#americans will use anything but the metric system to measure

[boyheros]

One thing that is always funny to me about FNAF SB is the Freddy hatch. like I can suspend my disbelief that Gregory can fit in there sure but isn't there some voice line about how it's for gifts and birthday cakes or something. this is my son Gregory he is the size of perhaps a very large birthday cake

[victusinveritas]

[ahria-lethe]

Three Sentence Fic Challenge Prompt: Bones Fandom: None/Original fiction Warnings: None The woman hums as she balances the point of the shovel on her boot. She looks out over the small meadow and wonders idly how many pickup trucks worth of bones are out there. At least one, she thinks, but there will be so many more by the time she’s done.

[ered]

Today I learned: USA uses a different system for numbering teeth than pretty much the rest of the world

[halfricanloveyou]

…the size of 3 bagels?

[nanzyn]

ao3 is still down (;-;) so now I'm browsing b-list documentary series on my mom's discovery+ for anything that has to do with planes and/or plane crashes

[stuffnthangsss]

when the gamer righteous rage is so strong it makes ur British ass start using American units of measurement. 🤣🤣

“Americans will use anything but the metric system” ahh word choices 😭😂

[mylittleredgirl]

today i'm thinking about b5 worldbuilding choices that seem like they were deliberately chosen to differentiate it from star trek. (this is a joyful statement, by the way, They Both Look Nice.gif)

i'm not talking about hyperspace/jumpgate technology, which is way too structurally load-bearing to think of as just Not Warp Drive.

it's more the small-ticket differences, like earthforce using american measurements (when the real life american military uses the metric system), and the sometimes conspicuous absence of the sci-fi technologies that are most iconically identified with star trek: transporters, replicators, all-purpose tricorders... and phasers with a stun setting, which is where things get kinda fucked up.

the sci-fi gun filling the phaser niche on b5 is the PPG. it's also a bloodless energy weapon, but it only has one setting, which is at least as deadly as a modern gun (i say "at least" because of how often someone is "killed instantly" with a single shot). officers are not armed with a less-lethal option.

in season one, it's routinely emphasized that no one except earth force personnel can have weapons of any kind on the station. the ban is pretty hardcore. not even religious ceremonial knives are allowed, there are active scans of everything coming on board, and security has the right to check for weapons even in the "foreign soil" of ambassadorial quarters.

there are a quarter of a million people here on any given day, mostly civilians, many of them aliens. there's a backdrop of petty crime, mostly theft and fistfights. occasionally someone gets stabbed with a homemade shank. security has Shit To Do! people to arrest, and so on. but the total weapons ban means that in the vast majority of cases, anyone that security can expect to encounter, especially inside the station (vs. the customs area) will be unarmed.

and this all seems like a recipe for disaster. a human in uniform killing an unarmed alien bystander (or a suspected petty criminal who hasn't been charged with anything) is going to be a problem for the Don't Start Wars With Aliens station!! of course the initial peace train derails mid-series, but at the beginning, sinclair is really holding on to the goal of peace by his fingernails. you would think that both he and earthgov (who Really want to keep earth out of war) would prefer that the random dumbasses in security carry a non-lethal option as a first-line weapon, even if they are also armed with a backup PPG... which implies that the humans in the b5 universe just never bothered to work on this technology.

meanwhile, in the real world, police tasers came into use in 1993, at the exact same time as b5 started. the idea that cops should have a way to subdue someone resisting arrest without shooting them was a pressing concern in the national conversation... so somehow it ends up being worse than just picking american riot cops off the street and sticking them in space. to us at home, especially in the 2020's, it fits in with the rest of the "hey, don't you and the good guys think this is kinda fucked up?" stuff, but it's not treated that way, because the good guys don't notice it at all (that's honestly a theme with law enforcement issues in b5 in general, but that's another post).

which is why i wonder if it was a Not Like Star Trek choice early on to avoid "set phasers to stun," and it just never came up again.

[physalian]

On Using Measurements and Metrics in Fantasy

This is what *I* do and what I find more immersive, easier to write, less world-bending, and more productive: I don’t use actual metric or imperial measurement systems. Why?

Personally I don’t like seeing a world completely different than our own referencing an Earth-bound measurement system (but when I must, I use metric even though I’m American).

Some people don’t have a useful frame of reference for how big something actually is if you just throw big numbers at them. Or even big units. Yeah I know a ‘football’ field is big, but that’s a very foggy and useless ‘big’ if I don't actually watch the sport and see it on a daily basis.

