I’m surprised there aren’t more suggestions which use intentionally-similar abbreviations. The American customary system is rich with abbreviations which are deceptively similar, and I think the American computer memory units should match; confusion is the name of the game. Some examples from existing units:
The knot is non-SI but perfectly metric and actually makes sense as a nautical mile is exactly one degree meridian. kn also doesn’t clash with kN, Newtons are always written with capital N. Capitalisation generally matters. No standard abbreviation exists for nautical miles but definitely don’t use nm because newtonnano metres.
That is, if you take all those colonial units out of there suddenly you’re left with SI units and things that work well with SI units.
Oh and a pint is 500ml, a pound is 500g, a hundredweight is 50kg (because 100 pound), and a teaspoon is rather approximate because everyone outside of North America will use an actual spoon you stir tea with. The important part is not the precise amount but distinguishing it from “a pinch” etc. I guess by extension ounces should be 25ml and 25g. While we’re at it: An inch is 25mm, and a foot an even 1/3rd of a metre while a yard is exactly one metre.
Did you know that a Newton metre is about exactly one chocolate bar metre? The work it takes to lift it in about standard gravity, that is. Very intuitive.
t for ton is a quirk in SI, you can use Mg if you want. There’s also other SI-adjacent strangeness such as the hectare, which is one hecto-are: While SI has meters for length and litres for volume somehow the are isn’t official for area.
The knot is non-SI but perfectly metric and actually makes sense as a nautical mile is exactly one degree meridian
I do admire the nautical mile for being based on something which has proven to be continually relevant (maritime navigation) as well as being brought forward to new, related fields (aeronautical navigation). And I am aware that it was redefined in SI units, so there’s no incompatibility. I’m mostly poking fun at the kN abbreviation; I agree that no one is confusing kilonewtons with knots, not unless there’s a hurricane putting a torque on a broadcasting tower…
No standard abbreviation exists for nautical miles
We can invent one: kn-h. It’s knot-hours, which is technically correct but horrific to look at. It’s like the time I came across hp-h (horsepower-hour) to measure gasoline energy. :(
if you take all those colonial unit
In defense of the American national pride, I have to point out that many of these came from the Brits. Though we’re guilty of perpetuating them, even after the British have given up on them haha
An inch is 25mm, and a foot an even 1/3rd of a metre while a yard is exactly one metre.
I’m a dual-capable American that can use either SI or US Customary – it’s the occupational hazard of being an engineer lol – but I went into a cold sweat thinking about all the awful things that would happen with a 25 mm inch, and even worse things with 3 ft to the meter. Like, that’s not even a multiple of 2, 5, or 10! At least let it be 40 inches to the meter. /s
There’s also other SI-adjacent strangeness such as the hectare
I like to explain to other Americans that metric is easy, using the hectare as an example. What’s a hectare? It’s about 2.47 acre. Or more relatable, it’s the average size of a Walmart supercenter, at about 107,000 sq ft.
We can invent one: kn-h. It’s knot-hours, which is technically correct but horrific to look at. It’s like the time I came across hp-h (horsepower-hour) to measure gasoline energy.
Quite standard, actually. If you buy a fridge over here it’d say something like “150 kWh/a”, which is 17.12 Watts, which is how much the fridge uses on average. People don’t pay for Watts, though, but for kWh, that’s what’s on the bill so kWh/a is way more practical if you want to convert to €/a. Also if you put more than one number in Watts in the docs civilians might get confused, ideally the only one you put there is connection power.
What’s a hectare?
I actually have no idea. I know that it’s what farmers pick up women with but I have no real mental image of how much it is. 100m, sure, make that a square but it’s still somehow without meaning.
but I went into a cold sweat thinking about all the awful things that would happen with a 25 mm inch,
Blame the Swedes, or more precisely Carl Edvard Johansson, inventor and manufacturer of gauge blocks. Before that the US and Brits had slightly incompatible definitions of inches and he split the difference pretty much in the middle and rounded a bit and ended up producing 25.4mm gauge blocks, and only after that industry even started to be precise and actually adhere to proper measures – without wide availability of reference gauge blocks that was impossible. He should’ve rounded just a bit further.
A 1 foot tall stack holds 1,647,360 bits of data if all 80 columns are used. If only 72 columns are used for data then it’s 1,482,624 bits of data and the remaining columns can be used to number each card so they can be put back in order after the stack is dropped.
IBM standard cards are one 48th of a barleycorn thick. I believe IBM measured from the 1932 Iowa Reference Barleycorn, now kept in the vault inside Mt Rushmore.
All definitely not metric as metric uses steps of 1000 (and there’s also 10 and 100 and 1/10th and 1/100th but that doesn’t extend to 10000 and 1/10000th).
The KiB, MiB, etc, the 2^10 scale is called binary prefixes (as opposed to decimal prefixes KB, MB, etc) and standardised by the IEC.
And while the B in KiB is always going to mean eight bits it’s not a given that a byte is actually eight bits, network people still use “octet” to disambiguate because back in the days there were plenty of architectures around with other byte sizes. “byte” simply means “smallest number of bits an operation like addition will be done in” in the context of architectures. Then you have word for two bytes, d(ouble)word for four, q(uad)word for eight, o(cto)word for 16, and presumably h(ex)word for 32 it’s already hard to find owords in the wild. Yes it’s off by one of course it’s off by one what do you expect it’s about computers. There’s also nibble for half a byte.
EDIT: Actually that’s incorrect word is also architecture-dependent, the word/dword/qword sequence applies to architectures (like x86) which went from being 16-bit machines to now being 64 bit while keeping backwards compatibility. E.g. RISC-V uses 32-bit words, 16 bits there are a half-word.
The bit, at least, is not under contention everyone agrees what it is. Though you can occasionally see people staring in wild disbelief and confusion at statements such as “this information can be stored in 1.58 bits”. That number is ~ log2~ 3, that is, the information that fits in one trit. Such as “true, false, maybe”.
So you’re saying my proposed imperial units depend on where you are, and who is using them, for what purpose? That just sells me on them as imperial units even more. :)
If you wanna be American, you gotta start thinking outside the box. A bit has two states, right? So a half-bit has only one state. Half-bits are truly American.
Probably something based on 1/6 th of a byte that originates form old IBM systems that used 6 bits per byte that was then later never changed into 8 bit systems so you now have to convert between 6 bit and 8 bit systems and then fractions, gotta get those good fractions. So they’d say something like my SSD is 170⅔ GB for a 128GB drive
A bit in Freedom units is 2 metric bits because it wouldn’t be freedom units without unnecessary confusion. A metric bit is equivalent to a freedom unit lil’bit, because it’s smaller than a bit. A bite (no relation to a byte) is 25 lil’bits because saying 25 ones and zeros outload is a mouthful. A hot dog is 4.2 bites or 105 lil’bits because that’s how many bites it takes me to eat a hot dog. A hamburger is 6.4 bites because it takes more bites to eat. A double with cheese is 7.8 bites. A whole hog is 233 hot dogs. A stampede is 23146 hamburgers.
May I suggest OB for Ounce Byte, or 28.35 Byte, one 16th of a PB PoundByte which is 453,6 Bytes.
These measures are both practical as freedom units because it’s base is close to 28, which is clearly more suitable than 32 as a freedom unit base number, and the Pound Byte can be easily halved 4 times to make an Ounce Byte. Which makes it about as convenient as other freedom units.
Finally someone is making sense. I was getting depressed with all the logical metric inspired units disguised as jokes everywhere in this thread. You get it. Thank you 🙏
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