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GuilleAcoustic

Chief Procrastination Officer
SFFn Staff
LOSIAS
Jun 29, 2015
2,984
4,421
guilleacoustic.wordpress.com
I've wondered how those work, so you say the fan blades are positioned in the trunk beneath the circle?

 

Smanci

SFF Lingo Aficionado
Apr 21, 2017
126
160
Here cutting desktop space to less than half probably classifies as an upgrade. After all it's not really SFF if you can fit more than three computers on one table.

That's a truly compact Oak tabletop + adjustable chrome legs + some oil, all for 33€. Waste space, hell no.



 
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EdZ

Virtual Realist
May 11, 2015
1,578
2,107
I wish we could properly finish the job of metrication (and abandon that bastardised half-unit of 'centimetres' while we're at it).
 
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EdZ

Virtual Realist
May 11, 2015
1,578
2,107
They have reason to exist. Every other SI unit works perfectly well with order-of-magnitude separation between them (kilo, mega, giga, etc, and milli, micro, nano, etc), and other countries (e.g. Australia) have managed without it entirely. Having one unit that happens to be 100x rather than 1000x just makes it awkward to use with everything else for no benefit whatsoever.
 
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BirdofPrey

Standards Guru
Sep 3, 2015
797
493
Yeah, but unlike the others, centimeters are within human scale, and saying something is 10cm groks better with most people than 100 mm because the human brain likes smaller numbers. Specifying, say, the height of a person in mm is awkward, and is also likely to lead to false precision.


It does beg the question, though, why does nobody use decimeters?
 
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Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
Original poster
SFFn Staff
May 9, 2015
5,947
4,953
They have reason to exist. Every other SI unit works perfectly well with order-of-magnitude separation between them (kilo, mega, giga, etc, and milli, micro, nano, etc), and other countries (e.g. Australia) have managed without it entirely. Having one unit that happens to be 100x rather than 1000x just makes it awkward to use with everything else for no benefit whatsoever.
Decimeter is also a thing, along with deciliter, but I've never heard of centigram or decigram.

EDIT: got ninja'd

It does beg the question, though, why does nobody use decimeters?
I guess because it's rarely used actively. Though it makes a lot of sense to say people are 18 decimeters tall instead of 180 centimeters. Or 1800 millimeters.
 
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EdZ

Virtual Realist
May 11, 2015
1,578
2,107
Specifying, say, the height of a person in mm is awkward, and is also likely to lead to false precision.
The 'false precision' argument only works if you ignore how Significant Figures work. Nobody writes 9 decimetres after all, they put 90cm. 90cm no more confers false precision than 900mm.
Long numbers are not in any way more awkward than decimal points. Australia again gives a good example in construction: all dimensions are in millimetres. No cm, no metres, all mm. You have a 12m long wall, it's 12 000mm. Want to get an exact bit between two studs avoiding a pipe attached to the side of one? 11 952mm. 11.952m is awkward, as is 119.52cm.
There are plenty of daily use cases where you need measurement precision finer than available with a cm, so inevitable you end up having to put a decimal point in there.
Rather than continuing to rant, I'll defer to existing ranting.
 

Kwirek

Cable-Tie Ninja
Nov 19, 2016
186
198
Nobody writes "9 dm"? Where are you from where people don't? At least in Sweden we use the whole spectrum regularly depending on the situation.
And unless you note the number of significant figures I'd say you certainly fall into the trap of false precision with 90cm or 900mm. In your examples you specifically need mm precision, so using mm is appropriate.