Specific numbers end up seeming more important than they are, whether you’re giving weights, lengths, times, etc, because you got specific. 24 hours won’t raise any brows but 22 hours will. And you just open yourself up to plot holes getting needlessly specific. You’re inviting your readers to do the math and if *you* didn’t do the math, they will find out about it.

This is for fantasy, not any other genre, although I’d still rely on vague numbers anyway unless I’m writing something super sciency where the math is important. Anything from sports to rocket science.

So what I do instead:

Give you measurements you can reference yourself. If I have a tiny fantasy macguffin, it’s about a pinkie finger wide, not 2cm. If I have a sci-fi ship, it’s about two houses/stories tall, not 20ft. It’s a puncture wound the size of a fist, not 4in. It’s a bed small enough for the character to sprawl and still hang off. It’s shoes that can fit in the palm of their hands.

Why I think this works better:

I really suck at converting numbers to actual measurements. Tell me to measure 4 inches between my hands and I’ll give you a gap +/- 2. But the size of a fist? Well I’ve got two right here, now I know what you’re talking about. Hands aren’t all the same size, but for me reading, that’s all I need to know. Do not make me bust out a tape measure or google to properly appreciate the scale of a thing in your book.

Outside of letting my characters give rough time estimates (e.g. a journey taking maybe 2 weeks) because they don’t know themselves, specific numbers aren’t very useful.

If you pick the right size comparison (picking the right allegory), it’ll read more immersive and less sterile. A character just got shot. Is the wound 1 cm, the size of a pencil, or the size of the fingers trying to dig the bullet out? A character is trapped in a criminally small cell. Is it 5 feet wide, or is it so small, they can’t even stretch out fully? A character has to make an incredible shot with a gun or a bow. Is their target 100ft away, or is it an ant on the horizon, is the target’s head the size of a marble? A character is about to fall, is the drop 800ft, or is it so far, they can’t even see the bottom? So far there’s clouds at the bottom? So far the river below is thin as a hair? The biggest lake in the region might be 4 miles across, but more importantly, standing on the bank feels like standing at the coast, cause that there’s an ocean. A tower might be 60ft tall, but more importantly, it gives you vertigo and seems to sway in the wind and it’s taller than every other structure around.

I think this also works with character descriptions. My character has no idea how long he’s been held captive, but his hair has grown out over his eyes to cue you in on the passage of time. Or my character isn’t 4’11, but her head doesn’t reach her boyfriend’s chest. Or, my character has some truly massive muscles, biceps like this other dude’s head. My character has an ugly scar from a nasty knife fight. It’s not eight inches across, but the person touching it can’t even cover it with their whole hand. This character has lost a lot of blood, not 1 liter, but enough that their clothes are dripping with it and the carpet can’t soak it all up.

Generally, the actual number isn’t the most important detail your audience wants to take away from the page, it’s what that metric now means for the scene. A 4ft cell means nothing to me, but a cell so small, my character might go crazy from claustrophobia is important.

And, also, maybe your characters also suck at gauging metrics. I have a character who’s good with horses who’ll give you their heights in hands, but another who’ll just say that one’s so tall, he can’t see over her shoulders.

When the characters need to know the numbers, give the numbers. If you have two people building something, letting them toss weights and lengths back and forth makes sense. But when it’s only the audience that needs to know the numbers, consider coming up with some other way to convey them.

[beggars-opera]

“Americans will use anything but the metric system” I murmur as I see my friend measuring her child in sub sandwiches

[rainedragon]

Shopping online can be a struggle. I know I personally am particularly bad at figuring out how big something is or isn’t from the photos and/or measurements, and so many lolita items have to be bought online because in person sales are so rare. This past weekend I attended Fanime in California and had the luxury of being able to see a bunch of things in person to see their actual size. Now, I’m American, and we all know that Americans will use anything else except the metric system to measure things. Which brings me to this month’s Bibliotheca theme: Banana (for scale).

Keep Reading....

[doctorslippery]

We Americans will use anything as a measurement to avoid the metric system.

[hamletthedane]

“Americans will use anything but the metric system to measure”

Listen, Thomas Jefferson listed “two wine glasses of milk” as a key ingredient in his handwritten macaroni recipe in 1807, so at least we come by it honestly.

[fishing-lesbian-catgirl]

This hardly matters for anything but pointless online discourse, but I feel like some of you should be aware of this. Even if you somehow managed to convince them that metric is a better system by calling them stupid online, Americans who defend imperial units wouldn’t be able to switch to metric if they wanted to because everything in the country would still use imperial.

