How come people say 5,000 km and not 5 Mm?
why not just say millions of meters or Mega meters?

  • @[email protected]
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    8 months ago

    nobody will stop you, i’ve seen some publications use gigagrams instead of thousands of tons

      • LostXOR
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        38 months ago

        I’ve always found that strange. I guess a kilogram is a lot closer to “human scale” than a gram, maybe that’s why they picked it.

        • Aatube
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          28 months ago

          SI also does meter instead of cm, so it overall checks out.

            • Aatube
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              18 months ago

              But that is like a giant difference in what they usually measure

        • @[email protected]OP
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          28 months ago

          yeah humans do really need a small, inch and cm, a medium, meter and feet, and a big, mile and km.

      • @[email protected]
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        18 months ago

        My physics teacher once told us that this was due to the influence of disciplines that calculate with huge masses, say in astrophysics the weight of a planet or the the amount of oxygen within it. Don’t know how much of it is true but the basic tenet of everyone preferring the numbers that they work with on a daily basis having as few prefixes as possible as it makes mentally handling and remembering them easier.