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Why a ton, and not a megagram?
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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No good reason, just historical inertia and resistance to change. People stick to what they're familiar with, either the imperial system or to common metric units. Making a "metric ton" similar in size to an "imperial ton" arguably helped make it easier for some people to transition to metric.
Megagram is a perfectly cromulent unit, just like "cromulent" is a perfectly cromulent word, but people still don't use it very often. That's just how language works. People use the words they prefer, and those words become common. Maybe if you start describing things in megagrams other people will also start doing it and it will become a common part of the language. Language is organic like that, there isn't anyone making decisions on its behalf, although some people and organizations try.
The sort of person that insists on calling a ton a megagram is probably going to be the same sort of insufferable Jimmy Neutron arsehole that insists on calling salt "sodium chloride".
Yes you're technically correct, but people experience food as salty, no one is going to say "this food is very sodium chloridy!" and it's the same situation with tons and megagrams
I order a megagram of sodium chloride and you bring me 1.000001 tons?!?! REEEE3EEEEEEEEE!!!
Similarly large volumes of water should be given in kl, Ml, Gl etc. instead of m^3. Which one is bigger 2500000 m^3 or 790000 m^3? Count the zeros if you want and then tell me if using appropriate prefixes would have made it easier to tell the difference.
If you see an IBC of water, do you see 1m³ or a thousand individual liters?
There's nothing wrong with describing things the way that you experience them. It makes sense to use which ever units express the idea most simply.
Well I guess an IBC is a bit of an exception if it really does contain 1 kl, although there are also 0.8 and 1,2 kl containers. If you prefer to think of those in terms of cubic meters, then that’s perfectly fine.
It’s just that when you’re buying a reactor, comparing two ponds or reading about annual and monthly production of different companies you bump into these crazy numbers with mostly zeroes. That’s not convenient at all. Even though it could look cool, you don’t see computer people talking about SSDs in terms of individual bytes. You know, prefixes exist too, so why not use them.
If you used scientific notation or commas (or periods, depending on region) to format those numbers for human consumption, that would also make it easier.
I think there is even a metric inch defined as 25mm (for pipe diameters etc)
There is a good reason.
People can picture one ton in their heads, no one can picture one million individual grams.
You can imagine a ton bag of sand, you can't imagine one million individual grains of sand that weigh one gram each.
The term "megagram" does make perfect sense, but it doesn't fit well with the way the people experience the universe around them.
It's the exact same reason that weight is the only SI unit where the kilogram is the standard rather than the gram. You can imagine holding a kilo in your hands (about 2.2lb if you're American) and you could easily tell the difference between 1 and two kilos, or 1 and 0.5 of a kilo, but if you hold a gram it feels like nothing, and you probably wouldn't be able to sense a difference between 1 and two grams etc.
Edit: didn't think explaining that people like to describe the universe as they experience it rather than being pedants about measuring weights to the precise gram every time would be an unpopular opinion lol
These two words mean the same thing, why would you be able ti picture one thing but not the other?
Try it, count grains of sand in your head whilst you picture them. Unless you're a savant, it probably starts getting a little blurry around the teens, maybe a bit higher. You can use tricks like imagining a grid of ten by ten to picture a hundred etc, but it'll still be rather blurry. Picturing a million of something is literally impossible, human minds aren't designed for that.
If you wanted some sand to line your new brick driveway, would you ask the builders merchant for a x tonnes of sand or a x million grains of sand? It's the same difference.
By this logic, a millianything is also completely unimaginable, because you can't count to less than one. BS.
That's the point, millis and megas make sense for things that aren't tangible in real life. That's exactly why we use tons and not megagrams.
They literally are the same thing. Why would you imagine them differently?
I've had this question quite a few times so I think that maybe I haven't phrased my point of view so well.
What I'm trying to say is that a million of anything is something the mind can't comprehend. You can understand the idea of it, but you can't mentally picture it.
It makes sense to say "my car weighs about 2 tons", because you can compare that to a couple of ton bags of sand or two IBCs of water.
It doesn't really make sense to say "my car weighs 2megagrams", because not only will it not be be precisely 2,000,000 grams, but because no one can picture two million of anything.
Despite the terms meaning the same thing, the mental imagery is totally different and it makes sense to use a unit that makes the description tangible in the real world.
When I imagine 1km I don't imagine 1000 individual meters in my head, I imagine 1km
The point is that you can easily estimate a meter.
Look to the horizon and estimate a kilometre and I'll bet that your error is significant by comparison to your estimate of a meter.
There is a big difference between imagining/understanding a concept and judging it accurately in the real world.