I wonder if Americans don't have a mental image for measurement units so that they alway use some physical object as a reference. Sure, its useful to use a common object as a reference but I don't see that much often in other places.
Most people usually understand what it means something to be 20 meters, 5kg or 2 liters intuitively. Like, when I hear that something is 60m tall I intuitively think if it as 20 story apartment building and don't benefit from the extra info about how this is like 18 elephants stacked on each other.
I'm also European and don't get these olympic swimming pool or whatever comparisons. I'd have to look up how many m3 of water they contain or what's the length/depth in meters are to make sense of it.
Newspapers in my country don't make these silly comparisons.
But yeah, to be fair, when hearing about Starship I had to look up our TV tower height to identify whether Starship is taller or not. It disappointed me that it's not.
Yeah, height is easier to grasp when correlating in terms of x story apartment buildings.
When using football fields as a unit of length you should use American football fields rather than soccer fields because American football field sizes are more standardized.
For American football professional, college, and high school games are all played on the same sized field, which is 100 years long.
Compare to soccer, where they can even have different sized fields in the same professional league. The English Premier League wants to standardize on 105 m x 68 m but several clubs are still using other sizes: Brentford (105 x 65), Chelsea (103 x 67), Crystal Palace (100 x 67), Everton (103 x 70), Fullham (100 x 65), Liverpool (101 x 68), and Nottingham Forest (105 x 70).
For international play FIFA has a standard, but it is a range: 100-110 m x 64-70 m.
There are parts of a soccer field that are precisely specified and so could be used as a standard of length.
Some examples are the radius of the circle around the center mark (9.144 m), the penalty area (40.23 x 16.46 m), distance from penalty mark to goal (10.97 m), goal area (18.29 m x 5.47 m), distance between goal posts (7.32 m), and the height of the crossbar (2.44 m).
The reason none of them are nice integers is that they were actually originally standardized in Imperial units. In those the aforementioned measurements are 10 yards, 44 yards x 18 yards, 12 yards, 20 yards x 6 yards, 8 yards, and 8 feet, respectively.
I don't know the first thing about football, only that it has the words "foot" and "ball", none of which apply to the American variant who is played with hands and a (geometric) lemon[1] :p
I figured FIFA/UEFA who both standardised on 105m, sensibly factored ±5m to account for Heisenberg uncertainty when approaching relativistic speeds. This is very well depicted - complete with curvature of space, train paradox, spooky action at a distance, time dilation, and other relativistic oddities - in a documentary I watched when I was young; if only I could recall the original name...
Yes I'm always a bit dumbfounded by this behavior as well.
They always use weird stuff and I never have the intuition of the actual size, especially since the definition can vary depending on context.
In this case, what is actually considered to be a small dog? To me it would be something that is close to the size of a cat but since it's about 13kg, it can't be that small, so that's more like a medium dog (I'm not certain, but I have a feeling that if you lay out things statistically this is what you would end up with).
On the other hand, 13kg is very easy to get, that's just 13 liters of water, and it's quite easy to make a mental image for both volume and weight "feeling" that way.
American units feel so impressive and random, it is the reason they always add those weird comparisons but often they make it even worse.
Americans do not do metric. Americans can’t even balance a checkbook. Hence the small dog reference for mental “clarity”. We’re dumb. Just look at the news…
I think it may be fair? This guy[1] explains how surplus of corporate profits are a mirror image of household/govt debt. Which is a direct transfer of wealth from everyone to the super-super-rich (not the 1%, but the 0.1 - 0.01%)
[1] The chart below shows how this works. The blue line at the top shows the “surplus” of corporations: corporate income minus expenses and net investment. We know this as corporate “free cash flow.” The red line shows combined “surplus” of other sectors: government, households, and foreign trading partners – in excess of their consumption and net investment. It’s negative, so in aggregate, they’re running a deficit. That deficit is the mirror image of the corporate surplus. This isn’t an accident. It’s just accounting (I’ve excluded a few tiny items for clarity): https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc251028/
And with your bank balance instantly available on the computer in your pocket, and transactions posted in near-real-time, why would you need to worry about balancing it?
Which is why all the dumbest Americans insist that "Why didn't they teach us how to balance a check book?", while, well, they were taught that, and every single check book comes with clear and simple instructions for its use
They were also taught how to calculate loan details and the extreme power of how interest grows, but they were too busy crying "Oh this is lame, when am I ever going to use this?"
