Fun penis fact: if you tell people you’re 6.5 inches, it sounds like you’re trying too hard to get that last bit of length. If you instead say 17cm, that’s just how long you are.
You’re welcome, fellow penis owners.
But what if I’m 17.5cm
Just use Millimeter, like a professional.
But what if 175.5mm?
Well… no one wants to use the word micro in relation to their penis.
I’m 75,500 micro meters baby
Americans will better understand as 19.5 9mms
1.755e-1 m
Why would you tell that to anyone?
I feel like people on the bus need to know.
With gusto
I’m roughly 5 attoparsec long
You can see this was made by an American.
Because why would the European use decimals for their own height? Just so it rounds to the nearest inch? Unlikely.
Particularly one who doesn’t understand significant figures. Are you certain that you’re precisely 74.000 inches, without even a thousandth of an inch of rounding? If not, you don’t get to use 5 sigfigs when converting.
That’s the joke my friend
I thought the joke was that the bald guy only accepts “n feet m inches” (0 ≤ m < 12) and any other format is not allowed
Making me divide by 12: that’s a paddlin’.
> console.log(`${Math.trunc(74/12)}' ${74 % 12}"`) 6' 2"I never could understand why they made us learn multiplication tables up to twelve. This is why, isn’t it?
We only went up to ten in germany, so yea probably.
Also my god those things are pointless.
Now if only we used a duodecimal number system. Then I could divide by 2, 3, 4, and 6 while staying within the integers for as long as possible. And someone who is 6’ 2" would just be 6212"
About 27 Big Macs.
Wait I’ve checked this, a Big Mac is 3,5 inches in height. That’s 94,5 inches not 74.
Seriously, I’m an European and don’t know what I am talking about. Inches, Feet, Legs, Elbows… Lol only in america.
Historians will get the Elbow joke.
Google said a Big Mac was 2.75” in height, 3.75” in diameter. I then had to convert that to civilised units.
We talking promotional photo Big Mac or reality Big Mac?
And did you sit on the bag on the way home?
Gotta capture your brand
Whatever as long as it’s easily convertible to a royale with cheese.
No joke, I used our European websearch qwant and found a link which says 3.5.
Cubits 😁
Use either School buses, or Football fields pls.
Or fridges or rocks?
3 LG fridges. Or one Atlant fridge.
Otherwise known as 1 trump of breakfast burgers
Fuck your freedom units. I’ll stick to sane units of measurement thank you.
So you use SI units?
Most of them, I hadn’t heard of the term until your reply., never used Kelvin, mole or candela before.
Personally I find 6 big unit + 2 small unit easier to visualize compared to a large number of small units 🤷♂️
That’s because your conditioned to do so. If you grow up with cm as your default height measurement it’s just as natural as your 4 foot 6 or whatever. 180cm i can easily visualise, it’s not that either is inherently better (although you know in your heart the metric system is superior 😉)
Yeah, the adult range is roughly 150cm for a tiny woman, up to 200cm for a towering man. 170cm is pretty average for a woman. 180cm is pretty average for a man.
So, 188cm is already a rather tall man.
That’s the joke: 188cm (ignore the mm) are 1m 88, easy as pie. Meanwhile inches to feet…
188cm is 1m + 88cm or 2m - 12cm
Use decimetres I guess
everyone is gonna look at you funny but you’ll have your medium sized units
18 big unit + 7 small unit
How did the first guy manage to measure his height to within 100 microns?
Really accurate tape measure.
Lasers and shit
woah
If you can stand very still I could do it here at work.
To be fair, mm scale lines are a thing and its pretty standard to estimate the last digit between lines on a measurement.
You’d still need demarcation down to .1 mm. Your eyes are going to struggle to guess which line you’re supposed to with, much less estimate last, unmarried 0.01 mm. 100 μm is about the width of a hair. 10 μ, well, good luck.
Regardless, such a precise measurement is meaningless when it comes to height, because there’s a lot of uncontrolled variables that will change you height for any given measurement.
Instrument uncertainty will be a very small part of total uncertainty there for sure.
He used an inch tape measure and converted the height to cm I guess.
He’s European
I’ve gotten so sick of working with people in multiple timezones that I’ve just started using UTC for everything.
