• Scrollone
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      7 hours ago

      I still don’t get how they can live with such a retarded measurement system.

      Then I see who they elected as a President and I understand everything.

      • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        I still don’t get how they can live with such a retarded measurement system.

        We can’t.

        Scientists do everything in metric, but that’s where it stops.

        Food industry tries to label everything both ways, so we all get some minimal exposure; but this is like expecting to learn French in Canada just by hanging around. Machinists cope by using thousandths (of an inch), but still have to translate to work with standard screw dimensions. Bakers do everything at multiples of cups or pounds, so fractions don’t really come up. Housing framers use, maybe, down to the half or quarter inch and have easier to read tape measures for this; story-boards and tick-sticks are used to avoid measuring entirely.

        If it wasn’t for raw materials (across the board) being sold in nominal empirical sizes, I would sooner just use the metric system.

        Meanwhile, the home kitchen is at war. Recipe books have everyone else dicking around with all the crazy fractional volume and weight measures. Either you’re a virtuoso with these, or you’re terrible at it and burn every meal - there is no middle ground. This might explain our relationship with restaurant food.

  • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    You can remove sharpie by writing over it with a dry-erase marker and then removinging by rubbing it.

    You call usually also use isopropyl alcohol, but you may remove more than you intended.

    So dry-erase first and then go nuclear with iso if the marker didn’t work.

  • Worx@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 day ago

    Coming from a non-American, an inches-only tape measure is incredibly cursed

    • xionzui@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      As an American, I was a bit flabbergasted when I looked through all the tape measures at the store, and none of them had a metric side

      • kn33@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        I found one when I looked but it was a bit spendy cause it was fancy in other ways. Still went for it cause I want both units.

      • Peppycito@sh.itjust.works
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        7 hours ago

        That’s a tape for the new guy on the crew so he doesn’t look like a dum-dum. Until the crew sees his tape anyway.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        Yeah, a good chunk of the ones available here only have inches, too. It was hard to find one with both when I bought my last tape measure.

          • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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            4 hours ago

            It was a home hardware and most of the longer ones with nice features were inches only. There were a bunch of metric only ones, too, but it’s nice to have both when some furniture descriptions have only one or the other because the tape then handles the conversion without having to remember if that 2.2 factor is inches to cm or kg to lbs or both.

            Though it could be that whoever decides what products to stock at home Depot is just better at their job than whoever does it at home hardware, or maybe I’m in the minority locally of wanting both and preferring metric if I have to choose one.

        • DankOfAmerica@reddthat.com
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          8 hours ago

          30°F is beautiful when you have had a few -10°F days. The difference between 70°F & 30°F is the same as 30°F & -10°F.

          110°F - If I don’t get A/C soon, I literally might die.

          70°F - It’s so nice, I’m going to open the windows.

          30°F - It’s so cold there’s ice outside. Look, snow!

          -10°F - The snot in my nose is frozen. I can’t feel my fingers and they hurt at the same time.

          -50°F - I didn’t expect seals to make that noise.

    • don@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      Well yeah, if you were raised learning imperial measurements, you’d probably find a metric-only tape to be an criminal abomination just as easily.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        15 hours ago

        37 year old American here. I was raised learning both and I can and have built things in both systems. Hell I’ve even mixed them on occasion. I own a metric tape measure and a metric/inch tape measure, and several inch tape measures.

        Specifically for woodworking, I vastly prefer working in fractional inches, for a whole stack of reasons but mainly in the wood shop, you find yourself dividing by 2 or 3 way more often than 5 or 10. Working in a dozenal system in powers of 2 makes more sense for that than working in a decimal system in powers of ten. It’s just easier to buy rough lumber at 1 inch thick, use 1/4" of it to mill it flat and parallel so you have 3/4", and now if you need to do a half-lap joint it’ll be 3/8" or a tenon will be 1/4".

          • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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            5 hours ago

            Same way you’d take a third of a centimeter: Get out a micrometer and set it to 0.3333, that’ll be pretty close.

            The main benefit to the metric system is it’s all base ten. One kilometer is 1000 meters, one kilogram is 1000 grams, you don’t have to memorize that there’s 16 cups in a gallon etc. For a lot of things that works well, the problem is with base ten itself. You run into the same problems with 1000 millimeters in a meter than you do trying to work in thousandths of an inch, it doesn’t divide by 3 particularly well and you get those weird repeating digits.

