I’ve learned about them in school, but I’ve never heard anyone say something is 8 decameters long or anything like that. I’m an American.
I’ve learned about them in school, but I’ve never heard anyone say something is 8 decameters long or anything like that. I’m an American.
I’m American, but follow mostly Europeans and Canadians online and use metrics in my own head just because it makes more sense.
I gather that the deca-/deka- and hecto- (along with a few other) prefixes are similar to imperial furlongs, leagues, stones, barrels, kegs, and hogsheads: They exist, but no one uses them outside of very specialized circumstances.
Well, not exactly. Those imperial units are all a unique measurement that one would have to learn to use. The SI prefixes meanwhile are simply powers of 10. Deca means 10, hecto means 100, kilo means 1000. Decameter literally means 10 meter. And so people just end up saying that instead, because it’s easier and conventional. But in some situation where you’re frequently dealing with 10s of meters it might be easier to use decameters.
The system also provides prefixes for extremely large or extremely small units. You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone referring to a ronnameter (10^27 meter). But it’s there if you ever need it, because it’s again just a power of 10. While megameter (1000km) is pretty much never used, megahertz is very common. SI simply provides a unified system and we can apply it in whatever way is most practical.
“Similar” = “not exactly”
Your point?
I think the point op is making is with ‘stones’ or ‘furlongs’ etc you need to already know what that unit represents to make sense of it.
With metric units, even the infrequently used increments can be reasoned out just from the name of the unit, as it’s a standard prefix in fixed multiples of 10, not a random number that must be learnt.
So they’re neither similar or exactly the same in principle really.