There's a cult of proud ignorance in the US. People will brag about being uneducated, illiterate, or unable to follow simple instructions.
"Balancing the check book" refers to the process of running your own log of check transactions using something like https://cdn.wallethub.com/wallethub/images/posts/14483/check... and ensuring that it matches the occasional official balance statement from your bank occasionally.
Don't want to make assumptions about what you know so forgive any overexplanation...
It is about ensuring that you manage your account balance, so as to not write checks that your account balance cannot actually fulfill. Writing a check that you can't actually pay because your checking account is too low is called "Bouncing" a check, and generally costs you money at your bank and the place that you wrote the check, and will often result in those places being less likely to accept a check from you.
A secondary purpose was to ensure that your bank did not pay out a check that you have no record of writing. The check system has almost no protection, so anyone who had ever gotten a check from you could theoretically attempt to create fraudulent and forged checks against your account. You would check your record against the banks to check for this.
You would do this constantly, as in writing down every check you write, and once a month or so, actually doing the math, comparing your record of checks against the bank's record of checks.
I would also consider it a euphemism for "Financial literacy" in plenty of people's heads.
It is without a doubt the simplest possible mathematical task you can have as an adult. It is literally addition and subtraction, and logging every check. Every single American who attends public school until 4th grade has been taught the required knowledge for this task: Addition, subtraction, and the concept of negative numbers.
People say "Schools should teach balancing a check book" as some sort of cry that they think schools should focus on "practical" skills rather than, say, persuasive essay writing or reading literature or learning art.
Those people are demonstrating that they are too stupid to even understand what they have been taught. These same people will sit in math class and argue about how they "will never use this", in reference to things like calculating interest. They will often also say "Schools don't teach critical thinking", openly and proudly ignorant of the hilarity of someone who can't follow very basic instructions that anyone can find in five seconds and often come with the checkbook complaining about not being taught how to think.
Similarly, Americans will complain that school didn't teach them how to "do their taxes", which is hilarious, because for 95% of Americans, your federal taxes are a couple of pages and about 14 lines of numbers you have to fill in, most of them are numbers you copy from another piece of paper, and the rest have literal worksheets to follow.
Most people joke about how VCRs used to constantly have the "12:00" blinking clock because nobody would set them because it's "too hard". As a literal child who fixed this exact issue, it was a single page of instructions, and they were trivial. But for the majority of Americans who like to speak up, it seems like they are totally incapable of following even the most basic of instruction.
Frankly, stupidity is not a moral failing. Nobody chose to be born stupid. But ignorance, especially fixable ignorance, IS. America has a serious problem of people being openly ignorant and thinking their ignorance should be anything other than an opportunity to improve. I think the biggest problem in the USA is how much respect and attention people who demonstrably refuse to learn and are ignorant of pretty much everything get. That's why, for example, you have people insisting that rail transport is impossible in the US because it's too big, despite the fact that we literally built a cross country rail network using public funds when the country was dramatically less populated than now, or how government inherently mismanages healthcare despite about 100 examples of government mismanagement producing better outcomes than we get.
I thought checks were things of the 80s or something, in other parts of the world you mostly either have the money or not, so the act of balancing checks wouldn't exist.
Interesting. Is it still that common to use checks as opposed to just a debit card?
My mother kept writing paper checks all the way into 2012. When I worked the local grocery store, she was one of the only people left who made us use the check printer machine.
She's just very conservative with money and relied on inertia to maintain a balanced budget and was averse to change that may cause her to mismanage money, as we were very poor.
Check writing lasted far too long here in the US, for whatever reason, but was somewhat killed in the early 2000s when dramatic increases in gas prices led to gas stations no longer accepting checks as they got so many bounced ones.
The benefits of writing a check: 100% offline. If someone is willing to accept a check from you, there's zero interaction with a third party at transaction time.
Checks take longer to process, so you can take advantage of that by spending money today that you will not have until tomorrow, with zero interest. This also allowed a kind of fraud called "Kiting" where you keep cycling bad checks to artificially increase some balances temporarily, but that was less possible by the 80s I think, as even then forms of electronic settlement existed.
They feel meaningful. It's effort to put together and requires effort to manage your account so you treat it as a bigger event, reducing impulse to spend. Credit card companies sold merchants on the ability to induce more spending, and Debit cards have the exact same feature.
You can give someone a blank check to spend for something without having to do any work with third parties "authorizing" their spend. Good for parents or small businesses, and quite dangerous.
