americans carefully using imperial units instead of metric to waste time of the rest of the world
… and themselves as well.
That link has your si in it. Your si is a tracking code Google uses to determine who clicked on links you shared. They want to know who your friends are for their social data models.
I had to explain this similar concept to a co-worker who always puts his tracking info in his parts orders. He didn’t understand until I started asking him about firearms parts he had been browsing on his own Amazon account.
His links are now sufficiently sanitized.
Additional recommendation: use https://linkcleaner.app or Léon URL Cleaner (Android) to automatically remove those pesky tracking parameters.
Firefox has a “copy link without tracking information”, in the right click menu btw
Okay so NASA lost a $327 million Mars probe because said was transmitting trajectory corrections in the SI Units of Newton-Seconds, but the home base software was interpreting and calculating it as Pound Seconds.
Remembering that there was endless amounts of scientific equipment aboard that took years to make, and the whole enchilada took 10 months traveling through space before it could even crash.
wasting time
getting used to converting between units.
Pick one.
I’ll have you know converting out of slugs was absolutely a waste of time. My prof searing 2.54cm/in into my brain was quite useful though
If your goal is to teach new material, you teach that material specifically. You dont mix other things into it because 1) it makes it harder for them to learn that new material and 2) it makes it harder for you to figure out what they dont understand.
That is actually not backed by science. Mixing material is a lot more effective than focusing on one thing.
Especially when teaching chemistry
This is not true. I literally have to fix conceptual issues that students have because people do this to them.
[Citation needed]
I have tutored thousands of students. You are going to need to back what you say with relevant evidence.
The only thing I quickly found is this paper, which says that learning multiple things is not better nor worse than one thing at a time, but it also states in the abstract that cognitive psychologists believed up to that point that mixing multiple topics is beneficial.
That paper isnt dealing with the same issue that I am talking about. Learning chinese isn’t going to compromise someones’ ability to understand physics. (Unless the problem is written in chinese I guess) But being weak on unit conversion will absolutely compromise their capability to learn a concept where the first problems they are meant to solve are written in a way that requires unit conversions.
In my experience tutoring thousands of students, one of the most common scenarios that I see is that a student struggled in an area like that, was taught in a way that relies on that weak skill to learn the new skill when that was not necessary and then struggled with the new skill as a result. Thats the sort of scenario that this thread is about. Mixing in concepts unnecessary to understanding into a problem thus overcomplicating it before the student has a solid grasp of the concept. That does make it harder for them to learn and its something bad teachers do.
At least it’s easy to remember the conversion between hours and seconds.
if you ever forget, heres a neat mnemonic device: 3600, because 60*60=3600
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