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from the progress-is-centimetering-along-nicely dept.
We measure stuff all the time – how long, how heavy, how hot, and so on – because we need to for things such as trade, health and knowledge. But making sure our measurements compare apples with apples has been a challenge: how to know if my kilogram weight or metre length is the same as yours.
Attempts have been made to define the units of measurement over the years. But today – International Metrology Day – sees the complete revision of those standards come into play.
You won't notice anything – you will not be heavier or lighter than yesterday – because the transition has been made to be seamless. Just the definitions of the seven base units of the SI (Système International d'Unités, or the International System of Units) are now completely different from yesterday.
[...] The challenge now though is to explain these new definitions to people – especially non-scientists – so they understand.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday May 21 2019, @03:14AM (3 children)
That's not really knowing intuitively how big a unit is. That's stating a definition. Can you estimate how many cubic feet your shower is without measuring or estimating all three dimensions? Do you have a sense of how many cubic feet your fridge can hold without looking at the sticker? Could you look at a pile of dirt and estimate how many cubic feet it is? People who work with bulk materials (soil, stone, gravel) etc. generally how an intuitive feel for how much a cubic yard is, for example. Most other people don't.
Compare that to how many people intuitively have a sense of how big an inch or a foot is, and they can estimate a distance with some accuracy. They know what those units mean.
I know roughly how much a teaspoon and a tablespoon are and could measure them in my hand freely. I could probably estimate a cup of flour by eye. But if you asked me to shovel out five cubic feet of sand, I don't know that I'd be very accurate by eye. Would you be? If not, you don't intuitively know what a cubic foot is.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday May 21 2019, @03:18AM (1 child)
(And by the way, I say all this because my point is that people use units they know intuitively. If someone has a sense of how big a 600 sq. ft. apartment is and how big a 900 one is, etc., they may have less a sense of how big a 75 square meter apartment is without doing some sort of conversion. People use units practically for comparing measures that have some meaning. That's what real-life measurement is usually about.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 21 2019, @09:57PM
This is exactly the argument I make to those who prattle on about the superiority of the metric system for everything. No, it is superior for science and commerce where calculations are done all the time. It is useless for everyday life where this obsession for dividing by 10 trumps the need for being able to relate to a measurement. All those weird units come from actual useful things; cups, pints, bushels. They are all units that one can relate to.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday May 21 2019, @12:41PM
You can say the same thing about a gallon. You know about what a gallon is in liquid measure from the container that it's in. But as a raw volume, say of sand, you're in the same boat as with a cubic foot. I'd rate that I could come closer to the shower question in cubic feet because I know that it's a good but taller, and about half again as wide and deep as a 20 cubic foot freezer. I can easily come up with, roughly, 3 feet by 3 feet by 8 feet tall, so 72 cubic feet. But I would have guessed about 2 to 3 times as big as a large freezer. That's as close as most people come to intuition on measures.
Gallons? Forget it. I'd have to figure it out from knowing a cubic foot is about 8 gallons roughly (and no, I didn't google it).
One of the things I used do at work is retrofit freezers for chemical storage so I've got a pretty good idea of about what size a freezer is. That said, I'd bet that most people have a better idea, in terms of raw volume rather than a container, what a cubic foot is compared to a gallon. They may think they know gallons better because they measure gasoline in it, but mostly they don't even see the fuel as it goes into their car. They might have some idea of it from the size of their, say, 2 gallon gas can that they use to fill the lawnmower.