this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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You laugh but if you ever take a college physics class you’ll appreciate having the idea of being overly careful of your units drilled into you.
This many times over.
I can't count how many times unit awareness has saved me when troubleshooting equations.
Think of what your result is measured in and what you actually receive and you'll never miss that square again.
Or anything else really
It's hell to try to understand something someone gave you if they don't label things properly. It's like "I can see there is a number here, but what the fuck does the number mean"
In another thread I was laughing about how U.S. utilities charge for electricity by the kilowatt hour, but charge for piped natural gas by the "therm," which is 100,000 BTUs. BTUs are the energy required to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit, like a shitty imperial calorie.
Confusingly, most gas appliances are marketed as being a certain number of BTUs per hour, but people often omit the implied "per hour" when talking about them, and will talk of their 12,000 BTU stove burner or 30,000 BTU water heater.
Talking through residential energy use without having a solid command of what unit means what would be confusing.
Factor label conversions. They get really complicated in chemistry as well.
And then you start using Gauß and natural units and are completely confused.