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by artisinal 1 day ago
Nothing screams freedom more than using ancient terms like horsepower and measuring tires in inches and percentages.

The other day I heard an American talk about a TV being 65 inches. Took me a while to understand they had a 165 centimeter diagonal television.

5 comments

most tv makers and electronics stores in europe give you the screen size in inches first and cm second. they only come in a few common sizes so the specific units dont really matter.
I’m Canadian and we’re mostly on metric but due to our proximity to the USA we use imperial for things like tires and TVs and it’s kinda silly but I’m used to it
I bet you’d use lightyears over petametres or exametres though.
It's more typical to use parsecs in practice for astronomy.
Speaking of tires, its actually a crazy mixture of units here in the US. You might have a size like P215/65R15 which translates to a radial passenger tire of a 15" rim, 215mm wide tread (sidewall to sidewall), and an aspect ratio of 65 which is a ratio of the sidewall to tread width.

So a tire size is expressed in inches, millimeters, and ratios.

Surely you mean tyres? It’s all arbitrary. Get over yourself.