far from the ideals of antiquity.
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The lunar month is currently ~29.5306 days (synodic, on average). Some day in the future (probably in a few million years), the average synodic moon cycle will reach 30 days (it is slowing down) - if, and that is a big if - we keep the current definition of "second" and "day", because both the length of the day as well as the lenght of the year will have changed...
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The way we split them is still purely arbitrary though. We could have metric time that uses multiples of 10 just by adjusting the duration of a second accordingly and adjusting how we divide time in a day.
Days of the calendar would be more challenging. But it's still possible to make something much more workable I'm sure of it.
Have a look at the international fixed calendar, used by kodak internally until 1989. 13 months of 28 days, it looks so clean
Everything months starts a Sunday (I'd rather start weeks on Monday but whatever), every second Monday is the 9th. Plus it has the advantage of keeping the 7 days week we're used to. Software excluded, it looks easy to adopt.
Alternatively there was the French revolutionary calendar with 10 days weeks and 12 months
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