Fuck you for living in a different sliver of the planet. You aren’t gonna make me do all the math. I’m bringing you down with me.
Let’s see them tremble when daylight savings time ends.
Your comment made me realize how we take for granted that everyone at least measures time the same way. Imagine the clusterfuck if there was metric time & imperial time.
Thank colonialism
Imagine we determined seasons based on the birds flying into a meadow in Japan
Or we measured days in quarters like Thailand (France forced their neighbours to use 24h time but since Thailand…then Ayutthaya and later Siam were never colonized they kept their weird clocks)
Russia never adopted leap years so that’s why Russian New Year is at a different time than the rest of us
Where did you get that about Russia? It’s incorrect
I should have been clear about it being adoption dates
Well, at least there are global events that correlate to the true seasons - equinoxes and solstices - that can be observed and measured anywhere in the world (except maybe at the geographic north and south poles? Not sure).
Just because it’s interesting, you can scroll through their seasons
Oh, the French did try to “metric” time for awhile when the metric system was just being developed and introduced. And even they decided that was a very bad idea. Turns out Mother Nature does not care about base10 all that much when it suits her.
On the other hand, it did lead to the saying that “The French follow no one and no one follows the French”
This is the sole reason why decimal time, which was also part of the metric system when it was first used, never caught on. The benefits of metric are that it’s unambiguous and standard, but that was already the case for time so there wasn’t any reason for it to change.
Worth noting though, parts of the world use a different calendar system, but AFAIK the Gregorian calendar is unambiguously the one used when communicating internationally. Good thing other calendars don’t share month names with it (I think?) and that no one uses the Julian calendar anymore.
There is metric day and UTC day.
Haha I work with people in the Midwest and west coast and do this too. But I still have to whip out the UTC time converter, so it’s 90% of the work just to be a bit of a pest.
In windows 11 (and possibly windows 10) you can add additional timezones to your clock. Your primary time shows at all times, and the other time zones show when you hover over it.
I had no idea! Thanks! Now I can be a pest with no extra effort
No worries!
If you really want to be a dick, get in the habit of sending out everything in UTC (make sure you are labeling as UTC to avoid confusion), and then when you work exclusively with people in your own timezone (let’s say EDT), you say something like “let’s sync up at 15:30UTC-4.”
I want to use TAI time zone. It’s 37 seconds ahead of UTC and doesn’t have leap seconds.
idk if all my calendars around me have been implementing it wrong, but if not, UTC is also affected by daylight savings, making it the same time zone as GMT
UTC isn’t supposed to be affected by daylight savings, neither is GMT which should be UTC+0. During daylight savings the UK changes to BST, which is GMT+1
That’s 0.00934 furlongs!
Metric system:
- Tons of great subdivisions
- Continuously and exclusively use the same two or three prefixes for everything ever
Hey, we use hectares sometimes, which are hm^2
Tons of great subdivisions
2,5 and 10 is “Tons”?
The world is flat, birds aren’t real, and there are only three prefixes in the metric system. You get it.
All the prefixes are just base ten though, so who cares? They don’t add more subdivisions.
If you’re trying to make a point, I missed it.
You said the metric system has tons of great subdivision which is objectively false. Prefixes in the metric system only multiply by 10, which by definition does not and cannot add additional sub-divisions. The point is that while the metric system is a useful system of measurement in very limited situations, the biggest advocates for it have no idea why they like it, and are ignorant of it’s deficiency’s.
Let’s try to raise the discourse a bit. Divisors are absolutely the most important part of a human-centric numeric and unit system, and the metric system, being a base 10 system, absolutely sucks at that.
Elaborate on how it’s “objectively false” that there are plenty of subdivisions, especially lots of subdivisions that aren’t frequently used.
This should be good.
10 has 2 divisors, or “subdivisions,” that is not “plenty” that is 2. Thus it is false, objectively, to claim that 2 and 5 are “plenty.”
0.093 cricket strips.
Oh shit.
Pitches, surely?
Pitches don’t have any standard size, so just the strip.
What? Yeah, they do, it’s 22 yards long and 10 feet wide. The fields don’t have a standard size.