I wholeheartedly agree that having easily convertible units on a simple base 10 system is a better designed system, but if I try and give someone measurements in metric I’m just going to annoy them because they now need to convert it to imperial. I could admit that I do think Celsius being a 0 to 100 scale based on water freezing and boiling temperature is a better basis for a temperature scale than uh this

but it doesn’t matter because everything that lists temperature from cooking to weather for where I live is in Fahrenheit, and if I told someone the temperature in Celsius they’d think I’m an asshole. I don’t want to convert the temperature that’s in Fahrenheit in a recipe book to Celsius just to feel smart because my oven is still going to be in Fahrenheit and the conversion would be a waste of time.

Do I think that the US should switch to metric? Of course! But considering the millions of cars, ovens, thermometers, and basically everything else that’s measured in this country is in imperial that sounds like an incredibly large amount of work to do when imperial is still a perfectly functional system of measurement even if it’s numbers don’t convert between each other cleanly. And I seriously wouldn’t want to be on the roads when speed limit signs and speedometers stopped being consistently in the same units

[sea-salted-wolverine]

I'm new to hunting and your post about suppressors made me curious, if you don't mind divulging: what sort of cartridges do you guys use for all the stuff y'all hunt up there? Particularly moose? I'm definitely only hunting whitetail for a long time yet because I'm quite inexperienced and cartridges are so confusing.

Alright so I have good news and bad news.

Good news: Cartridges are not nearly as complicated as they seem.

Bad news: The organization of rifle and handgun cartridges is a fucking nightmare because they use Metric, Imperial, and i/another/i measuring system. All at the same time. On the same damn box. And that's why the whole thing seems complicated.

So let's start with a simple bit first, and we can work our way up to the complex nonsense.

So, your cartridge, also called a round, has four parts.

The bullet itself

The shell, also called a casing, also referred to as brass

The gunpowder

The primer

We're going to pretend that's a bulleted list and the rest is going under a readmore

General mechanics: trigger pull makes the firing pin hit the primer, which works more or less like one of those stomp rocks fireworks. The primer ignites the gunpowder which explodes and sends the bullet down the barrel of the gun. There are different ways to clear the action and reload, I'm going to assume you have a bolt action rifle, and that you know how that works.

So the shell is what defines the caliber of the cartridge and what gun it can go into. Some are measured in millimeters and some are measured in thousandths of an inch. Why? Because fuck you that's why. It is not even as simple as American companies sticking to Imperial and everyone else using metric because specific sizes have been standardized over the years and now everyone produces everything. Some shells are just old designs that have been modified, I think it's the 6.5 which is just a .308 cartridge that's been cut down.

(Remember that hyperfixation by association i mentioned earlier? Sunshineman took over the living room and is resizing .223 shells into 300 blackout. By hand.)

But the shell is just the bucket that holds everything together and fits in the chamber of the gun. The thing that controls the energy output of the gun is the amount of gunpowder and the amount of bullet you are using. If you have a tiny bullet and a lot of gunpowder that bullet will go very fast. But it doesn't have enough mass to really transfer that energy into whatever it hits.

Both the bullet and the gunpowder are measured in grains. It is a measurement of weight, and I don't know what it converts to, but I don't actually need to because gunpowder and bullets are only ever measured in grains. If you are buying bullets, like a normal human being, the grain listed on the box will be the weight of the bullet. The box will also have a muzzle velocity listed, the speed at which the bullet comes out of the gun. This is more useful information than just telling you how much gunpowder is in the round, because different casing shapes and bullet compositions will make that powder react differently.

I am going to talk about wound channels and bullet expansion now, so if you are squeamish this is the place to tap out.

So, a bullet hitting a living body does more than just poke a hole. The energy transferred to the tissue by the bullet creates a hydrostatic shock, basically a ripple through the water inside the cells. As you might imagine this is bad for the cells and turns them into goo. The goo is referred to as the bloodshot meat, and depending on your processing standards of the meat, it is generally discarded as inedible.

However, if the bullet remains perfectly intact and transfers no energy and only pokes a hole, unless you had a perfect shot on a vital organ, the animal will usually just walk away. This is why bullets are made out of lead and copper, anything harder would simply go through. The lead squishes or "mushrooms" and the copper which is just slightly harder, controls where the expansion of the bullet goes.

