Pixel of Life

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I would rather just have a singular name like “squajibbles” for milimeters and memorize an intuitive sense of what that is. I realize I can do that with the word “milimeters” too but my brain sometimes gets stuck on unpacking the math.

    This is, in fact, exactly what metric users do in their daily lives… We don’t do math in our heads every time we measure something. We know from experience how large all the units are and pick the one that’s appropriate for a given situation, just like you do.

    When you measure something using inches, you don’t then say “it’s this many 1/36ths of a yard” unless you specifically need to convert it into yards for some reason.

    Similarly, when we measure something using millimeters, we don’t say “it’s this many 1/1000ths of a meter”. It’s just a millimeter. Don’t get hung up on the prefix, just ignore it and treat it as a unit of a particular size.


  • What difference does it make if the temperature is 79 or 80 F? That’s a difference of about half a Celsius, and as a Celsius user, I can tell you that I don’t plan my daily life based on a half a degree difference, or even a one degree difference; 5 degree precision is almost always enough.