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Thatingles t1_j0hkdhe wrote

How many punnets is that? Could we express it in slugs? Pounds is fine for food but cutting edge science should be metric imho.

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spankywinklebottom t1_j0htpb7 wrote

What about us dumb Americans? We measure everything in 1/4 lb increments so we have a good cheeseburger reference.

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Juliuseizure t1_j0hvrrv wrote

But can't realize that 1/3 is more than 1/4... That one still seriously annoys me

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spankywinklebottom t1_j0hwzdt wrote

4 is bigger than 3 fuck tard

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FelDreamer t1_j0i18eu wrote

Why the hell am I laughing??

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Juliuseizure t1_j0i7bbq wrote

Because we all know a u/spankywinklebottom in real life and laughing is the only coping mechanism we have left since Winklebottom graduated from college (Sports Management) and is now a manager at his father's dealership making three times our yearly salary. He sells Chevy, but drives Telsa.

I have no idea where I'm going with this imaginary character...

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midnight_mechanic t1_j0i5hu0 wrote

As someone who has worked many years in the construction industry, the number of full ass grown adults I have had to teach fractions to is triggering.

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MostBoringStan t1_j0igko4 wrote

This made me remember a job I had for a short time a few years back. I was in the shipping department of a machine shop. The one guy wanted to train me how to cut some pieces of metal on one piece of equipment.

Before we got started, he pulled out a tape measure and started asking me where on the tape measure 1 3/4" was, or 2 3/8" was. I was really confused because I'm a grown ass man and have known how to use a tape measure since I was a child.

Then he laughed and said he just wanted to make sure because a not insignificant amount of people he has worked with had no idea wtf they were doing when it came to tape measures and fractions.

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midnight_mechanic t1_j0ih1u0 wrote

I had a folder with spare copies of a chart of fractions and their decimal equivalents I would hand out to people on the first or second day of training.

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Uden10 t1_j0it8kh wrote

This... this is concerning. Not that I can talk much since I had to learn imperial units for volume and weight in college. I never memorized them in primary school despite being American.

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gender_nihilism t1_j0jj9ue wrote

I still don't understand what's so hard about fractions. I'm absolutely terrible at math, but even I can multiply, divide, add, and subtract fractions far faster than I can decimals. I even find myself converting decimal units into fractions to do the math in my head, then write out the result and convert it back to decimal. I guess there are benefits to your math tutor being a retired carpenter.

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midnight_mechanic t1_j0jl2p3 wrote

It's not hard. While some of the folks I taught this basic math to were just plain dumb, most turned out to be capable, hard workers.

I think it's more a reflection of growing up in extreme poverty, in a broken home, young gang activity or childhood immigrants that had to learn English and everything else in school.

One dude I taught fractions to was this beast of a man who just got released from several years for selling crack. This dude could pick up and carry 2 full size oxygen bottles across the yard like nothing.

He learned quickly and was super willing to work his way up. He grew up selling drugs, skipping school was in a gang as a kid and only had his mom who could barely put food on the table when he was a kid. He told me he was bullied in school for showing up in old clothes and ragged shoes and wasn't till he started selling drugs as a kid that he first could afford a nice pair of sneakers.

He eventually got picked up for selling coke one weekend, but he was a hell of a shop hand while we had him.

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midnight_mechanic t1_j0i50tw wrote

Jesus, when my engineering professors were trying to teach us "slugs" as units, I was like WTF is this ancient horse shit? Let's just use the approximate foot size of king Henry as a unit of length.

Fucking slugs. Good lord.

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Roscoe_P_Coaltrain t1_j0igp1y wrote

Have a pity for those of us in Canada who had to learn in the easy way (metric) and also the American way. Eventually I just converted everything to metric at the start, did the calculations, then converted back at the end. So much easier.

But I always liked the unit slug. Though from the name, sounds like it should be a unit of force, not mass, lol.

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magnoliasmanor t1_j0kg6dn wrote

Honestly have never heard of the slug unit of measurement?

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Roscoe_P_Coaltrain t1_j0l9p96 wrote

It's a unit of mass. Pound is technically a unit of force, though for everyday use we treat it as if it was a unit of mass. Sometimes we used lbf and lbm to distinguish the two, but IIRC slug is the fundamental unit of mass in the Imperial system. Honestly, haven't had to deal with it in 30 years so it's all a bit fuzzy.

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whatsCamelCase t1_j0ky2c6 wrote

I know I’m late, but I wonder if they did it (in a science mag) so they can use the “million” word. “2 million pounds” may sound more impressive than “almost 1 million kilos” if your goal is to get engagement.

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doomer_irl t1_j0ibwkw wrote

People always give Americans shit for being entitled and self-centered but here you are throwing a fit because they didn’t use your country’s favorite unit of measurement.

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Pixilatedlemon t1_j0j44x8 wrote

america runs on metric too, they just do everything in metric and then convert it for the simple consumer like yourself.

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doomer_irl t1_j0kmu4l wrote

You, on the other hand, are an astrophysicist who has no idea what “millions of pounds” means.

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[deleted] t1_j0iwyal wrote

[deleted]

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doomer_irl t1_j0j35o1 wrote

Cool story, maybe you should read an article written by someone from the rest of the world, then. The hostility over this dude using the weight measurement he’s familiar with is ridiculous.

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proper_ikea_boy t1_j0iqrkr wrote

space.com is read by an international audience and US as well as NASA is on metric internally anyways. The people involved in the imperial standardization process say it's stupid as well, it's just being held up cuz educating all the US hillbillies on how to use metric would be too expensive for the government.

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smithsp86 t1_j0jfj0m wrote

It's not our fault that the rest of the world didn't develop interchangeable parts until after their adoption of metric. The U.S. will not switch because there's close to 200 years of industrial development riding on our customary units.

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Candelent t1_j0k2e4x wrote

Why are Europeans so whiny about U.S. customary units? Seriously, whining about what a U.S. writer writes for a U.S. website shared on a U.S. social media platform regarding a U.S. funded space agency has got to take the cake for utter arrogance.

And why do they completely ignore the fact that Canadians and Brits use both customary units and metric? Does that make them hillbillies, too?

Europeans on Reddit can be so insufferable.

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doomer_irl t1_j0j4b72 wrote

I’m not against metric, I’m against the hostility. “Millions of pounds” is hardly cold science. A pound and a kilo are separated by a factor of about 2. “Millions of pounds” is very probably the same sort of statement here as “millions of kilos”. And even if it weren’t, it’s perfectly valid for someone to use a unit of measurement that they’re familiar with when writing. He probably didn’t even think about it.

The original comment is the equivalent of an American going to a foreign country and demanding people speak English.

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