this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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I’m always disappointed that megameter isn't a common word. People will say “one thousand kilometers” instead of just “one megameter”.
Make it a gigameter for my 1000 megameter needs
The only bad thing about metric is that billionaires technically do have giga dollars.
I'm a fan of light nanosecond, which works out to roughly 30 cm.
Infinitely cooler than a "foot"
Which is also approximately 30 cm
Exactly, but those foot fetishists with their stinky units seem to think otherwise.
Is kibimeter a technically allowed measurement? That would be fun!
Can anyone say it isn't? You're using a valid prefix, so people will understand what you're saying, if they have no idea in hell why you're measuring out 1024 meters.
Yes, the same way that kiloinches is technically allowed.
Engineers use milliinches all the time! They call it thous but it's the same thing.
How about kilo-klick?
I'm more disappointed the world renamed one thousand million from milliard to billion.
"the world"?
If you came over to the other side of the pond, you'd find that most of Europe is still using milliard, billiard, trilliard etc.
Anglocentrism strikes again!
I think that's one thing that's actually fine about the English language though. Constantly switching between something ending with "ion" to "iard" instead of just counting up doesn't make much sense to me personally.
Million (1A), Milliard (1B), Billion (2A), Billiard (2B) seems odd compared to Million (1), Billion (2), Trillion (3), Quadrillion (4)
I suppose the upside is that you don't have to learn as many prefixes, but it'll take another few years of inflation and wealth centralization (at least with currencies like the Euro, Dollar, or Pound) until Quadrillion is relevant in the financial sector and Mathematicians generally use letters. I suppose it makes other natural sciences a tiny bit easier, but there it's usually written in scientific notation anyways.
The million-milliard system means a billion has double the zeroes compared to million, trillion has triple the zeroes, etc. In the English system, a quadrillion has 15 zeroes, so 4 times 3 plus 3? A quadrillion should have 4*6=24 zeroes.
I must admit I still don't see the point. Whether it's double/triple/quadruple of a million or just 3*n+1 doesn't seem to matter much. Of course it'd be better if a "thousand" was just called a "million" then, since that'd remove the +1, but the million milliard system doesn't seem to have any notable advantages otherwise, especially considering every "iard" step is a .5 one, which isn't much cleaner.
1,000 -> 3x0+1 zeroes
1,000,000 -> 3x1+1 zeroes
1,000,000,000 -> 3x2+1 zeroes
vs
1,000,000 -> 1x6 zeroes
(1,000,000,000 -> 1.5x6 zeroes)
1,000,000,000,000 -> 2x6 zeroes
(1,000,000,000,000,000 -> 2.5x6 zeroes)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 -> 3x6 zeroes
In the long system: Million - 1 000 000¹ Billion - 1 000 000² Trillion - 1 000 000³
Short system: Million - 1 000² Billion - 1 000³ Trillion - 1 000⁴
It just doesn't follow as smoothly with the increase in power
Crazy assumption.
While the word is still in use in some languages, the short system has mostly replaced the long system for numbering, especially in the English speaking world.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/milliard#Translations
Crazy assumption. Yes, it's true for the English speaking world, but it's much more nuanced outside of it. Here's a map from Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#/media/File:EScalas_corta_y_larga.svg
Keep in mind that your link to wiktionary only covers languages where it is spelled exactly "milliard".
When translating to Finnish it's confusing sometimes:
Billion = miljardi = 1 000 000 000
Trillion = biljoona = 1 000 000 000 000
Quintillion = triljoona = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000
You can tell how bad a news site is when they translate billion to biljoona and thus making the amount 1000 times higher.
You probably want double new lines in your posts. Or two spaces at the end of your paragraphs but that's usually a bit annoying to do.
Or just \ at the end, like so
Becomes
Like this
So you escape the newline and you get a newline? That's some black magic voodoo. But hey if it works. Much simpler to handle than double space since you can see them and your phone doesn't try to make them into period space instead of space space.
Newlines with double space (or space backslash apparently) also let's you have newlines in a quote block without exiting the block. I see a lot of people struggle with that on Lemmy. E.g.
will render as:
Or exit if you don't handle the newline
So you want to do
Or add space space at the end instead of space backslash.
The inventors of Markdown thought they would do something devastatingly clever and eat newlines if the next line has content. That way, if you're writing Markdown in the Stone Age and your editor doesn't support soft-wrap (it's a stone tablet), you can do your own soft-wrap and Markdown will "helpfully" eat all the newlines (unless there are two or more).
Of course this has done nothing to help and instead caused chaos and confusion for anyone non-technical. Very clever
It would be more useful if there were comments in markdown. Like, it's helpful when organising your writing and thoughts in LaTeX that you can write one line per sentence, double newline for end of paragraph. It becomes immediately clear when a sentence is too long and comments for collaborators (or yourself) are easier to handle than in something like Word or Google Docs. It's also simpler to move sentences around which is important for good writing.
Thanks! Forgot to do that. Now edited.
The long system with milliard and billiard increases with every potens which makes sense. The short system on the other hand 🤷
Heh that's a funny word.
Looks like we have something in common! Hämmästyttävä!
I think that's just not being used to it.
Again, anglocentrism strikes. Your feeling is strictly based on your personal experience with your own words. It is like when Americans claim fahrenheit is more for humans than celsius, because they are unable to fathom things they have no experience with.
Megameter gigameter,
Next thing is one astronomical unit.
And then we are using light years.
Not very linear those last two.
And I am sure that gigameters would still be better than light years.
well neither astronomical unit nor light years use meters as a reference. and one of those isnt even accurate (AU)
I think AUs are just meant to mean "far away (like much much further away than the pub)".
In Scandinavia we have "mil" which everyone uses, 1 mil, or Scandinavian mile as it is known in English, is 10km. Cuts down ln zeroes. I love this but no one else(outside of Scandinavia) uses it.I typically get a lot of pushback mentioning it to my international peers.
Sweden and Norway only. Few people in Denmark know what a mil is. And virtually no one here uses it.
Yeah-yeah; something something Denmark. I know....
Will they though? I don't talk about distances that large anywhere near often enough to really need a shorthand for it, personally. Had to even look up what things are approximately 1000km apart to even know what to imagine it as (it's about the distance between Paris and Berlin).
Yes, every time I’ve ever heard someone use metric to describe distances of >999km, they keep using kilometers.
Sweden is quite long, so talking about traveling>1 000 km is not uncommon, but here we have mil, which is equal to 10 km. So on my vacation I traveled 120 mil is more useful and common
Oh no, over here a mil is 1/1000 of an inch, haha
Comes up a literal metric ass load (8 bushels) when your talking about travel in the USA.
We big
Especially with several thousand kilometres.
“Eleven mega metre” rolls off the tongue much better than “eleven thousands kilo metre” IMO.