...was my first thought as well. 😿

Does the general American public have a better appreciation for 20 millimeters than 2 centimeters? Just a curious notion, this morning (ignoring the issue of centimeters vs inches for the moment, (which btw would be a little less than 3/4 of an inch to about 1 1/4 inch).


A fascinating discovery, though.

Deci, deka, centi, hecto are generally deprecated in practice, though AFAIK are still perfectly legitimate, officially, and this is more of a cultural preference than anything. If some scientific society has an official policy of discouraging these in print, I remain ignorant of it, but it's not like I've been paying it a lot of attention.

It does lead to some simplification. Unfortunately, many reference tables and standard values, particularly in medicine, use odd units like dm3 (cubed) or dl. Of course "ccs", for cubic centimeters, is almost slang now; I think every medical show on TV uses it, so the public hears it often. The dm3 is the same as a liter, and a cc is the same as a milliliter, so no loss in abandoning those terms, but medicine is stuck on "cc".

Ten(th)s and hundred(th)s do make some sense in the "real world" human scales of commerce, machinery, clothing, and cooking, but their absence from a scientific communication is unsurprising.