Weird, I thought the pitch was the whole thing, cos people would just call them cricket pitches. No wonder I am exiled from Yorkshire.
How I feel about meters per second that gets changed to miles per hour and I just want kilometers per hour
M/s to km/h is nowhere near as bad as any of the imperial conversions though. (M*60*60)/1000… Or, M*3.6 if you want to simplify it.
How dare you make me do math
Do Europeans really give their height in cm? You’d think they short hand it like to like 1.7m or whatever since height is one of those things that doesn’t really need to be exact and will change by a cm or so based on the kind of shoes you are wearing, or wearing shoes at all.
In my native language we say the equivalent of ‘one and eighty-five’ to refer to 185 cm of height, so basically we give it in meters.
Unless you happen to be 2 meters tall, yes, you would give your height in cm. You might round it, but you’d never say you’re 1.8m tall.
Never? Why never?
Never ask why never.
Not when it comes to height measurement.
…Not when it comes to height measurement.
Lol, I guess I touched a nerve somehow, idk
Well, where I live, 1,85 m is less than average height, 1,90 m is more than average. It’s also a noticable difference, especially if you’re in the same height range.
That doesn’t answer my question at all, but thanks for your input!
The answer is if you round up to 1 digit, these heights are the same. So we give height in cm’s, because otherwise it’s not a usefull metric.
Except numerous people in this thread say they and people they know give their height in meters. So I guess it’s not really never then, huh? Just saying, try not to be so absolute about something so inabsolute.
If they would really give their height in meters, they would almost all be 2 meters except for the very short people.
Where I’m from, some people will still use feet/inches only for heights of human beings (weird, I know), but the most common response is in cm. For instance, if you asked me how tall I am I’d say 173cm, but I would say it like “I’m about a hundred and seventy-three” or “one-seven-three” - you don’t really have to say the units. Much the same as you’d say “I’m five foot seven” and you don’t need to specify “inches”.
Well, if someone asks you about it, they’d like to hear a more precise number. They can easily estimate your height at a precision of 10cm.
1.8 is too imprecise. It includes both 1.80 and 1.89. do you think it’s fine to approximate your height to the nearest 4 inches?
Why ever would a 6’ 2" person bother with the 2"?
I just say “one sixty five”, and so do most people in the Netherlands (most use different numbers though)
Same in Sweden.
Germany too
Bayern too
Bremerhaven does this as well
In France it’s generally in meters with two decimals, so basically the same as giving it in cm
Not europe but yes, we do it in cm. Never heard people rounding up or down to the tenth though, so 164cm is 164cm, not 160cm.
Dick length is the only thing you can round up to the tens.
Do Europeans really give their height in cm?
Yes.
continental europeans who know their height in feet must number in the hundreds! (my dad and i happen to be two because of Karl May reasons, but i doubt anyone else bothers…)
Yes where I live, we use cm usually. Also height is almost always measured without shoes
176cm would be given as “eins-sechsundsiebzig” in German, literally translating to one six and seventy (yeah it’s backwards), which works exactly like currency.
You always do it in cm wherever I’ve been. It’s either directly in cm, as in 172 cm or phrased in meters, as in 1.72 m. You cab say you’re around 170 cm tall or around 1.7 m tall, but the ‘default precision level’ is 1 cm
Not European, but from a country that also uses the metric system. We give out our height in meters, as you said. Saying it in cm would be okey for medical reasons I suppose. Also there isn’t much difference in what unit you use, you just have to multiply/divide by 100, which is easily done in your head
Germans do go with meters when talking about their height but they’ll give you two decimal places.
Do North Americans really give their weight in lb? You’d think they’d short hand it like to like 15 stone or whatever since weight is one of those things that doesn’t really need to be exact and will change by a lb or so based on the time of day and what you’ve eaten.
No, we give our weight in pounds instead of ounces because weight is one of those things that doesn’t really need to be exact and will change by a couple dozen ounces or so based on the time of day and what you’ve eaten.
No, see, here ounces compare to millimetres. If height and weight fluctuate over centimetres and pounds, and they do, lesser units should be disregarded, right?
Stone isn’t a measurement in America, it’s inorganic material. The next-heighest commonly known weight is a ton, or 2000 lbs. Not very helpful.
