Comment by agys
5 days ago
Everything but the Metric System: “The new YASA axial flux motor weighs just 28 pounds, or about the same as a small dog.” :)
5 days ago
Everything but the Metric System: “The new YASA axial flux motor weighs just 28 pounds, or about the same as a small dog.” :)
I wonder if Americans don't have a mental image for measurement units so that they alway use some physical object as a reference. Sure, its useful to use a common object as a reference but I don't see that much often in other places.
Most people usually understand what it means something to be 20 meters, 5kg or 2 liters intuitively. Like, when I hear that something is 60m tall I intuitively think if it as 20 story apartment building and don't benefit from the extra info about how this is like 18 elephants stacked on each other.
I guess you're in the minority here. In Germany, everything Remotely large will be measured in football fields or "Saarlands".
I'm also European and don't get these olympic swimming pool or whatever comparisons. I'd have to look up how many m3 of water they contain or what's the length/depth in meters are to make sense of it.
Newspapers in my country don't make these silly comparisons.
But yeah, to be fair, when hearing about Starship I had to look up our TV tower height to identify whether Starship is taller or not. It disappointed me that it's not.
Yeah, height is easier to grasp when correlating in terms of x story apartment buildings.
Don't forget to mention the inofficial units for fluid volumes being "Badewannen" and "Schubkarren".
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Whats the speed of light in football field terms?
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What's the difference between 18 elephants stacked versus a building with 20 stories? They are just different analogies.
Yes I'm always a bit dumbfounded by this behavior as well. They always use weird stuff and I never have the intuition of the actual size, especially since the definition can vary depending on context.
In this case, what is actually considered to be a small dog? To me it would be something that is close to the size of a cat but since it's about 13kg, it can't be that small, so that's more like a medium dog (I'm not certain, but I have a feeling that if you lay out things statistically this is what you would end up with). On the other hand, 13kg is very easy to get, that's just 13 liters of water, and it's quite easy to make a mental image for both volume and weight "feeling" that way.
American units feel so impressive and random, it is the reason they always add those weird comparisons but often they make it even worse.
Which is strange, since one of their measurement units is literally based on a body part.
Americans do not do metric. Americans can’t even balance a checkbook. Hence the small dog reference for mental “clarity”. We’re dumb. Just look at the news…
I don't think it's fair to insult all US citizens because of your personal shortcomings.
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Sure but don't they have a mental image for 80 feet for example? Why articles will almost always include something like "that like 50 chairs put next to each other" when length is mentioned.
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I know that 1kg is about 2.2lbs but that still doesn't give me the "mental clarity" of what 20kg is unless I do the conversion.
At the gym I use the pound plates and not the kilo ones. I intuitively know what the difference between 135 and 225 lbs feels like, and I don't have that same intution for kg.
All that said, I don't find the "small dog" types of analogies for weight very useful. Why not just use the same number of characters (or less) to give the weight in the other popular unit?
Europeans don't even know what it means to "balance a checkbook", so they must be dumber.
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It helps to understand that the only freedom Americans only cared for (and the only freedom they have left from the looks of it) is the freedom to choose standards of measurement and vocabulary. This will provide historical context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk (Washington's Dream - SNL)
Huh? Britons get locked up for social media posts. Most of the world doesn’t have guns. And among the first world we’re the only ones free to go bankrupt from medical bills!
Our problems don’t stem from lack of freedom, they stem from too much of it.
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The link you're quoting, the one posted, is a second hand US report.
The primary company link is from a UK subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz and is (almost) fully metric (the fundemental units US weights are officially defined with respect to (for more than a century now)).
See: https://yasa.com/news/yasa-smashes-own-unofficial-power-dens...
Just those pesky trad bhp units left hanging like a chad in a Florida election . . .
> The link you're quoting, the one posted, is a second hand US report.
You can tell, because a proper Brit would have given it as 2 stone, not 28 pound.
That seems unlikely, a proper Brit would know that a stone is defined for body weight (14 avoirdupois pounds), Wool (14, 15, or 24 pounds depending on wool class), Wax (12 pounds), Sugar and spice (8 pounds), or for Beef and mutton (8 pounds).
( Of course Scottish Britains used 16 Scottish pounds for a Scottish stone ).
The point being that 'precious' metals used a different weight measure altogether .. (common lead often used a 12 pound stone).
Such a fun system.
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If I were a self-respecting journalist, I would've used 3.26 gallon milk jugs. Small dog automatically goes to which breed? Chihuahua (fits in a toddlers purse) or Border Collie or Golden Retriever or Saint Bernard (needs an SUV/minivan)? 4 different classifications based on size!
Is even a 13 kg dog "small"? It certainly does not feel small if you are carrying it upstairs.
It's American small.
While there’s no formal definition, I think it isn’t. It would be considered medium sized. I live with a 4 lb dog.
I’d say 25-50 lbs would be medium, small below that and large above.
Imperial dog or metric dogge?
Sometimes leads to humorous effect https://x.com/SheriffAlert/status/1221881862244749315
> Large boulder the size of a small boulder is completely blocking east-bound lane Highway 145 mm78 at Silverpick Rd
Americans are very weird when it comes to metric. They often quote mobile phones as having something like "a six inch screen size but now only 12mm thick" - pick a measurement system people !
Canada is even weirder.
After switching to the metric system ('70-80s) some things are still measures in imperial units. If you slice some ham at a counter in a grocery store, it's in grams. You then turn around and get a pound of apples and a gallon of milk. Nuts are in grams, and soda is in liters. Also the body weight tends to be in pounds. Tools are both metric and imperial. Speeds and distances though, thank god, are metric.
All this is just kinda there and everyone's OK with it, but it is an epic mess if you think about it.
The inch thing is because it's a screen: all screens are measured in inches pretty much everywhere, even in the EU
And I hate that. Wish screen sizes were measured in centimeters.
Yep, inches won for screen sizes.
Aaaand for various fittings for plumbers.
I like having more choices for units. Sometimes the "correct" unit is extremely inconvient to deal with, either because the unit sizes are oddly out of proportion with the things being measured, or the things being measured have odd ratios with the units. Sometimes even making your own unit system or going with pure ratio relationships between objects is the most useful and effective way to measure things. And I feel that people who only ever use a single system of measurement often fail to see it and put themselves at a large disadvantage.
To me using only a single system of measurement is the same as only ever using a single number base. Yeah it helps to have a standard number base everyone can use like base 10, but that doesn't mean we should try to eliminate other number bases from our vocabulary or understanding because they obviously have situational advantages.
Also from my personal bias I much prefer fractional measurements and people go apeshit if you use fractional metric units but don't blink an eye at fractional imperial or other 'non-standard' measurements.
the author and the company are British
Bag of potatoes?
If you mean a 13kg bag of potatoes, then I'll allow it.