• slazer2au
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    8210 days ago

    The lengths Americans will go to in order not to use the metric system is insane.

      • @Dasus
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        1810 days ago

        Oh?

        “450 mothers ago” is roughly 363,500 megaseconds ago.

        To be fair, measuring that in moms seems more intuitive.

        • Cadenza
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          410 days ago

          From your link, I rabbitholed to there and found gold

        • @[email protected]
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          310 days ago

          It’s also about the speed of light in millifortnights (2.9e8), within a 4% error margin.

        • @[email protected]
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          110 days ago

          I’d like mothers represented metric tbh, I’m in a meeting and not able to do the math rn but if anyone else can oblige …

          • @Dasus
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            110 days ago

            You can probably propose a new SI-base unit of “a mother”, but what does it measure?

            “Metric” just essentially comes from “metering”. People confuse “metric” with “decimal”, which is sort of the point of the person I replied to. While metric time technically exists insofar as you just use seconds as the base unit, omit minutes and hours and just do SI-prefixes, the French did also try decimal time, but it was just horrible.

            So if “mother” was the base unit and it measured something, in this instance time, the advent of agriculture was roughly four hectomothers ago. Or 0.4 kilomothers, if you will.

            • @[email protected]
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              10 days ago

              Mother as a unit of time.

              Ty

              Edit the mother epoch presumably is the same epoch as all time, just … related to the mothers as above.

              Ty

              • @Dasus
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                310 days ago

                But see we already got the base unit of a second for time. But for generations, perhaps?

                One kilomother would’ve been the early modern human, roughly. Ten kilomothers ago homo sapiens was just coming into being. A hundred kilomothers ago homo erectus would’ve just been coming into existence. A megamother ago we would’ve been diverging into great apes.

      • @thespcicifcocean
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        910 days ago

        metric time actually was a thing, and it sucked so nobody used it.

        • @[email protected]
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          210 days ago

          It didn’t suck exactly, time is just so much more prevalent than other units that switching to a new system was even more contentious. Current time is just as arbitrary (although maximizing for maximum number of prime factors is pretty nice, even if it doesn’t mesh nicely with other metric units)

      • @[email protected]
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        810 days ago

        The French tried to impose “metric” time way back in the day. Even they learned that was a bad idea and quietly dropped it. The solar system seems to prefer it’s base12 time.

        I think it maybe helped give rise the the saying: “The French follow no one. And no one follows the French.”

    • @[email protected]
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      910 days ago

      They were discussing converting the AU to 1 ‘your mom’ as a better frame of reference, but France wouldn’t sign on

    • @Bearlydave
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      710 days ago

      What is the conversion from imperial mother to metric mother? About 1:1.26?