A better example would be if europeans really gave their weight in grams. I don’t think they do, they use kilo’s cause they don’t really need the precision of a gram for something like that.
because grams are small, but 174cm makes more sense than 1.7m
Agreed, since 1.65 and 1.74 both round to 1.7m, but 9cm is a pretty significant height difference.
“Small” is extremely relative, I’d say centimeters are small too.
Particularly for folks with long spines, height can change significantly throughout the day.
I use a wheelchair on occasion - when I’m unwell and use my wheelchair I measure about 3cm taller than when I’m well and have been walking!
When using feet and inches, its fine to use precision of 1 inch as it’s much smaller unit than 0.1 m.
If one says that they are 5’11" (180.34 cm), they can be 5’10.5" (179.07 cm) to 5’11.5" (181.61 cm) tall. That’s 1.4% variance.
If using meters with one decimal place, and say they are 1.8 m (5’10.9"), they can be 175 cm (5’8.9") to 185 cm (6’0.8") tall. That’s 5.6% variance.
Thus it’s not really viable to use only one decimal place when using metres as unit, so in many languages it’s easier to just say the length in centimeters compared to use two deeimal places.
That also explains why the guy in the comic is being an ass or an idiot by listing his height to the nearest hundredth of a centimeter. A half inch or whole centimeter are more appropriate precisions for human heights. In your example even, a real-world measurement of 5’ 11" can’t just be blindly translated to 180.34cm because it adds precision that was not there in the 5’ 11" measurement unless otherwise specified. 180cm would be more appropriate but is still overstating the precision a bit. Using SI units without appropriate scientific notation and without respect to significant digits is kind of like watching a 3D movie with one eye closed.
10cm is 4inches, you’re not gonna round that much
I guess its just because saying “one-seventy-nine” rolls better off the tongue than “one point seventy nine” or “one point eight”
Japan does too, at least from all the manga etc I’ve read. Not in meters either, just cm.
In German, you’d probably say 1 Metre 85 (Ein Meter Fünfundachtzig), or 1 85 (Eins Fünfundachtzig) to be more brief. I’m relatively certain that it very much differs from language to language, and probably regionally within languages.
When the metric system was introduced in the UK, the schools taught decimeters, decameters and hectometers, not knowing that no one would ever bother with those.
Even if they are used rarely, they are still named.
So it is good to know they exist in order to explain the metric system.
I was still taught them back in the day in Belgium.
You can round it to 10’s or 5’s.
My licence says 183 cm. I’ll usually say 180.
Edit: so the cartoon guy would probably just say 190cm
I just wish people would step up to a bigger scale when it’s needed or to a smaller scale for the same reason. I hate seeing big massive boats measured in thousands upon thousands of centimeters instead of just using meters or feet, and it’s annoying when people say their height in hundreds of millimeters.
Or when knife-blade thickness gets measured in hundredths of decimal inches or weird fractional measurements instead of just using millimeters since it’s a smaller unit.
I hear americans measure tire thread depth in 32ths of an inch?? I mean it’s nice that you’re using powers of two but huh?
Yeah, I never heard anyone tell their height in centimetres. It’s always like “I’m 1 metre 71” or so.
IDK about english-speaking places, but in Hebrew we’d say “meter 70”. I never thought about whether this is strictly grammatical in Hebrew, but by the descriptive approach I guess it must be because it’s commonly used.
Edit: but it doesn’t really work when you want to write it as a number so you’d have to write either 1.70m or 170 cm (if you prefer 1m 70cm that’s fine but it’s two numbers)
I also don’t really know about English-speaking places, in writing we also go for 1,70 m over here
In my language 100 is just tree letters so most of the people just say 170 insteand of meter 70 because its shorter
7.4 decainches
Mathless morons should be exiled to the middle of the saharan desert with a 5l bottle of water and a metric measure map to the nearest settlement
Jokes on you, the entire US military operates that way.
So that’s why it took them so long to get out of Afghanistan!
Maybe thats where i got the idea
He’s 6’2" but I needed a calculator to figure it out.
I didn’t, but only because I am 6’2".
Those are two separate measurements ladies 😉
12
24
36
48
60
72 + 2
74
