SI Units of Simile | Hacker News Reader

SI Units of Simile

blog.karliner.net

40 pointsmkarliner32 comments

The Register took this to the next level. Here is their converter:

https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

I usually really dislike the Register, but this is fantastic. Now I’m going to measure time in trusses and discuss economics in kilopogbas.

For energy: - if it's a bad thing, e.g. nuclear power, it's "megawatts" or "gigawatts" - if it's a good thing, it's "powering N homes"

Although double deckers, fingers or hairs are not going to change much in size - the power requirements of a home is increasing significantly as we gravitate more away from gas towards heat pumps and electric cars.

> the power requirements of a home is increasing significantly as we gravitate more away from gas towards heat pumps and electric cars.

That's not true at all.

Usage recorded by the electricity meter will go up, yes, but usage recorded at the gas meter will go down. And net, the newer approaches use less power than the older ones.

The one technical exception is the car, whose power requirement was previously not captured by the home's consumption. But including that, on a household basis power consumption should drop.

Correct for the exact opposite reason. Our homes use less and less power as better insulation becomes widespread. Italy for example just had a massive campaign of incentives for people to renovate their homes to better power saving.

I’ve seen that changing in the good way over time. Journalists used to have no clue about the difference between a megawatt and a kilojoule (some still don’t), but these days they are not afraid of discussing gigawatts and terawatt-hours in mainstream media.

Indeed, it's bad enough when they mix up units of the same dimension, but ignoring different dimensions is even more stupid (though it has the advantage of being more easily detectable without even having to check the numbers). In that vein, a common mistake is to mix up multiplication with division, e.g. when they write "terawatt per hour" instead of "terawatt hour" for energy or "kmh" instead of "km/h" for speed.

Those are units of power

I've occasionally seen energy measured in "fully loaded 747s coming in to land"

I don't think the blue whales are "mostly extinct".

Per their Wikipedia article, they are "endangered".

"mostly extinct" means "endangered in the environment unit if measurement

Yeah we hunted them pretty horribly for a long time so their population now is a fraction of what it once was (10-25k vs ~250k). But since it became illegal to hunt them in the 1980s it seems like they're recovering slowly, rather than heading towards extinction.

that figure in the low tens of thousands along with the menace of extinction just reminded me of an interesting thing about the demographics of another species of large animals (though not that large)… one that is already extinct: the Tyrannosaurus Rex:

Apparently, the standing population of T-Rex during their existence is estimated to have been only in that ballpark, around 20000… and yet the estimation for the total number of T-Rexes to ever have lived is in the billions… just because T-Rexes have existed for such a long period of time. Of course, that was long before humans came along and killed everything Cf: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/04/15/how-many-t-rexes-were-t...

(edit: replaced "factoid" with "thing" after a dictionary lookup. What I meant was like "fun fact" but without the degree of certainty that I would require to call it a fact… but without implying likely falsehood as "factoid" apparently would)

That is a really interesting factoid, I hadn't ever really thought about how many might be kicking around at any given time. Cheers for sharing, I wish I could reciprocate but my brain is mush at the moment :D

The difference is that blue whales are social animals, living in groups (whereas T-Rexes were probably solo hunters), and also that the living zone of blue whales are a large fraction of Earth oceans (whereas the article you mentionned applies to North America dry land, a much smaller area than the cold-to-temperate oceans).

So, in the case of blue whales it is understandable that the low ten of thousands is not the healthy number of individuals that they used to be (hundreds of thousands).

The real problem with blue whales is that most people have almost no intuition for how big they really are.

At the Museum of Natural History in NYC there is life size replica of a blue whale hanging from the ceiling in the Hall of Ocean Life and it’s simply astonishing that something that big could be alive.

(I would liken it to shaking hands with a > 7’ tall person or seeing the giant redwoods in person. Intellectually you know they’re big, but in person it’s a little shocking.)

Shame, I was expecting to see large or small boulder there: https://twitter.com/SheriffAlert/status/1221881862244749315

The UK magazine New Scientist has been collecting occurrences of strange units in newspapers for years, and people often write in with new ones.

https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg18725070-900-incompati...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25133562-700-the-race...

I also remember length "measured in worms laid end to end", and volume "measured in cups of tea".

In the US, "Football field" is a quick conversion for hectare-sized areas. It also comes in handy for describing vast fortunes ... since a football field stacked 6 feet deep in hundred-dollar bills holds close enough to one trillion dollars. Or the annual US defense budget. If you change that to ten-dollar bills, you get close to today's richest individuals.

Re the distance measures, in particular earth's circumference or distance to the moon, an important note is that these are often used to measure quantity as well, as in saying that if all of something was stacked it would reach the moon or if all of something was laid end-to-end it would circle the globe

A question for the USAmericans - don’t you use a different unit place of the ‘Wales’ - I have in my head it’s something like a New Jersey?

Usually one of the smaller states, which does include New Jersey, yeah. But I think most often you hear Rhode Island, which is the very smallest. Another advantage of Rhode Island (and to a lesser degree Jersey) is a convenient squarish shape: Maryland is also small but people would get headaches trying to picture too many of them.

Well we have 50 states, which allows us to talk about landmasses of hugely varying size, often with multiple suitable candidate states for any given situation.

Dunno why, but that just reminded me of the term "landwhale" (also written "land whale") which is common enough in American English whereas you never hear/read about it in European English.

This misses my favorite - width of human hair ratio when talking about microscopic sizes.

Maybe it was updated, but its's right there under "Length".

I think it wasn't there when I posted (ctrl+f didn't find hair)

I want to add:

Time - Lightyears

If you can measure time in parsecs, why not light years? /s

PS: Yes, I'm looking at you Star Wars.

You are certainly referring to Han Solo's comment about the Kessel Run. But: they didn't measure time in parsecs - it was indeed a distance! The Kessel Run was in extremely difficult to navigate space and the Millenium Falcon could take a shorter route because of its robustness and its superior navigation computer.

That was part of the story of the "Solo" Star Wars movie.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Kessel_Run

IMHO, those were postfactum excuses.

Instead of taking the main route you just cut through the parking lot of the big Walmart and that saves you like three parsecs right away, everyone knows that trick.

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