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Comment by trenchgun | Hacker News Reader

Fucking stop using miles. Just. Use . The Ducking. Metric. System.

The title seems to use meters as the article says "anything up to 25 meters". It's a bit jarring how it switches between systems and then gives conversions on some imperial units but not others.

It's also odd to read about Europe in measurements like "cubic miles" given there's only one country in Europe using imperial and their system is different from the US imperial. The author is a self-described "Yorkshireman" so I assume it's UK imperial but I have no idea what that means for American audiences. Are US and UK miles the same?

Yes, US and UK miles are the same. And yep, I'm English - and I have that blindspot that a lot of us have, where we don't noticed how we use both imperial and metric in a confusing mash-up of systems - so yep, apologies, and guilty as charged!

(In my everyday thinking I use meters and miles alongside each other, which is...ridiculous. But I was a little too late to the world to properly learn inches and pounds, so it's centimetres and kg all the way.)

(I also wrote about all this in another newsletter, here: https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/imperial-vs-metri... This isn't me claiming Britain isn't idiotic on this matter, though...)

I'm U.S., and I'd assert that all of our informational conveyance (from language to measurements) is a confusing mashup. English is a pidgin language, and we're so accustomed to the weird mashup that it doesn't seem jarring to us sometimes to mix metric and imperial in the same context. Not defending it (because it's honestly awful), just explaining why we might not notice until it's pointed out to us.

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