Checks are sociologically neat. Literally just a piece of paper, but they keep up the bargain often enough that we were able to use writing on paper as an entire financial system. They also required an amount of trust and familiarity between transacting parties that isn't really normal anymore. The guy in charge of the local grocery store is some overpaid desk jockey with an MBA tweaking excel spreadsheets of spend and revenue until the graph goes up and to the right enough. 40 years ago that guy was my dad and he knew everyone in the town by name.
I have written a check three times in my life. Setting up a way to accept a debit card is way more difficult than just cashing a piece of paper once a month, so landlords are a big consumer of real checks nowadays.
Sure but don't they have a mental image for 80 feet for example? Why articles will almost always include something like "that like 50 chairs put next to each other" when length is mentioned.
I would say most American's sense of feet gets fuzzy after about 30, there are very few things that are standardized that size or bigger or that they have ever personally measured out. Yards might be more useful up to maybe 200 or 300 because they have all seen football fields though. After that for most people they go to miles or minutes of travel.
Some farmers might throw in a reference to an acre length that is referencing the 660 foot length of a standard acre (660 feet x 66 feet, or 1 furlong x 1 chain), which is just another way to say 1/8th of a mile.
If you were to say 100 yards, we could. That’s a football field (American football played with your… hands).
Because people in the south don’t even know the imperial system… it’s bad. They say things like “Take the road there yonder and when you see the white church, turn right, go a ways until you get to the dirt road…”
Anything outside of what they have with them, they don’t have a clue or can’t imagine it accurately. Small dog reference, there’s millions of Americans with a small dog so most just looked to their pooch when this came up. Same as if you were to say something like 50 cars. They would look outside to their Toyota Corolla and imagine 50 of them. It’s like talking to grown toddlers sometimes but that have full grown emotional states not under control. Not everyone is like this but a good 50-60% of Americans are. Just look for the Lululemon.
I know that 1kg is about 2.2lbs but that still doesn't give me the "mental clarity" of what 20kg is unless I do the conversion.
At the gym I use the pound plates and not the kilo ones. I intuitively know what the difference between 135 and 225 lbs feels like, and I don't have that same intution for kg.
All that said, I don't find the "small dog" types of analogies for weight very useful. Why not just use the same number of characters (or less) to give the weight in the other popular unit?
It helps to understand that the only freedom Americans only cared for (and the only freedom they have left from the looks of it) is the freedom to choose standards of measurement and vocabulary. This will provide historical context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk (Washington's Dream - SNL)
Huh? Britons get locked up for social media posts. Most of the world doesn’t have guns. And among the first world we’re the only ones free to go bankrupt from medical bills!
Our problems don’t stem from lack of freedom, they stem from too much of it.
You have the sort of view of America that I can only imagine comes from somebody who has never been here. I don’t know what you mean by batteries, I’m not aware of any we don’t have available.
We have the second most electric vehicles after China, and nearly all new power generation being built here is renewable. I’m not sure how you managed to turn this into some anti-American rant, but at least do a better job of it, it’s very easy.
The link you're quoting, the one posted, is a second hand US report.
The primary company link is from a UK subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz and is (almost) fully metric (the fundemental units US weights are officially defined with respect to (for more than a century now)).
Earlier in the summer YASA achieved 550kW (738bhp) from a 13.1kg version of its new axial flux prototype motor, equating to an unofficial power density world record of 42kW/kg
Now latest testing of an even lighter 12.7kg version on a more powerful dynamometer has shattered this record, with a staggering 750kW (>1000bhp) short-term peak rating, resulting in a new unofficial power density record of 59kW/kg
Just those pesky trad bhp units left hanging like a chad in a Florida election . . .
That seems unlikely, a proper Brit would know that a stone is defined for body weight (14 avoirdupois pounds), Wool (14, 15, or 24 pounds depending on wool class), Wax (12 pounds), Sugar and spice (8 pounds), or for Beef and mutton (8 pounds).
( Of course Scottish Britains used 16 Scottish pounds for a Scottish stone ).
The point being that 'precious' metals used a different weight measure altogether .. (common lead often used a 12 pound stone).
Prior to the Revolution, in France alone there were allegedly 250 thousand various units in use! (All sorts of units, not just length.)
It didn't help that pre-Revolutionary France was a political Frankenstein stitched together from dozens of regions with completely different history (Celtic Brittany, Flemish Dunkirk, Germanic Alsace, Provencal South, Catalan Roussillon, Italian Nice) and thus very different local standards of everything, including measurements and law.
