this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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I remember reading somewhere that a single horse can actually output 12-14 horsepower. And an average human's maximum output can be over 1 horsepower.
It's a stupid unit because it averages long-term output including resting periods, and was inveted for steam engine marketing. At least it reflects the quantity it measures, reducing confusion some people have with kW and kWh.
It's also based on a mule, not a horse. Specifically, the mules used for towing mine carts.
People have confusion over Kw vs. Kw/h?
Are you being serious or just trying to trigger me in every way possible?
All the other mistakes that will make me explode in rage
It's the same like with thousands separators and dates. We learned unit ÷ h in math.
~~Though i have no excuses~~ for lowercase/uppercase mistakes. edit: "it's internet" is my excuse.
Well, the capitalization is not as bad as the fact that it's kWh (kilowatthours/Kilowattstunden), not kWh⁻¹ or kW/h (kilowatts per hour/Kilowatts pro Stunde). It's a measure of energy so it goes up as power is consumed (or generated or whatever) over time, not the other way around!
The capitalization is not as important here but sometimes, it absolutely is - mΩ is 10⁻³ Ω while MΩ is 10⁶ Ω - a billion (Milliarde) times more, or data units like Mb (megabit) and MB (megabyte) where one is 8x larger than the other. Sometimes, the people inventing units made really stupid decision, like 1 Cal = 1 kcal = 1000 cal, with both "Cal" and "cal" being called "calorie". It's almost as bad as "a billion" (American, recently also British English) = 10⁹ vs. ein Billion (German) = 10¹².
However, I still think that capitalization is very important for all units, if only to show non-metric plebs the superior status of our standards. We have rules while they use MPH/mph and PSI/psi interchangeably.
This reminds me – they denote "per" as another letter (MPH = miles per hour) or, unacceptably, not at all (PSI = pound forces per square inch). We denote inverse relationships like mathematicians, with fractions (slashes) and exponents. The ridiculous aforementioned offenders should be written "mi/h" and "lbf/in²". Just imagine atrocities like this in metric, how does "going 60 kph on a 50cc bike" feel instead of the correct "km/h" and "cm³"?
In short, we should be respectful to the people who made a better system than the alternative by following the good standards to ensure continued ease of use, error resilience and language independence of our system.
I thought Germans used the
:symbol for division, like us Czechs.Encore rant for all the upvotes:
All this kWh and Cal nonsense could have been avoided if we just used the SI unit "joule" and its multiples for all energy, which is one of my few metric system woes. Still, a factor of 3600 is better than 5280 feet in a mile, and imperial people have their own mess with energy units (kWh, Cal but also BTU, gallons-of-gasoline-equivalent and horsepowerdays or whatever). They can't even get distance measurements to convert easily: you might remember 5280 but can you recall and apply the inverse logarithmic formula to convert between AWG and inches??
Yes! J/s gives so much more intuition than W. Even kJ/h is fine. Using W and kWh is like using knots and measuring distance in knot-days.
I might even prefer Coulombs per second over Ampère, so you immediately see that it's a speed-like property.
Wow that's a long list!
It's not by me; Nayuki is a very cool person. She made a cool PNG chunk analyzer on her website too, and has some interesting blog posts.
As for the length: Well, I don't actually mind some of the featured items but I find at least 3 particularly annoying.
I mean ... Have you met people?