There's a thing I wonder, Ireland, do they use metric or imperial?
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@lanodan I've been to Ireland they used metric. We had a tour guide who told us to guess the measurement of a tower (don't remember which one) and told us not to use our "American feet and inches".

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@xianc78 Haha that would have been fun to see the american unit confusion.
@lanodan @xianc78 meanwhile in down under land
everything is metric except for when we're weighing drugs or cooking

:blobcatgooglyshrug:

@cee @lanodan And time. Nobody uses metric time outside of computers.

@lanodan Metric has no equivalent for ft. A meter is more like a yard. A centimeter is more like an inch. I guess you have decimeters, but nobody uses those.

We actually do use metric for some stuff though. Scientists use metric (probably because they work with people around the world), track and field uses meters for distance, and we have 2-liter soda bottles (everything else is measured in ounces though).

One side effect about using the imperial system that nobody talks about is that since both weight and mass are measured using the same units, people think that mass and weight are the same thing. It bothered my high school physics teacher so much that he even talked to elementary school teachers and told them not to confuse mass and weight at a young age.

@xianc78 mass vs. weight kind of issues is more a language/vocabulary problem rather than unit, it also exists in the metric world because it just feels like massive pedantry to not consider those as absolute synonyms.

I quite feel like "weight" ought to be deprecated. With typically always be using Newton or creating a new word (say loaning from latin or ancient greek) to make it stuck to scientific.
@xianc78 Like imagine if spring scales (like stuff used in kitchens) would have newton readings instead of (kilo)grams.
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