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Metric users, do you have handy rhymes or mnemonics to help you convert from American to kilos on the fly?

Do you convert miles, pounds, inches, etc into the Metric system on the fly?

  • Yeah, I do the conversion in my head and keep reading

    Votes: 4 36.4%
  • No, it tells me the post is by an American and is safe to ignore

    Votes: 7 63.6%
  • I'm an American and feel almost as selfconscious about my measurements as I do about my circumcision

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    11

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
The formula to roughly estimate the conversion from kilograms to pounds is to multiply the kilograms by 2.2 or to divide the pounds by 2.2.

There are approximately 1.6 kilometers in a mile.

American entertainment and media is chock-full of our Imperial measurements, whether as shorthand or as explicit description. And I don't typically see Americans self-consciously add the kilometers or kilograms or centimeters or whatever in case a non-American happens to be reading. So in order to follow along, does everyone else just convert in your heads while the Americans keep using miles and pounds?

For instance, a kid learns The Alphabet Song to help memorize their letters. Do non-Americans learn a Convert The American Measurement Propaganda nursery rhyme or song that is taught at a young age?
 
Roughly 2.5 cm to an inch.
'a bit less' from meters to yards
no fucking clue about ounces and oz and all that nonsense. (wtf is 'an eight?')
30 cm to a foot

but let's be honest it would just be better if y'all got less stubborn and just went metric, maybe structure y'alls brains a bit better that way <3
 

eot

Banned
I've done enough unit conversions that it's pretty easy for me, except for garbage like fl oz.
I'm okay with miles, feet, inches, deg F and pounds. In some cases I use them over the metric ones, like in aviation you use ft for elevation, and knowing it takes light 1 ns to travel 1 ft in vacuum can be handy.
 

Falcs

Banned
better-1024x961.png
 

GAMETA

Banned
The only time it bothers me is when a racing game doesn't give the option to use km/h (kilometres per hour) instead of mph. But that's basically non existent anymore.

If it's important info I'll just use Google to convert.
 
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The only time it bothers me is when a racing game doesn't have the option to show km/h (kilometres per hour) instead of mph. But that's basically non existent anymore.

This is how I learnt to convert Km/h and mph, but the other way around. The games I used to play usuallly came in km/h. Same for kilos and lbs for weight by looking up car stats.

Grams, ounces and lbs also became easy to me once I regularly started buying weed.
 
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On a funny and related note, my 17-year old refuses to use US standard measurements, despite us living in the US. She says "It's stupid." and so she won't use it, lol. I don't necessarily disagree with her, but it was funny sometimes when she started doing it if I forgot about it and the temperature came up (or any other measurement).
 

Tesseract

Banned
it's just convention, i use imperial for everyday thoughts because that's what i grew up with

i'm left handed so i'm used to all your shitty conventions
 
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There's only one measurement history you need -

Well, there's an interesting extension of the story about railroad gauge and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad from the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was originally determined by the width of a horse's ass.

Source

That or just measure everything in hands, like how we measure horses and therefore horsepower, very American to measure things in horsepower.
 
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