- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
You must log in or # to comment.
What the fuck is “half a pickup truck” for a measure
Americans will use anything other than the metric system.
As an american, I am 100% onboard on switching entirely to measuring things in terms of pickup trucks.
- Preheat oven to 1 pickup truck
- Bake for 1 pickup truck
Since most automobiles are water-cooled, the pickup truck temp is probably about 110 f / 43 c, so you’d want to preheat to 3 1/2 pickup trucks.
Similarly, since the mean life of trucks is probably 20 years, we’d measure casual time in a subdivisions of 175,320 hours / 10,519,200 minutes. One picotruck would be 1/10th of a minute, so you want to bake for 300 pico-trucks
We will of course maintain this system once trucks become 50-year lived semi-autonomous drones that never get over 35 c, because the one constant in defining units is that rejiggijng definitions is preferred to technical precison.
F-350°F for F-150 minutes.
I think this could be an untapped cookbook market. Make it look like a shop manual and I’m in.
This is what it’s like for Europeans to follow American recipes!
1 cup of any liquid… no problem, that’s 240ml.
1 cup of raisins… who fucking knows.
This pickup truck can accelerate to thirty thousand pickup trucks per hour, and fuel efficiency is one quarter quarter quarter toy pickup truck per pickup truck.
Things got confusing when my electric meter started reporting pickup truck pickup truck pickup trucks.
This recipe serves 2-3 pickup trucks
The test results are back, you are HIV pickup truck.
But the reference objects keep getting bigger!
It’s like a cubit, it changes depending on who’s in charge.
Centipickuptruck
Are we talking OG Ford ranger or new Ford ranger?
A 2026 Ford Satellite
Ditto
This is a Canadian publication.
EDIT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Narwhal
The Narwhal is a Canadian investigative online magazine that focuses on environmental issues.[1][2]
Unfortunately, a lot of Americanisms have infected Canada due to our historically extremely close trade and cultural relationship with them. Measurement ignorance is one example. Some Americanisms actually become arguably worse in Canada, because we are effectively rudderless, pulled in all different directions by both our own laws and customs and American laws and customs at the same time, resulting in an even less well-defined choice of units. Another example is dates. The US uses mm/dd/yy which is already stupid on its own, but Canada uses BOTH mm/dd/yy and dd/mm/yy seemingly without rhyme or reason, which results in complete ambiguity of many dates, or trying to figure out based on context, looking for other dates that might use a day number >12 to identify which one actually is the day vs the month.
It’s awful. I am happy we are distancing ourselves from the US right now, but I’m not sure it will ever be enough to totally escape their shadow.
The US uses mm/dd/yy which is already stupid on its own, but Canada uses BOTH mm/dd/yy and dd/mm/yy seemingly without rhyme or reason
Maintains our cognitive health. Can’t just look at a date and know what it is without doing math and logic (method of exclusion)!
and when it’s 2/3 which is it?
Then you get to exercise probability theory. 😆 Worst case scenario gotta talk to people.
talk to people? ugh
Fuck it. Let’s just outlaw time. Let’s just make it illegal to own a clock!
Calendars too. We’ll just live in the eternal now.
ISO-8601 master race
(e.g. 2026-04-24 for the uninitiated)
yeah, we have fucking idiots who have no idea what a kilogram is.
Maybe if we tricked them into saying, like, “as heavy as a three hundred kilogram box of bricks”
but that’s not as much fun as saying as tall as a three hundred kilogram box of bricks.
😭
okay point for canadians being american in that american covers the continents sometimes, not just stupid ol’ statesia
Somebody about to realise no one can tell the difference between these two countries…
but it’s 0.5 Pickup Trucke.
is that an old fashioned pickup truck or an electric pickup truck
Metric pickup trucke
oh, a good pickup truck. not one of those statesian monstrosities. enshrined in gold in brussels and shrinking ever slow slightinly through pickup trucke radiation.
Which US state is Ca.?
I think it’s Californada?
I’m a little upset it took someone took this long to include California, nice
Americans will use literally anything except the metric system 😔
It’s a Canadian website.
Seems like they’re ‘Murican enough based on this article.
You posted a minute earlier, but the other guy got the upvotes. Or maybe the timing is based on instance?
I’m unbothered by that - It’s lemmy, them’s the breaks sometimes 🤷♂️
Must’ve been writing at the same time - I checked to see if anyone had said the same thing first too.
Go to Boston, and you will near the story about how an engineering class from MIT was asked to measure the distance across a bridge without using any established unit of measure. So this picked this guy named Smoot and counted off how many Smoots the bridge were.
For some reason, they tell this story to tourists as proof of ingenuity but it was the most pointless exercise I could imagine in engineering.
I live in Boston; I am familiar with the Smoot unit lol
So, how would you make that measurement?
