Imperial units people, Do you sometimes get confused about time units as well? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by MTK@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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Hi, I think in metric units, so almost everything is some form of a power of 10, like a kilogram is a 1000 grams, etc.

Sometimes I will think of an hour and half as 150 minutes before remembering that it is 90 minutes.

Does something similar happen to imperial units users? Because as far as I understand you don't have obvious patterns that would cause you to make these mistakes, right?

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[-] QualifiedKitten@lemmy.world 12 points 8 months ago

Similar to your example, I do sometimes have a "brain fart", thinking that X:50 means half. So, like if the microwave says 1:50, I might think that means 1.5 minutes left, but I generally catch myself pretty quickly, and it's never caused any real problems.

I did my undergrad in a science that lends itself to lots of metric measurements, so even though I'm born and raised in the US, I'm pretty comfortable with metric and tend to set my defaults to metric.

[-] JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

I have always found it interesting that typing 150 or 90 in the microwave both set it for 1 & ½ minutes.
I reckon its a bit clever that it allows for both people who think in seconds and people who think is minute+seconds.

[-] QualifiedKitten@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago

Maybe we have different microwaves, but I'm pretty sure that on mine, typing 130 is the same as typing 90 (1 min, 30 sec) and typing anything larger than 99 is automatically interpreted as m:ss, so 150 would mean 1 min, 50 sec, not 1.5 min.

[-] JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

I am dumb. I meant to say 130 but i mixed up 1.5 being a minute and a half... We have come full circle.

this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024

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