OK, so now that I've rambled on about cartridge mechanics for several paragraphs, I'm actually gonna answer your question. The cartridges I used to hunt vary wildly based on what I am hunting. General wisdom is You need a gun and a cartridge big enough for the biggest animal you would need to shoot. For me that is a grizzly bear which is not unlike shooting a bus if a bus had claws and teeth and a million years of predatory instinct and the ability to just sit on you and squish you to death if they got annoyed.

But I am usually not hunting bear. So usually what I do is I have a Glock 29, which is a sub compact 10 mil, in a chest holster and a rifle more suited to whatever I'm hunting. The glock honestly sucks to shoot and it is a break glass in case of emergency situation, because it is literally the least amount of gun for the maximum possible bullet.

I also have a 6.5 Creedmoor which is too small for bear or moose, but it is the only other gun that is actually mine and not borrowed from various family members. It works for caribou if I use a solid copper 140 grain bullet and it's great for varmint. My original idea for the gun was goat hunts but I can't convince anyone to go with me and I'm not dumb enough to try a solo hunt.

The 6.5 Creedmoor also has the virtue of being a very well marketed gun. The 6.5 swede has been around for 120 years and is not markedly different than the 6.5 Creedmoor, but a handful of years ago somebody got the right idea to market this thing as a target round for a high precision gun with a mild recoil. So now every bro who thinks he's Chris Kyle has one, which is annoying, but you can always find ammo for this thing because its so popular. It is a small and relatively underpowered gun, but I am a small person and as long as I am hunting small things I feel no need to drag a cannon with me over hill and dale.

As far as hunting for bear and moose go, the rounds used are .308 and .223. I'm sure other people use other things but that's what I'm used to. I would have to check on grain size, but I'm inclined to guess it's up around 200. Those are almost never solo hunts, simply because there's so much work associated with butchering and processing the animal, but also because you really want backup if things go sideways.

Oh, and I use a .22 for birds. And biathlon. That round is so tiny that the entire cartridge is the size of my pinky fingernail and the primer is built directly into the shell rather than being its own thing.

[maklodes]

Americans traditionally measure the fuel economy of their cars in miles per gallon. Europeans tend to use liters/100 km. Americans not only use their customary unit rather than metric, but also have a measurement that is reciprocal to the European one. (To convert one to the other, divide 235.215 by the number you already have – although official stats may still not be comparable, because the U.S. and Europe use different test-routines to determine city/highway mileage. FWIW, I’ve heard that both U.S. and European tests are too optimistic about fuel economy compared to the real world, but European tests are a little more optimistic and further from reality.)

I think metric is better in general (but Europeans really should have done liters/1000 km! Then their measurements would have two digits of precision for typical modern sedans, crossovers, and such without going past a decimal point, plus 10^6 m is a better metric distance standard than 10^5 m.), but fuel per distance and distance per fuel both have arguments in their favor: do you want to know how far you can go on a tank of gas (American), or how much gas you’ll need to go a given distance (European)? Is it better to have bigger numbers be better, so good fuel economy is viscerally impressive in the same way as high horsepower (American), or is it better to have a number directly proportional to fuel consumption, so it’s obvious that going from 12 L/100km to 6 L/100km is twice as important as going from 6L/100km to 3L/100 km, whereas in the American system it’s less readily apparent that going from 19 MPG to 38 MPG saves twice as much fuel as going from 38 to 76 MPG? (assuming constant distances) I think the European system of volume over distance is probably somewhat more sensible on the whole, but not as clearcut as the metric vs customary issue.

What strikes me as interesting, though, is to consider the European system: liters per 100 km. That’s volume – x^3 – over distance – x. Phrased like that, you can see the immediate temptation: what if we reduce x^3/x to x^2? Now our units of fuel economy are in area. If we have a vehicle that uses 6 L/100 Km, we can phrase that as 6 * 10^-3 m^3 / 10^5 m, which is 6 * 10^-8 m^2, about 6% of a square millimeter.

Does that actually mean anything, though, or is it just an artifact of misused dimensional analysis, like claiming that torque can be measured in joules because newtons * meters = joules, when really torque just isn’t energy? I think the area measurement of fuel economy actually does have a physical interpretation: if you were driving, and a tiny filament of liquid gasoline with this cross-sectional area traced your route, then that filament of gasoline would be approximately enough fuel for your trip.

I can’t think of a physically intuitive explanation of what the dimensionally-reduced American measure of efficiency (reciprocal area) is, though.