Yes, it's from a book called "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader" and that book was resting on a closed toilet seat in a nation that only kind of uses the metric system in certain situations... however, you'd be surprised how much you can learn after a single visit to any local fast-food joint!
I use centimeters for certain things, but I call them "inches".
It's so impressively thought out. I got my mind blown when the physics teacher told us that 1 calorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat 1cc by 1°C. Suddenly you realise that someone actually put some effort into this whole system
And the fact that Inch is not precisly defined. "Three grains of ..." or "King's thumb" is not a precise definition.
In what context do people use metric units of length larger than a kilometer? 🤨
The paragraph on the meter should mention that their measuring error from the pole to the equator was .02%, which, without using satellites or even electricity, is fucking impressive.
It bugs me so much that they used the decimeter to define the liter and kilogram instead of using a meter to define a liter and gram
I think this snippet misrepresents the accuracy of the former definition of the metre. Sure, it's no longer the distance from the equator to the pole (the modern definition uses the speed of light and the period of transition for a particular atom), but the difference is quite small. The circumference of the Earth around the poles (so 4 times the distance from equator to pole) is 40007.863 km. In Napoleonic times scientists had a pretty good idea what the shape of the Earth was.
If we were to make a meter today, I would think it would be a fraction of the speed of light.
And on that note, I honestly think a base 12 number system would be easier in the long run.
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