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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, @03:18AM (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.