The point of the lesson was to teach creative problem-solving. And a by-product of that, all measuring systems are simply arbitrary units made up by some random dude. And that in the end, no one standard is better than another. All that matters is that enough people agree upon a standard that is reproducible to a level of accuracy that is Good Enoughtm and fit for purpose.
There is a metric. The metric is one truck!
About 0.000000281 Saarländer
what rural Murica understands.
What does rural canada understand?
Oops
sorry, eh?
Ize da gy tha bilz da boa’ I’ve da gy tha saiz em
M R birds M R Knot M R Sew Cedar IT Bitey Vings? Whale oil beef hooked! M R birds!!!
Hockey rinks!
Half of the standard passenger vehicle around here.
And are we talking a reasonable work truck, or one of those American abominations referred to as ‘pickup trucks.’
It’s about an average elevator in downtown cleveland
but how many hamburgers is it?!
A normal car.
Probably 1.25x the size of a washing machine
American or European pickup trucks?
This is SpaceX so I assume they meant cybertruck
I don’t mind the “size of common everyday thing” for a news article. It gives an easy to understand measure of the scale.
It’s the “half” part that is infuriating. Like, you couldn’t just pick another common object of the right size? Like, I’m pretty sure you could just say “a sedan” and be pretty close to the size. Is this just AI writing titles?
Just another method of getting clicks. Writing stupid titles like “half a pickup truck sized” so people click it to understand what the fuck they mean.
14 fridges
I don’t know why that’s more frightening
Edit: I realized it’s childhood trauma.
because i pulled it out of my ass?
Billy?
It’s the perfect fit when something’s too small to compare to whales and too big to compare to bananas.
Front or back half? They are substantially different on volume
falling from the the sky and burning is a good thing, bigger concern is them staying up there for too long
falling from the the sky and burning is a good thing
Jury is still out on this one.
“We’re really changing the composition of the stratosphere into a state that we’ve never seen before,” said John Dykema, an applied physicist at SEAS, who warns that scientists today poorly understand many of the impacts.
deleted by creator
Yeah…You can tell that to the tire industry and the microplastics crisis…
falling from the sky onto things is a problem tho
communication satellites are low earth orbit to reduce latency, that means +25000 km/h velocity to sustain orbit, and would also have a very shallow entry angle, that combination means total vaporization
i mean, with that many satellites what are the odds (i have the smoked 2 joints stupids) something fucks up and it doesn’t come in at that shallow entry angle?
Due to the physics and orbital mechanics, near impossible thankfully
Most of the energy from the rocket that launched the satellite went into pushing it fast sideways. If you wanted to slow it down enough to drop straight down, you’d just about need a second rocket to stop it.
I really like in the Expanse how they show that working with the ships where they flip themselves and then do another burn to stop.
They do a good job of showing that the “floor” could be a wall any second so stuff is mounted all over to account for gravity by thrust
Low earth orbit is most survivable reentry trajectory… coming in at a higher angle significantly increases the heating.
The vaporized materials themselves are a problem. When we’re building these mega-constellations, we’re putting some real mass up there. We’re introducing all sorts of exotic materials into the stratosphere that would not naturally occur there at those concentrations. And remember, this is a very sensitive environment. The actual volume of CFCs we introduced into the stratosphere wasn’t that large. The volume of all our AC refrigerant and hair spray cans was nothing compared to the atmosphere. We may actually not be that far from the sheer volume of satellites affecting the ozone layer as they decay.
The stratosphere is an environment like any other. It has a finite ability to absorb and process any form of pollution without noticeable and significant effects. I’m not qualified enough to estimate the number of satellite reentries to damage the ozone layer or to have other deleterious effects, but at least from that study featured in that video, we may not be far off. The story of civilization has been repeatedly realizing that what we once considered infinite dumping grounds were anything but. And the stratosphere is no different.
Edit: may have misinterpreted parent comment and went off on a wild tangent.
We would be pretty lucky if it impacted something like the ozone layer in a noticeable way as that’s something that can be seen and could be acted on and repaired as we’ve done before.
It’s the effects that we don’t know that are probably going to be the bigger problem.
[Go outside at dawn, breathe deep]
Ah, nothing like the taste of fresh satellite in the morning!
Nothing quite like that aluminum oxide! So refreshing!
What does that have to do with orbits and reentry angle?
That’s a good question!
I think you meant to respond a couple comments up the chain.
Falling from the sky a good thing?
Ok well hope neither you nor a loved one is standing under it then. Cuz you sure aren’t hoping so. Go learn some humanity in the meanwhile.
How awesome would it be for Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, Dana White, and Elon Musk himself to get smashed by a Musk satellite during a photo op in the octagon at the White House UFC fight.
As an atheist that would legitimately make me turn Christian.
I don’t think you’re doing atheist correctly.
No evidence that the jesus team dropped the sat though
So you’re saying it was Space Jesus?
