this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
167 points (96.1% liked)

Showerthoughts

29652 readers
950 users here now

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 best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. Avoid politics (NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out)
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

How come people say 5,000 km and not 5 Mm?
why not just say millions of meters or Mega meters?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Drummyralf@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

In our primary schools, we learn our children mili, deci, centi, deca, hecto and kilo, and how to calculate between them.

Beyond that or below that is used either in science classes or specific usecases and not known by the whole population at large.

Since people use what they know, they'd never use mega as a common way of measuring. We mostly use km for distance, and only in specific cases we might use, say, hectometers or decameters.

5 megameter is not wrong, but I don't call 34 cm 3,4 decimeters either(unless decimeters make sense of course :p)

[โ€“] joel_feila@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Here i learn mega, giga, tera. But show up in computer which is like place you most commonly see them.