this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Showerthoughts
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As a Swede, using units that give numbers above ~100 starts to get unwieldy. Hence why we use mil (1 Scandinavian mile = 10 km) once we get to triple digits in km. "It's 60 mil to Stockholm" is immensely more natural than "it's 600 km to Stockholm".
That is fascinating! I had heard of the "metric mile" as being 1500m: the closest you can get to running a statute mile at international competitions.
But I like this 10km mile idea! We could use something like that here in Canada. Sometimes we say "klick" here to mean km, so I have tossed around terms like "decaklick" and "hectoklick" but people look at me funny.
We've had different mil definitions in Scandinavia before, but at some point Sweden and Norway agreed to unite at 10 km, which is a really useful unit. Denmark just didn't do it. They'll give distances in hundreds of kilometers.
I love this! Let's use all the prefixes!
It's always been a pet peeve of mine that Sweden is seemingly the only country that uses dl (deciliter) and hg (hectogram, but we just say hekto, just like with kilo), which are to me vastly more useful units as they're close to what you're measuring. 2 hg salami or candy or whatever instead of 200 g, and 3 dl water instead of 30 cl or, god forbid, 300 ml.
I see cooking shows from countries that normally use imperial, using metric by measuring everything in milliliters. It makes no sense! No recipe needs that resolution.