How come people say 5,000 km and not 5 Mm?
why not just say millions of meters or Mega meters?

  • @takeheart
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    1311 months ago

    weirdly enough SI unit for mass is kg not grams

    • LostXOR
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      311 months ago

      I’ve always found that strange. I guess a kilogram is a lot closer to “human scale” than a gram, maybe that’s why they picked it.

      • @joel_feilaOP
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        211 months ago

        yeah humans do really need a small, inch and cm, a medium, meter and feet, and a big, mile and km.

      • Aatube
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        011 months ago

        SI also does meter instead of cm, so it overall checks out.

          • Aatube
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            111 months ago

            But that is like a giant difference in what they usually measure

    • @takeheart
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      111 months ago

      My physics teacher once told us that this was due to the influence of disciplines that calculate with huge masses, say in astrophysics the weight of a planet or the the amount of oxygen within it. Don’t know how much of it is true but the basic tenet of everyone preferring the numbers that they work with on a daily basis having as few prefixes as possible as it makes mentally handling and remembering them easier.