            We kinda did have a base twelve system going, isn’t it weird how we have a special word for twelve in English? There’s 12 hours on a clock face and 12 inches in a foot. And from there, we work in powers of two.

            Woodworkers don’t traditionally cut boards to 1 inch or 2 inches thick; they’re rough sawn to that thickness and then dried and milled to 3/4" or 1 1/2". Which are 1/16th or 1/8th of a foot, and both are divisible by 2 and 3 and expressed in a power-of-two fraction. a third of 3/4" is 1/4".

            It works very well until someone who doesn’t actually understand it tries to contrive a way to make it not work in the same way their preferred system also doesn’t work.

            For many other things, the metric system is easier to deal with, I would much rather do physics in metric than in Imperial (also I’m American, I actually use SAE) but woodworking in a dozenal system is a discipline that is millennia old, the bugs have been very thoroughly shaken out. I would rather build furniture in inches.

            • fallingcats@discuss.tchncs.de
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              3 hours ago

              Woodworkers don’t traditionally cut boards to 1 inch or 2 inches thick; they’re rough sawn to that thickness and then dried and milled to 3/4" or 1 1/2". Which are 1/16th or 1/8th of a foot, and both are divisible by 2 and 3 and expressed in a power-of-two fraction. a third of 3/4" is 1/4".

              Okay but then that third is more of a lucky coincidence than a function of the measurement system. That’s like saying millimeters are good for woodworking because boards are traditionally milled to, say 18mm (incidentally almost equal to ¾") and you can divide that by 2, 3, 4, 6 and 9.

              And I’d argue, dealing with fractions is still fundamentally harder. They number sometimes are or aren’t convenient independent of the system used.

        • don@lemm.ee
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          13 hours ago

          Really interesting reply, and thank you for it. I’ve spent time in metric countries, and can, to a limited degree, equate either measurement to the other. Hell, I measure my vodka shots by the ml.

          Before I enlisted, I had worked as a laborer putting siding on houses, and had to make cuts in both systems. I naturally default to imperial/avoirdupois, but given that most packaging has metric on it, I can still reference a can of soda as 355 ml. When I vaped, all of my e-juice was sold in mls, too.

          Like being a polyglot, learning more than one language has its benefits, but if one has only ever learned one language, the likelihood is high that any other language encountered will seem strange.

          • Peppycito@sh.itjust.works
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            7 hours ago

            Like being a polyglot, learning more than one language has its benefits,

            That’s what irks me about the “anything other than metric is stupid” crowd. Who needs less tools?

            • fallingcats@discuss.tchncs.de
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              3 hours ago

              Knowledge has benefits, that’s pretty much always true. But it’s not good to require everybody else learn a different system just because one single country feels too important to switch from their homebrew system like everybody did. It reeks of arrogance instead.

      • Peppycito@sh.itjust.works
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        17 hours ago

        No, they’re fine. It’s the bilingual tapes that are a pain in the ass. You have to guess at half the measurements no matter your preferred scale.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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          8 hours ago

          I carry my “bilingual” tape in my away mission bag, because that way I can get away with having one tape measure. My metric tape lives on my desk and I’ve got inch tapes dripping out of the walls. I wake up in the morning and cough up a few.

          • Peppycito@sh.itjust.works
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            7 hours ago

            I accidentally bought an engineers ruler that’s in 10ths of a foot on one side. That’s a real pain in the ass. Or that side of the square that’s in 12ths. But I’d really like a fractional metric ruler. 7/16ths cm.

            • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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              7 hours ago

              My sawyer has a tape that measures in tenths of a foot as well. Kind of reminds me of how aircraft measure time aloft; both tach time and hobbs time is measured in tenths of an hour.

              Something that’s gonna tilt your head: 1 1/2" is 1/8th of a foot. And 3/4" is 1/16th of a foot. Common inch woodworking sizes like that aren’t weird fractions of an inch, they’re some power of two fraction of a foot.

              • Peppycito@sh.itjust.works
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                6 hours ago

                1 1/2" is 1/8th of a foot

                Nice! Never thought of that!

                I like how shipwrights used to notate dimensions, feet-inches-eighths+/- so 28 3/4" would be 2-4-6. 28 13/16ths" would be 2-4-6+