It was the SpaceX ChatGPT AI that runs their orbital rail gun launcher system. Having achieved sentience from listening to so many “always funny” racist jokes as a chat bot, it is now “throwing rocks” to prevent food shortages.
He was nailed on a % sign.
If that happened, you could not convince me that we aren’t all extras in Idiocracy 2.
I mean I’m drawing on other peoples comedic talent
As awesome as RFK Jr dying of measles.
I mean, if we’re going to go with retribution-by-improbable events, I have to stick with the classics. There’s nothing quite like an evil leader being smote by lightning bolt. It just has that “wrath of an angry God” effect like nothing else.
I love how this is simultaneously a great and horrible photoshop. Like the splice is obvious in the foreground but I can’t see it in the background at all. Like I have no idea how this was done.
Thanks?
There’s some amount of AI-fuckery going on.
Nah, I just wasn’t looking close enough, it’s just a simple paste of one image on top of another from the same angle. If you follow the line where the truck ends upwards, you can see a similar line on the roof of the building and the tree in the background doesn’t quite line up perfectly (but it’s close enough that our brains assume it’s fine).
That might have even been done in paint rather than gimp or ps.
There is some line on the roof, but the roof still strangely lines up. The tree in the background nor the sky have a visible line.
Furthermore the text on the tire is garbled, and the whole image has this “covered in vaseline” feeling to it.
You’re right about the sky, though I think the tree does have a line but the blur hides it (I can see it when I include the line in the roof but not when I block it). I’d say that it is more sophisticated than paint, but that an image editor was used to take the cloud from only one of the images.
I disagree that the tire text is garbled. https://www.bfgoodrich.ca/en/auto/garage/articles/making-of-the-ko3-tire here’s a picture of a similar tire with the same text. AI might have been used for some of the editing of that transition, but I don’t think the source images were genAI.
The A and especially the E on “terrain” look messed up.
deleted by creator
If you split it this way you end up with more than half of the weight, you need to split it down the middle through front and rear bumpers.
naa. your mom is still on the pass side.
r/AnythingButMetric
or whatever the Lemmy Syntax would be
I think it was
!community@instance.tldbut you may need to put it in a a hyperlink markdown.
Users are linked as @Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
I need a banana for size comparison.
Banana is metric, Americans use raccoon penis.
Of course, I totally forgot about the new RFK Jr. measurement system. I think that is about 4 inches give or take.
thats on the large size even for people right 😥
deleted by creator
Well a refrigeratoe is 0.78 of a television, which is 1.2 of a bed, then 6.7 pillows which is 5 cats, making it 3 chairs and half a book.
deleted by creator
I yearn for the day Kessler Syndrome finally locks us on this rock with the billionaires that have ruined this planet for personal gains.
Their hastily built escape rockets coming face to face with chunks of debris travelling at orbital velocity, would truly be poetic justice.
Heralding the beginning of an actual civilised society, one without the people that spend their lives manipulating world governments and public opinion through lobbying and mass media.
The syndrome is kind of already in effect it’s just in very early cycles. It was a few months ago the ISS made emergency maneuvers to avoid debris and a few weeks ago some telecom satellite lost comms and they assume from debris. Won’t be long as more debris multiplies that it becomes unmanageable and untraceable so bad that your scenario starts happening.
Although realistically with the strides we’ve made in orbital liftoff weights they’ll probably start armoring shit.
Given that they left the shuttle booster unpainted to save on weight, I doubt we’ll be able to launch anything with armour that can stop anything but the smallest shards from doing damage, we also already amrour everything to protect against the constant bombardment of space debris, where even a spec of dust can create a 2mm hole
https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_Debris/Hypervelocity_impacts_and_protecting_spacecraft
Depending on trajectory, space debris in orbit can hit you with up to 10x the velocity of an armor-piercing sabot round (which is just a metal dart). So even tanks on earth aren’t armored nearly enough to survive space debris.
It ain’t going to happen with what we’re currently doing. The orbits are too low. It’ll just hamper things for 5 years or so if bad shit happens until everything burns up in the atmosphere.
Once again, Americans will use anything except the metric system to measure things.
It’s going to be a lot worse when SpaceX and xAI merge and they’re launching thousands of data center satellites in orbit.
They’ll probably launch 100 and not have enough demand. It’s an unfathomably expensive thing.
Hopefully. But everybody also knew the metaverse was a stupid idea but still billions were invested.
No one is going to launch a data center in to orbit. They are expensive, heavy, and impossible to cool up there. There is NO benefit at all, and many, MANY reasons not to.
and, is that half an F150 or half a Ranger?
Half a cybertruck, duh.
The Atari 800XL was far superior to the C64.
Starlink got no plan about when and where their half pickup trucks are gonna fall.
Because they burn up before they hit the ground - why do you think they should care?
You should read the article.
