A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report the message goes away and you never worry about it.
A megagram is 1000 kg, by definition. It's symbol is Mg.
In metric countries, we just use the word "ton" as shorthand/slang for it, since it is an easier term and was well known.
The only reason the US calls it a metric ton, is because they have archaic units (long and short tons).
Metric countries don't call it a metric ton.
Canada does, because we’re mostly metric but still do enough business with the US that we’re sorta half and half
We call it a metric tonne in Canada.
There's also short ton and long ton which have to be differentiated, but no one ever knows which one they are using.
Damn, you guys might be worse than the British.
That’s because you only metricated 40y ago.
There's nothing wrong with doing so. Perfectly up to you, and everyone would know how much it is.
I sometimes use millitonne (mt) instead of kilogram to keep people on their toes. I've learned that some people doesn't like to have their weight measured in any kind of tonne.
I noticed this with vehicles. Odo has 100,000 km on it? Nah, it's 100 megameters. It just sounds cooler
Units closer related to everyday stuff are those that stick around. Like horse power or km. People don't use Mm but instead 1'000s of km, even into the million km for cars. Even in space they still tend to use km like for the distance to the moon or sun. Only once the distances get absurdly large is there a shift to either another unit (light years) or the use of different notation (like 3.14E12 m).
As a Swede, using units that give numbers above ~100 starts to get unwieldy. Hence why we use mil (1 Scandinavian mile = 10 km) once we get to triple digits in km. "It's 60 mil to Stockholm" is immensely more natural than "it's 600 km to Stockholm".
The astronomical unit AU is commonly used for things in the solar system. 1 AU is roughly the average distance to the sun, about 150 000 000 km
Earth's circumference is 40 Mm. 1 AU is 14 Gm. I could get used to this.
The moon is 400Mm away. Never say thousand kilometers again, the mega is the way.
Imaging if we started saying millions of kilobytes instead of GB.
Megagram is the official SI term for the weight. Metric tonne is non-SI but happens to be equivalent to a megagram and became the more common parlance (where I am, at least) by historical accident.
I like metric wrenches, if my 5mm doesnt fit I can try the 6mm. Most nuts and bolds are not metric, so I end up figuring what comes next if my 1/2" doesn't fit. is it like 33/64th? 34/64th? 17/32nd?
What is this metric shit? I'm an American! I measure weight in American units like the hundredweight and the truss and the slug!
I don't know what a hundredweight is, but I'm just guessing based on American experience that it's a unit of volume equal to 132 quarts.
I'm an engineer, and I make it a point to teach young engineers that "a ton" can mean any one of three things:
And which is being used is often not spelled out, but is just known from context, and usually should be clarified. I once nearly got in trouble by thinking a measurement was in short tons when it was actually metric tons.
So my own act of rebellion is to use "Mg" when I'm writing my personal notes.
There is metric ton and this imperial shit. And thanks to metric being highly systematic, "Mg" (megagrams) is actually correct - "ton" is just a shorthand.
After reading the comments, I've noticed a point that is missing from the other comments. We like to measure things relative to other things. Therefore we should use a unit of measure which you can compare the entire range of expected values for that question simply.
For example how far away is my nearest town centre? 1km. How far away is the nearest city? 10km. How far is it across the country? 500km, How far is it across the continent? 5,000km. How far is it around the equator? 40,000km.
By using all km in this case it's easy to get an idea of the relative distances. But you wouldn't measure your height as 0.0018km. Just my own thoughts!
That's what unit prefixes are for... you can measure your height in cm
In Italian schools they teach it as Megagram, since ton is an old term which is non compliant with the SI
I prefer Gigamilligram
I've often wondered why the kilogram was not called the gram when the former is commonly cited as the official unit of mass? I guess it doesn't really matter much since it's easy to convert between units. That's sort of the point of metric, but still…
Cuz the gram came before the SI system and the kilogram is a much more useable unit. The original m-g-s are based on physical things, like m being a subdivision of the length from the North Pole to the Equator going through Paris, and s being related to the time of a pendulum with certain length swinging or smth
A gram is the weight of 1 mL of water, roughly.
I remember in some old astronomy textbooks they used units based on CGS (cm-g-s) as opposed to MKS (m-kg-s). It was pretty weird, as they had terms to go with that system like dynes instead of newtons for force. But at least it wasn't imperial.
we do call them megagrams?
It's all either Megagrams / hectare or tons / acre in my work...