Unification of units removed a massive constraint on international trade and engineering. Except the US and Myanmar, of course... it is so frustrating to order anything from Myanmar e-shops, I must say. But Myanmar is at least promising to move on.
If I were a self-respecting journalist, I would've used 3.26 gallon milk jugs. Small dog automatically goes to which breed? Chihuahua (fits in a toddlers purse) or Border Collie or Golden Retriever or Saint Bernard (needs an SUV/minivan)? 4 different classifications based on size!
Americans are very weird when it comes to metric. They often quote mobile phones as having something like "a six inch screen size but now only 12mm thick" - pick a measurement system people !
After switching to the metric system ('70-80s) some things are still measures in imperial units. If you slice some ham at a counter in a grocery store, it's in grams. You then turn around and get a pound of apples and a gallon of milk. Nuts are in grams, and soda is in liters. Also the body weight tends to be in pounds. Tools are both metric and imperial. Speeds and distances though, thank god, are metric.
All this is just kinda there and everyone's OK with it, but it is an epic mess if you think about it.
I like having more choices for units. Sometimes the "correct" unit is extremely inconvient to deal with, either because the unit sizes are oddly out of proportion with the things being measured, or the things being measured have odd ratios with the units. Sometimes even making your own unit system or going with pure ratio relationships between objects is the most useful and effective way to measure things. And I feel that people who only ever use a single system of measurement often fail to see it and put themselves at a large disadvantage.
To me using only a single system of measurement is the same as only ever using a single number base. Yeah it helps to have a standard number base everyone can use like base 10, but that doesn't mean we should try to eliminate other number bases from our vocabulary or understanding because they obviously have situational advantages.
Also from my personal bias I much prefer fractional measurements and people go apeshit if you use fractional metric units but don't blink an eye at fractional imperial or other 'non-standard' measurements.
I used different types of dithering (ordered, error diffusion) in many of my design projects as a visual language, static or animated, mostly for projects related to tech/computers/blockchain, sometimes combined with ASCII art.
There is a certain warmth (or maybe it’s just nostalgia) of these older techniques that can be harvested and combined with new ideas or new takes.
This is an old project by Studio Moniker (Amsterdam)… I was once at a presentation of their work at Resonate in Belgrade (memories…) and they explained that the slight delay before the reveal of the underlying image is added artificially to add a bit of drama.
Btw, the correct image is loaded through a Voronoi diagram.
Conspiracy theory: that explanation is a lie, and the real reason for the delay is that it helps hide the fact that there isn't a unique image mapped to each pixel. If you click two pixels very close together, it shows the same image, but slightly shifted to exactly match your pointer. If the images were displayed immediately, it would be much more obvious what's going on.
LLMs and complex command line tools like FFmpeg and ImageMagick are a perfect combination and work like magic…
It’s really the dream UI/UX from sience fiction movies: “take all images from this folder and crop 100px away except on top, saturate a bit and save them as uncompressed tiffs in this new folder, also assemble them in a video loop, encode for web”.
it can work but it's far from science fiction. LLMs tend to produce extremely subpar if not buggy ffmpeg code. They'll routinely do things like put the file parameter before the start time which needlessly decodes the entire video, produce wrong bitrates, re-encode audio needlessly, and so on.
If you don't care enough about potential side effects to read the manual it's fine, but a dream UX it is not because I'd argue that includes correctness.
what... wait... In what universe do people write argument processing that doesn't process the content of all the arguments upfront AND THEN do things in the right order??
Had to do exactly that with a bunch of screenshots I took but happened to include a bunch of unnecessary parts of the screen.
A prompt to ChatGPT and a command later and all were nicely cropped in a second.
The dread of doing it by hand and having it magically there a minute later is absolutely mind blowing. Even just 5 years ago, I would have just done it manually as it would have definitely taken more to write the code for this task.
I really love the less famous stories by Andersen that involve objects or insects… A needle, a coin in a foreign land, a teapot that feels empty, a tree (that wants to be cut down!) have deep inner thoughts; a butterfly in love!
In all those stories the last sentence introduces some sort of a final twist.
About a decade ago I was at a museum in Odense, Denmark. I vaguely remember a comical story about him and Charles Dickens. In that Andersen would regularly visit Dickens and stay with him and his family. The gist was that Dickens found this to be quite irritating, as he was not enthused by Andersen's company, finding him to be much too emotional and having "strange" Danish customs.
