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[NullForceOmega]

That sounds like an extremely subjective viewpoint to me.  After all, without any measuring tools at all I can still use imperial to perform important tasks.  It won't be precise, but using the second joint of my index finger for an inch is a hell of a lot closer than "I think that's about three centimeters, but I don't have a ruler".  And gods help you if you're trying to approximate anything larger, the distance from my wrist to the base of my bicep = 1 foot is much more reliable than whatever you would use in metric.  But to be completely fair, your whole measurement system originates from a point exactly as supposedly arbitrary as ours, after all, the base unit is the 'meter' of a man's stride.

Sincerely: a contrary rebellious Yank.

[thompson]

That sounds like an extremely subjective viewpoint to me.  After all, without any measuring tools at all I can still use imperial to perform important tasks.  It won't be precise, but using the second joint of my index finger for an inch is a hell of a lot closer than "I think that's about three centimeters, but I don't have a ruler".  And gods help you if you're trying to approximate anything larger, the distance from my wrist to the base of my bicep = 1 foot is much more reliable than whatever you would use in metric.  But to be completely fair, your whole measurement system originates from a point exactly as supposedly arbitrary as ours, after all, the base unit is the 'meter' of a man's stride.

No, the base unit is 1/40000000th the circumference of the Earth, and everything is base 10. It's a good system. As measuring with body parts... You're just messing with us, right? You do realise once you learn metric it becomes intuitive too... Right?

[NullForceOmega]

What part of "Contrary, rebellious Yank" are you having difficulty with?  If we had any interest in doing the same things everyone else does we'd still be part of Britain's terrible Commonwealth.

Seriously though, metric can die in a hole, it is in no way better than Imperial, everyone just complains because we don't do it their way.

[Kagus]

Seriously though, metric can die in a hole

But how deep is the hole?

[NullForceOmega]

One fathom.

[Frumple]

One fathom deep on the road to hell, you say.

[NullForceOmega]

No, the base unit is 1/40000000th the circumference of the Earth, and everything is base 10. It's a good system. As measuring with body parts... You're just messing with us, right? You do realise once you learn metric it becomes intuitive too... Right?

Imma address this right quick.  The claim aside, that is also a silly arbitrary measurement to base things off of as the estimate of that circumference is inaccurate because the Earth's diameter is in flux due to magma flows, volcanic activity, and earthquakes all the time.  And why, oh why, does your base ten system use a 40 millionth for the meter anyway? doesn't that completely defeat the concept of strict base ten?  Shouldn't it use either a ten millionth or a hundred millionth for consistency?

It's all shitposting in good humor.  Really, I find metric pretty useless at the macro scale but I can certainly agree with the merits of the system at the micro and nano scale, there is no meaningful way to scale imperial down that far so having the honestly much more fine-tuned digital setup of metric makes that kind of work possible.

[Kagus]

This just in: "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" was intended as a unit of length.

[NullForceOmega]

I mean, this is what I think of the meter being one forty millionth of the Earth's diameter, to wit, that it is accurate in exactly the same way that the following statement is:

"The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom."

Now, you've probably got a better case to make for the meter than the second does for itself, as the second pretty obviously predates our ability to measure the states of an atom, but there have been estimates of the Earth's diameter since at least ancient Greece.

It's still arbitrary.

[Kagus]

Ouch.


Also, the picture they chose for that article made me think that someone had managed to remotely hack the hardware and screwed around with speed caps and whatnot to make things physically destroy themselves... sadly this was not the overly dramatic case.

[scriver]

Do we have strong feeling on Shane Dawson here? I prefer his weird hoarder of a friend personally.

I don't even know who it is.

[NullForceOmega]

Cursory google shows me a youtuber, might be unrelated tho' and I can't say I'm up to deep diving for other possibilities.

[Akura]

Ouch.


Also, the picture they chose for that article made me think that someone had managed to remotely hack the hardware and screwed around with speed caps and whatnot to make things physically destroy themselves... sadly this was not the overly dramatic case.

A lot of the comments are calling the victim out for not having an offline backup, such as swapping magnetic tapes stored off-site. Still, that's pretty messed up.

someone had managed to remotely hack the hardware and screwed around with speed caps and whatnot to make things physically destroy themselves...

Also, this is incredibly terrifying.

[Arx]

Seriously though, metric can die in a hole, it is in no way better than Imperial, everyone just complains because we don't do it their way.

Metric is in no way better than Imperial apart from the fact that it provides a single, quick, conventional way to convert between common units of measurement. It's bad enough that in metric you have to use peculiar conversion factors to work with natural units, it'd be a nightmare having to also use factors to convert between ordinary units.

There's a pithy quote from a book somewhere about the number of calories needed to raise the temperature of an ounce of water by ten degrees Fahrenheit being basically impossible to calculate.

[NullForceOmega]

Oh, you wanted to talk about weights and volumes, not distance.  I'll bite, metric handles that way better than Imperial does, but those aren't measurements that I need to convert between basically ever, so I don't care.

But Celsius is bullshit arbitrary dogcrap and I will not be convinced otherwise.

Though, to be fair, so is Fahrenheit.