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Joined 3 years ago
Aquileo | cake
Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • HexagonSuntoBuy European@feddit.ukImperial Wastes So Much Time
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    10 months ago

    That’s an interesting question that I’d never thought about before.

    I asked chatGPT, which predictably bullshitted me and said they’d decided grams made more sense than kilograms for scientific lab work.

    But then I searched and found this from the user tomalator on Reddit:

    “When the French were developing the metric system, they suggested the unit be called a grave (pronounced grav) being the mass of 1L of water (1000 cm3)

    The French at this time being in the middle of a revolution against the rich notice that it sounded a lot like the word Graf, being a word for Duke or Earl, and they wanted to avoid affiliating with the nobility, so they changed the measurement to be the mass of 1mL of water (1 cm3) and called it the gramme

    They then noticed that it was inconvenient to use a mass unit so small, so they changed back to the 1L of water definition, but kept the name gramme for the base, and threw out the word grave in favor of the kilogramme.

    And that’s why the kilogram is the base SI unit and not the gram. I had the exact same question when I learned the SI unites.”










  • HexagonSuntoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldDefine fries
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    1 year ago

    I’ll bite.

    It might have been different a few decades ago, but in the UK these days fries are still fries. Nobody would ever ask for a Big Mac and chips. Chips are specifically much fatter ‘chipped’ potatoes. And potato chips are crisps.

    So if we’re talking objectively… Fries are just the same US and UK. But US potato chips aren’t actually ‘chipped’, they’re very thinly sliced. And ‘crisps’ are indeed very crisp.

    So I’d actually say the UK descriptions are more objectively correct.