There’s nothing wrong with doing so. Perfectly up to you, and everyone would know how much it is.
Earth’s circumference is 40 Mm. 1 AU is 14 Gm. I could get used to this.
The moon is 400Mm away. Never say thousand kilometers again, the mega is the way.
Imaging if we started saying millions of kilobytes instead of GB.
The Andromeda galaxy is ~23.6 Zm away. The metric system reaches far.
I noticed this with vehicles. Odo has 100,000 km on it? Nah, it’s 100 megameters. It just sounds cooler
What is this metric shit? I’m an American! I measure weight in American units like the hundredweight and the truss and the slug!
u guys mesure pressure with elephant stomps per giraffe square feet
burgers per bald eagle
Ar15s per school shooting.
Megagram is the official SI term for the weight. Metric tonne is non-SI but happens to be equivalent to a megagram and became the more common parlance (where I am, at least) by historical accident.
Pretty sure they tried to mimic existing unit’s/terms to make it “easier”. So they used tonne to mimic ton.
They didn’t mimic existing units, an imperial ton is close to a metric ton, and the spelling tonne is just an alternative spelling of ton. In some parts ton means imperial ton, and tonne means metric ton, but it’s not standardized. In German, where the word originally comes from, it’s Tonne (btw the e is not silent, it’s [ɛ] as in let. Or in Porsche (no, it’s not pronounced porsh…).)
They mimicked existing terms, otherwise we wouldn’t have ever had the term metric tonne. It would have been called a megagram.
One magnesium please. yes I’m sure, only one.
In Italian schools they teach it as Megagram, since ton is an old term which is non compliant with the SI
Sounds good to me 👍
Seconded. Who do we need to update?
I’m an engineer, and I make it a point to teach young engineers that “a ton” can mean any one of three things:
- Short ton = 2000 lb
- Long ton = 2240 lb
- Metric ton = 1000 kg = ~2204 lb
And which is being used is often not spelled out, but is just known from context, and usually should be clarified. I once nearly got in trouble by thinking a measurement was in short tons when it was actually metric tons.
So my own act of rebellion is to use “Mg” when I’m writing my personal notes.
There is metric ton and this imperial shit. And thanks to metric being highly systematic, “Mg” (megagrams) is actually correct - “ton” is just a shorthand.
I like metric wrenches, if my 5mm doesnt fit I can try the 6mm. Most nuts and bolds are not metric, so I end up figuring what comes next if my 1/2" doesn’t fit. is it like 33/64th? 34/64th? 17/32nd?
Such a pity that kg is the base unit because it doesn’t line up with the rest of the base units in terms of prefixes.
Bring back the grave!
This is hilariously archaic 😂
But then what would a metric fuckton be?
A Megafuck.
2.2 shitloads.
I’ve often wondered why the kilogram was not called the gram when the former is commonly cited as the official unit of mass? I guess it doesn’t really matter much since it’s easy to convert between units. That’s sort of the point of metric, but still…
Cuz the gram came before the SI system and the kilogram is a much more useable unit. The original m-g-s are based on physical things, like m being a subdivision of the length from the North Pole to the Equator going through Paris, and s being related to the time of a pendulum with certain length swinging or smth
A gram is the weight of 1 mL of water, roughly.
I remember in some old astronomy textbooks they used units based on CGS (cm-g-s) as opposed to MKS (m-kg-s). It was pretty weird, as they had terms to go with that system like dynes instead of newtons for force. But at least it wasn’t imperial.
Apparently it was going to be, but they chose the kilogram instead.
Fair enough. But it’s interesting right? Like the litre lines up with the kilogram (for fluid measures) but they don’t call it a kilolitre for consistency’s sake?
This is one of two “warts” that I know of in SI. They wanted a coherent set of units, coherent meaning that no nuisance constants are required to convert between dimensions in the set. The system at the time was gram-centimeter-second. To expand things to all dimensions I suppose it was simpler to use the larger units, like J = kg m^2 / s^2 rather than trying to make a new unit for energy, etc. You’d think they’d have just come up with a new name for mass units and defined it as 1 kg, something like 1 prot = 1 kg, then all of the coherent units would be ones without prefixes. Someone must have really being going to bat for the word “gram” though, because now we have this pretty stupid rule that the coherent units are all of the ones without prefixes, except mass, which has the coherent unit of kg. And then also, prefixes are used to scale the coherent units by appending the appropriate letter to the coherent unit symbol, except for mass, for which g is treated as the coherent unit, even though it’s not.
It’s not the worst thing, but it’s pretty stupid to explain.
Okay I’ll bite. What’s the other “wart”?
