Talk:3164: Metric Tip

!tsrif --DollarStoreBa'al^Converse 21:08, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

If you like to have fun with first comments, the place to do it is The Daily WTF comment pages. https://thedailywtf.com. Barmar (talk) 21:25, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

Would have helped avoid the Mars Climate Orbiter [1] feature. SubtrEM (talk) 07:41, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

I am switching from metric to imperial: I am 1m34.5" --Lupo (talk) 08:18, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

You mean 1m2'26⅔cm. Or very nearly 2yd4cm½"..? 82.132.244.220 12:08, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

This actually is how I remember how much a Yard is. I am slightly over 2Yards, while being under 2m, so a Yard is a bit less than a meter. --Lupo (talk) 15:36, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Can I introduce you to the fathom? It's exactly 2 yards, and generally used for harbor depth, but saying you're a fathom tall is technically correct... 176.165.208.89 (talk) 20:21, 6 November 2025 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

It's hard to fathom any of this.82.13.184.33 09:19, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

Wait, what? ounce can be volume or weight? So you could give the density of a material in oz/oz? Imperial units are really weird... --Lupo (talk) 08:21, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

That would be highly nonstandard. Density is usually given in pennyweight/cubic barleycorn. 209.188.63.33 08:52, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Not just that - it can be an areal density or a thickness, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ounce#Other_uses Strictly speaking, though, the imperial measure of volume is not an 'ounce', but a 'fluid ounce' - it's just that Americans have mangled the two together. 82.13.184.33 10:21, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Weirdly enough, the active ingredient in something like medication is given in mg/oz (fluid ounce, presumably). That's just wrong.--Coconut Galaxy (talk) 10:35, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

"...are usually effectively one or other measurement of weight..." The grammar here seems wrong and confusing. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:54C4:F71B:724:CBE7 10:30, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Better now? 82.13.184.33 10:41, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

I'm so glad I live in a metric country now. Helping people fix their terminally naff cars in the 80s in the UK was a trauma - spanner/socket sizes, like 13/16ths and 10/12ths and 1/2 and... so the guy takes one, not right, asks for the next size up. Well, what size is that then? You mean the six and a quarter eighths, yes? 😪 Oh, and don't get me started on American recipes - you'll very quickly discover that US Imperial and British Imperial are not the same (and far too many American recipes measure stuff in "cups"). So, really, Imperial is complicated enough without translating half into metric! 92.184.141.48 14:07, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Most recipes don't require the measurements to be very precise and you can get away with adding too few.or too much of an ingredient. A "cup" is just a large cup. So for a cup of wheat, just fill a cup or even looser, throw in what you estimate to be a cup.

Certain bakeware and especially homemade pasta and cakes are picky about the relative quantities (especially of wheat and water), so beware! IIVQ (talk) 20:13, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

I ran some numbers, and assuming 28.349523125 grams in an ounce and 16 ounces in a pound, "7 kg and 9 ounces" would be 7255.145708125 grams, assuming the "9 ounces" doesn't involve rounding, while 16 pounds would be 7257.47792 grams, which differs by only about 2.332211875 grams, or about 0.08 ounce - it's possible the weight is actually 16 pounds exactly, which feels like it makes "7 kg and 9 ounces" even worse than it already is. Conster (talk) 14:13, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Don't see why - it's easy to see the equivalence: 7 + 9 = 16. Simples! 82.13.184.33 14:30, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

This is an interesting coincidence - I made a desmos to find other places this happens. Unfortunately, looks like it's just in the 7kg, 9oz case (7257g) and integer multiples of it, up to 30kg. After 30kg, there are no more coincidences like this one. Maybe someone could mention this case in the trivia section. R128 (talk) 16:04, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

To sell the metric system to Americans, you should make it sound bigger. Americans love big things, and telling them a "metric yard" (a meter) is longer than a yard, or a "metric pound" is weightier (500g) than a pound should work wonders... Except against their most confusing unit, the mile per gallon, that one is a doozy 176.165.208.89 (talk) 20:31, 6 November 2025 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Of course, one should also use esoteric units. Like: 1 meter, 7 hands, and 175 picolightseconds. Divad27182 (talk) 23:17, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

I prefer 1 smoot 5 cm. TomtheBuilder (talk) 03:50, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

Wait, mpg is confusing to non-Americans? It's just the amount of miles you can drive per gallon of gas used...--DollarStoreBa'al^Converse 14:00, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

It's because we all know that the typical US 'runabout' car is a gas-guzzling monster-truck (despite the bumpiest terrain it encounters being the traffic-calming bumps on the school run) for which the amount of fuel it uses (whether petrol, diesel, aviation fuel or RP-1) is best measured in gallons per mile... ;)

(Or, more seriously, for even those of us who still habitually deal with miles, we work with the miles/litre 'standard'. And even the older subset of us who still would like to have stayed with the previous miles-per-gallon know that the US gallon is different from the UK(/Commonwealth) gallon, and yet perhaps vastly less likely to know the approximate conversion factors for that than the ones between gallons and litres that they normally use to work out "what's that in 'old money'?"...) 82.132.244.181 15:15, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

Miles per liter is how far I can run divided by how much water I consume (in liters) that I would not have consumed had I been sitting down during that time. 64.201.132.210 16:42, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

Oh god the US is more confusing than I thought. GALLONS ARE DIFFERENT? --DollarStoreBa'al^Converse 16:51, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

See Gallon#Definitions (including this related image) and Comparison of the imperial and US customary measurement systems... Enjoy! 2.98.65.8 19:30, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

Yes, mpg is not a hard concept, but to me as a German, there are two uncommon units involved there and a reciprocal. An economic car uses 3l/100km here. Try to figure out what that is in mpg. It is 0.8 gallons per 62 miles... so maybe 78 mpg? (assuming I got the right types of miles and gallons) --Bmwiedemann (talk) 05:32, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

Well, you're probably using the right mile (even the US survey mile is just 3.2mm longer than what we'd normally use in the UK).

Doesn't help that you'll be primarily used to km. Personally, the way I convert (either way) is remembering that from the Earth to the Sun is 93 million miles or 150 million kilometres (well, actually it averages as 92.96 million vs 149.60 million, but I'm sure you'll agree that those are not nearly as memorable and workable, and results in just a fraction of a percentage of difference ...so I'm sure you'll excuse the slight sloppiness).

...anyway, it makes it easy to convert in your head. And significantly lot better than the 5/8ths or 8/5ths factor most people make do with.2.98.65.8 20:49, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

* Yep, fuel consumption vs fuel mileage (kilometrage?): US Americans tend to think about range per capacity ("I put in 20 gal; therefore, I can travel 600 miles"), while Europeans tend to think of consumption ("I need to travel 200 km; therefore, I need 10 liters"). Wasn't there a strip on consumption vs mileage? Or was it a comment in What-If? fuel efficiency 191.101.157.75 18:28, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

Re: This is worse than saying it all in one single system, as it is much more awkward and confusing for the receiver. Is it really? It gives people an idea of what a centimeter is for distances up to 30 cm. Some educational models refer to that as "instructional scaffolding", introducing a simpler version of a system to help people adopt the full system. 181.214.173.156 20:25, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

Are there other comics mentioning the height of Cueballs? I thought of 721: Flatland where Cueball is about four times as high as A. Square, and The greatest length or breadth of a full grown inhabitant of Flatland may be estimated at about eleven of your inches. 物灵 (talk) 11:52, 16 November 2025 (UTC)