this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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[–] Mercival@lemm.ee 28 points 2 years ago (2 children)

My sibling in Satan, that's the backbone of the metric system. Nobody said anything about units.

[–] dmention7@lemm.ee 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Gotcha, so we're talking kilotons and microinches then?

Or is it actually the units that make the metric system scary to Americans?

[–] TheRaven@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 years ago

To further add to this, a unit would be something basic like litre, metre, or a gram. So 1000 litres is a kilolitre. 1000 metres is a kilometre. 1000 grams is a kilogram. You may be familiar with the computer byte. A kilobyte is 1000 bytes. A megabyte is 1000 of those. Everything is divisible by 10, and everything makes sense.

Interestingly, even though a calorie isn’t a metric unit (the joule is), the energy to raise 1 millilitre of water by 1 degree Celsius is 1 calorie.

Also, 1 gram of water is 1 millilitre. And if you measure that in size, that’s 1 cubic centimetre. So if you go buy a litre of water, you know it’ll be 1000 cubic centimetres, and it’ll weight 1kg.