Comment by merde alors@sh.itjust.works on Ukrainian drones now spray 4,000° F thermite streams right into Russian trenches

so you think that inches too is a freedom unit?

I assume they call them freedom units because England freed so many nations. Otherwise… Not sure to be honest.

I mean, it isn’t metric, so yes…?

how many fingers do you have on your 2 hands?

feel free to count

~24 inches of fingers.

Metric is excellent until it gets into data units. There shouldn’t be a difference between 4T and 4TB, but it’s actually a (1024⁴-1000⁴) ≈ 92.6G (99.5GB) difference because of the fuckers who decided to make data units metric and rename the base-2 data units to “kibibyte”/“mibi*”/“gibi*” (KiB/MiB/GiB)

I think the biggest mistake there is using SI prefixes (such as kilo, mega, giga, tera) with bytes (or bits) to refer to the power of two near a power of ten in the first place. Had computer people had used other names for 1024 bytes and the like, this confusion between kibibytes and kilobytes could have been avoided. Computer people back then could have come up with a set of base·16 prefixes and used that for measuring data.

Maybe something like 65,536 bytes = 1,0000 (base 16) = 1 myri·byte; ‭4,294,967,296 bytes = 1,0000,0000 (base 16) = dyri·byte; and so on in groups of four hex digits instead of three decimal digits (16¹² = tryri·byte, 16¹⁶ = tesri·byte, etc). That’s just one system I pulled out of my ass (based on the myriad, and using Greek numbers to count groups of digits), and surely one can come up with a better system.

Anyways, while it’d take me a while to recognize one kilobyte as 1000 bytes and not as 1024 bytes, I think it’s better that ‘kilo’ always means 1000 times something in as many situations as possible.

Everybody knew exactly what kilo mega and giga ment. when drive vendors deliberatly lied on there pdf’s about their drive sizes. Warnings were issued: this drive will not work in a raid as a replacement for same size!!. And everybody was throwing fumes on mailinglists about the bullshit situation.

But money won, as usual.

Source: threw fumes!

Not too sure if they outright lied, but I suppose we can say that they used the change to make their drives seem larger!

That’s why I wished computer people had used a prefix system distinct from the SI ones. If we’re measuring our storage devices in yeetibytes rather than gigabytes, for example, then I suppose there’s less chance that we’ve ended up in this situation.

There is no reason whatsoever to use base 16 for computer storage it is both unconnected to technology and common usage it is worse than either base 2 or 10

I guess? I just pulled that example out of my ass earlier, thinking well, hexadecimal is used heavily in computing, so maybe something with powers of 16 would do just fine.

At any rate, my point is that using a prefix system that is different and easily distinguishable from the metric SI prefixes would have been way better.

They could have easily used base 2 which is actually connected to how the hardware works and just called it something else

People weren’t using them ambiguously, drive manufactures picked a non-standard unit to lie with on their boxes, and then tricked courts into going along with their shit because it was the old case of money vs truth.

Yeah, that’s probably a better phrasing.

…being in nursing school is giving me a strong hatred for the imperial system.

The doctor ordered 35mg/kg Watdafuqenol IV QID. Available is a 2’ by 15" section of torn out carpet soaked in spilled Watdafuqenol; when wrung out into the patient’s left shoe, you get 97 chipmunk-mouthfuls diluted to a concentration of 24 Watdafuqenol to 1 toe jam. How many shot glasses full do you administer?

You’ll never see dosage questions like that on the NCLEX. If you do it’ll be like one. I breezed through it when I took it, but basic knowledge questions are minimal (as long as you don’t get them wrong).

I love how much nursing advice I’m getting in a thread about melting Russian invaders. ^_^

You might’ve already seen this, but try using the method of dimensional analysis where you work backwards on a single line and you’ll never get one of those problems wrong again.

The key is just working backwards by units using the equations you have available. I know somebody that only got one of the questions on his MCAT correct bc he used this method lol.

Even dimensional analysis works best with metric because sometimes you need to convert units and almost all conversion in metric are base 10, so something like 1kg/km is 1000g/1000m is 1 gram per meter. But in imperial 1 pound/mile is 16 ounces / 5280 feet is who the fuck knows how many ounces per feet.

I use dimensional analysis, but it’s over two lines… and not sure what you mean by working backwards, since the order doesn’t really matter so long as every value is in the correct line.

Since typing it out would be ugly as sin, example image stolen from google:

…they like to give us things like pt weight in lbs and oz, and ask for final product of tablespoons or some shit cuz they enjoy wasting our time, lol.

That the type you mean?

I know there are a few different ways to crunch the numbers, but DA is my favorite so far cuz it’s so consistent.

*edit, example pic changed, first one put mcg twice in the same line, which is a weird move. /shrug

Hopefully you can read my chicken scratch lol

Gotcha! Yeah same page - some of the other students don’t like that method cuz it can take a bit longer, but building the equation kinda idiot proofs itself against calculating for the wrong unit, and it’s super consistent! Definitely my favorite so far.

So USAnian drugs are in metric units? I hope in actual work nurses get to use a phone app or something because this asks for mistakes

It works fine when everything around you is in those numbers. The scale for medications might be set to mg, or injections in mL. The bottles for both are labeled the same way. Everything works together, and you don’t really have to think about it.

Part of the problem with converting everything to metric is it really needs to be everything. You can try talking about driving distances in km, and your gas tank in L/100km, and your speed in km/hr. However, the interstate highway signs will still be in miles, you buy gas in gallons, and the speed limit signs are in mph. This isn’t a case where you can just choose to use the metric system as an individual, because the whole system works against you.

Even in the US, science is mostly metric. But most US people are not exactly the scientific kind…

99% of it is metric. I think the biggest outlier is home care, where you go visit some grandma who’s actively offended by metric, so if you tell her to take 7.5mL of something she’ll just do the deer in the headlights thing, then shove the bottle up her ass.

Tell her instead that she needs to take 3 Mountain Dew caps full and suddenly she can follow instructions enough to not kill herself.

That’s a trick question. How many pound-feet of torque did you apply to the carpet?

1.15 pallets of spent 12-gauge casings over over the course of 2.3 standard breakfasts.

Don’t forget to round to the nearest liquor store!

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Ukrainian drones now spray 4,000° F thermite streams right into Russian trenches(arstechnica.com)

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