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midnight_mechanic t1_j0i50tw wrote

Reply to comment by Thatingles in NASA's DART asteroid smash flung 2 million pounds of rock into space by shellystarzz

Jesus, when my engineering professors were trying to teach us "slugs" as units, I was like WTF is this ancient horse shit? Let's just use the approximate foot size of king Henry as a unit of length.

Fucking slugs. Good lord.

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Roscoe_P_Coaltrain t1_j0igp1y wrote

Have a pity for those of us in Canada who had to learn in the easy way (metric) and also the American way. Eventually I just converted everything to metric at the start, did the calculations, then converted back at the end. So much easier.

But I always liked the unit slug. Though from the name, sounds like it should be a unit of force, not mass, lol.

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magnoliasmanor t1_j0kg6dn wrote

Honestly have never heard of the slug unit of measurement?

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Roscoe_P_Coaltrain t1_j0l9p96 wrote

It's a unit of mass. Pound is technically a unit of force, though for everyday use we treat it as if it was a unit of mass. Sometimes we used lbf and lbm to distinguish the two, but IIRC slug is the fundamental unit of mass in the Imperial system. Honestly, haven't had to deal with it in 30 years so it's all a bit fuzzy.

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