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Why a ton, and not a megagram?
(lemm.ee)
There are about a million reasons.
If you think about it, tonne is actually a better base unit than grams, because it aligns better with the cubic metre (1m^3 = (approx.) 1 tonne of water.)
So really, I would ask why kilograms and milligrams, and not millitonnes and microtonnes?
I can picture it now. I weigh 70 millitonnes.
Because "ton" was an established amount in trade and shipping (though with significant local variations), that was later adjusted to fit into the metric system and standardized. Hence why people specify "metric ton". There was simply no need for people to change their terminology when they already had good monosyllable.
Similar to "mile" which in metric countries were brought into the standard and defined to be 10,000 meters. While these days kilometers are almost always used for long distance in all official uses, people's habits are still to talk about "miles" when describing how far something is to travel. E.g. "I live roughly 2 miles from town" flows better than "I live 22 kilometers from town".
Edit: Recent example use of metric mile: https://www.nrk.no/tromsogfinnmark/kirkenes-if-og-norild-il-ma-reise-100-mil-for-a-spill-hjemmekamp-i-fotball-nm-1.16338078
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Have you ever bought a ton of anything?
Did you put it on the scales and make sure that it was exactly one million grams or go, "yh, that looks like it's about a ton".?
That's why the term ton is popular, the term megagram only really makes sense when you need your "ton" to be precisely one million grams.
Beg to differ. That's kind of an imperial measurement system way of thinking about units. But there's probably some truth to it.
No. Tolerance is tolerance no matter what the unit is. There is implied tolerance but that's also the same for "one A" and "one B" no matter what A and B are.
If you bought a ton of coal and the tolerance was ±5Kg who's scales are you using when it gets delivered to your house?
Or are you looking at size of the bag and thinking, yep, looks like a ton.
My local water services sells it by the ton.
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Personally I think it’s irritating to name units with millions and billions in the names.
Imagine everything was built up from microns and we had to say “mega micron” for milimeter. And centi-mega-micron for centimeter and mega-mega-micron for meters. It gets silly and your unit names become formulas instead of highly memorable and intuitive concepts.
Once per order of magnitude you should just re-root the units with more unique names. Keep the conversions metric and clean but give “ton” and “gram” their own names because they live in different order of magnitude scales.
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
151 points (94.2% liked)
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