• Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      …being in nursing school is giving me a strong hatred for the imperial system.

      The doctor ordered 35mg/kg Watdafuqenol IV QID. Available is a 2’ by 15" section of torn out carpet soaked in spilled Watdafuqenol; when wrung out into the patient’s left shoe, you get 97 chipmunk-mouthfuls diluted to a concentration of 24 Watdafuqenol to 1 toe jam. How many shot glasses full do you administer?

      • GiveMemes@jlai.lu
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        4 months ago

        You might’ve already seen this, but try using the method of dimensional analysis where you work backwards on a single line and you’ll never get one of those problems wrong again.

        The key is just working backwards by units using the equations you have available. I know somebody that only got one of the questions on his MCAT correct bc he used this method lol.

        • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I use dimensional analysis, but it’s over two lines… and not sure what you mean by working backwards, since the order doesn’t really matter so long as every value is in the correct line.

          Since typing it out would be ugly as sin, example image stolen from google:

          …they like to give us things like pt weight in lbs and oz, and ask for final product of tablespoons or some shit cuz they enjoy wasting our time, lol.

          That the type you mean?

          I know there are a few different ways to crunch the numbers, but DA is my favorite so far cuz it’s so consistent.

          *edit, example pic changed, first one put mcg twice in the same line, which is a weird move. /shrug

          • oldfart@lemm.ee
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            4 months ago

            So USAnian drugs are in metric units? I hope in actual work nurses get to use a phone app or something because this asks for mistakes

            • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              99% of it is metric. I think the biggest outlier is home care, where you go visit some grandma who’s actively offended by metric, so if you tell her to take 7.5mL of something she’ll just do the deer in the headlights thing, then shove the bottle up her ass.

              Tell her instead that she needs to take 3 Mountain Dew caps full and suddenly she can follow instructions enough to not kill herself.

              • oldfart@lemm.ee
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                4 months ago

                I thought everything is bigger across the ocean but your Mountain Dew caps are tiny over there! ;)

                • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  Just googled it and apparently they’re about 5mL each. Apparently I’m not great at eyeballing volume.

                  Add it to the pile of conversion failures between metric and imperial.

                  • oldfart@lemm.ee
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                    4 months ago

                    Yeah, 5ml is a teaspoon, but I’m not sure if it’s reasonable to assume teaspoons have similar sizes across countries.

                    But after your first month in the job you’ll convert and eyeball it even when half asleep :)

            • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Even in the US, science is mostly metric. But most US people are not exactly the scientific kind…

              • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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                4 months ago

                Modern science is, but there’s plenty of old journals from the 80s and earlier that use degrees Rankine and gallons.

                • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  4 months ago

                  Fucking BTUs and shit.

                  PSI is another one that seems to be used over the metric/SI alternative in some science-adjacent applications.

                  • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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                    4 months ago

                    Psi is used a lot in engineering. But honestly, pressure units are a bit of a mess. The metric unit is a Pascal, which is fundamentally defined as a Newton per square meter – unsurprisingly, that is an incredibly small quantity of pressure. It’s roughly 101,500 Pascals for standard atmospheric pressure. You’ll typically see pressure written in either kPa, MPa, or bars (1E5 Pascals) within a metric framework. For perspective, it’s 14.7 psi (lbs per square inch) for an atmosphere.

                    And personally, I think all of these are pretty silly when we could be using 1 atm instead, which is literally defined as standard atmospheric pressure. It’s a much easier way to visualize and intuitively grasp pressures.

                    BTU is another fun one. It’s the energy needed to raise 1 lb of water by 1 degF. Calorie is the energy to raise 1 g of water by 1 degC. Both are very pragmatic definitions and have a degree of intuition. Then they’re the metric unit, the Joule, which suffers from the same issue as Pascal. It’s the work done by a 1 Newton force pushing an object 1 meter. Once again, pretty small.

            • frezik@midwest.social
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              4 months ago

              It works fine when everything around you is in those numbers. The scale for medications might be set to mg, or injections in mL. The bottles for both are labeled the same way. Everything works together, and you don’t really have to think about it.

              Part of the problem with converting everything to metric is it really needs to be everything. You can try talking about driving distances in km, and your gas tank in L/100km, and your speed in km/hr. However, the interstate highway signs will still be in miles, you buy gas in gallons, and the speed limit signs are in mph. This isn’t a case where you can just choose to use the metric system as an individual, because the whole system works against you.

              • oldfart@lemm.ee
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                4 months ago

                That is understandable, I was surprised that metric is actually used somewhere. Use in pharmacy also explains why in Hollywood stoner comedies they used grams, which always confused me.

                • frezik@midwest.social
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                  4 months ago

                  It’s used all over the place in the US. It’s usually a weird, thoughtless mixture. Milk is sold in gallons, soda is sold in liters.

                  In fact, you’ll find exceptions in most countries once you start looking for them. Just a matter of how prevalent the metric system is; nobody is 100%. Most common exception is car tires because of how industry standards work.

            • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Gotcha! Yeah same page - some of the other students don’t like that method cuz it can take a bit longer, but building the equation kinda idiot proofs itself against calculating for the wrong unit, and it’s super consistent! Definitely my favorite so far.

        • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          Even dimensional analysis works best with metric because sometimes you need to convert units and almost all conversion in metric are base 10, so something like 1kg/km is 1000g/1000m is 1 gram per meter. But in imperial 1 pound/mile is 16 ounces / 5280 feet is who the fuck knows how many ounces per feet.

      • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        You’ll never see dosage questions like that on the NCLEX. If you do it’ll be like one. I breezed through it when I took it, but basic knowledge questions are minimal (as long as you don’t get them wrong).

    • merde alors
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      4 months ago

      how many fingers do you have on your 2 hands?

      feel free to count

    • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Metric is excellent until it gets into data units. There shouldn’t be a difference between 4T and 4TB, but it’s actually a (10244-10004) ≈ 92.6G (99.5GB) difference because of the fuckers who decided to make data units metric and rename the base-2 data units to “kibibyte”/“mibi*”/“gibi*” (KiB/MiB/GiB)

      • megane-kun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 months ago

        I think the biggest mistake there is using SI prefixes (such as kilo, mega, giga, tera) with bytes (or bits) to refer to the power of two near a power of ten in the first place. Had computer people had used other names for 1024 bytes and the like, this confusion between kibibytes and kilobytes could have been avoided. Computer people back then could have come up with a set of base·16 prefixes and used that for measuring data.

        Maybe something like 65,536 bytes = 1,0000 (base 16) = 1 myri·byte; ‭4,294,967,296 bytes = 1,0000,0000 (base 16) = dyri·byte; and so on in groups of four hex digits instead of three decimal digits (16¹² = tryri·byte, 16¹⁶ = tesri·byte, etc). That’s just one system I pulled out of my ass (based on the myriad, and using Greek numbers to count groups of digits), and surely one can come up with a better system.

        Anyways, while it’d take me a while to recognize one kilobyte as 1000 bytes and not as 1024 bytes, I think it’s better that ‘kilo’ always means 1000 times something in as many situations as possible.

        • sep@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Everybody knew exactly what kilo mega and giga ment. when drive vendors deliberatly lied on there pdf’s about their drive sizes. Warnings were issued: this drive will not work in a raid as a replacement for same size!!. And everybody was throwing fumes on mailinglists about the bullshit situation.

          But money won, as usual.

          Source: threw fumes!

          • megane-kun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            4 months ago

            Not too sure if they outright lied, but I suppose we can say that they used the change to make their drives seem larger!

            That’s why I wished computer people had used a prefix system distinct from the SI ones. If we’re measuring our storage devices in yeetibytes rather than gigabytes, for example, then I suppose there’s less chance that we’ve ended up in this situation.

        • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          There is no reason whatsoever to use base 16 for computer storage it is both unconnected to technology and common usage it is worse than either base 2 or 10

          • megane-kun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            4 months ago

            I guess? I just pulled that example out of my ass earlier, thinking well, hexadecimal is used heavily in computing, so maybe something with powers of 16 would do just fine.

            At any rate, my point is that using a prefix system that is different and easily distinguishable from the metric SI prefixes would have been way better.

            • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              They could have easily used base 2 which is actually connected to how the hardware works and just called it something else

              • megane-kun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                4 months ago

                I realized why I didn’t think of base 2 in my previous reply. For one, hexadecimal (base 16) often used in really low-level programming, as a shorthand for working in base 2 because base 2 is unwieldy. Octal (base 8) was also used, but not so much nowadays. Furthermore, even when working in base 2, they’re often grouped into four bits: a nibble. A nibble corresponds to one hexadecimal digit.

                Now, I suppose that we’re just going to use powers of two, not base-2, so maybe it’d help if we do a comparison. Below is a table that compares some powers of two, the binary prefixes, and the system I described earlier:

                Decimal value Value with corresponding binary prefix Hexadecimal Value Value with prefixes based on powers of 16
                20 1 1 1 1
                24 16 16 10 16
                28 256 256 100 256
                210 1 024 1 Ki 400 1 024
                212 4 096 4 Ki 1000 4 096
                216 65 536 64 Ki 1 0000 1 myri
                220 1 048 576 1 Mi 10 0000 16 myri
                224 16 777 216 16 Mi 100 0000 256 myri
                228 268 435 456 256 Mi 1000 0000 4 096 myri
                230 1 073 741 824 1 Gi 4000 0000 16 384 myri
                232 4 294 967 296 4 Gi 1 0000 0000 1 dyri
                236 68 719 476 736 32 Gi 10 0000 0000 16 dyri
                240 1 099 511 627 776 1 Ti 100 0000 0000 256 dyri
                244 17 592 186 044 416 16 Ti 1000 0000 0000 4 096 dyri
                248 281 474 976 710 656 256 Ti 1 0000 0000 0000 1 tryri
                250 1 125 899 906 842 624 1 Pi 4 0000 0000 0000 4 tryri
                252 4 503 599 627 370 496 4 Pi 10 0000 0000 0000 16 tryri
                256 72 057 594 037 927 936 64 Pi 100 0000 0000 0000 256 tryri
                260 1 152 921 504 606 846 976 1 Ei 1000 0000 0000 0000 4 096 tryri
                264 18 446 744 073 709 551 616 16 Ei 1 0000 0000 0000 0000 1 tesri

                Each row of the table (except for the rows for 210 and 250) would be requiring a new prefix if we’re to be working with powers of 2 (four apart, and more if it’d be three apart instead). Meanwhile, using powers of 16 would require less prefixes, but would require larger numerals before changing over to the next prefix (a maximum of 164 - 1 = 216 - 1 = 65 535)

                One thing that works to your argument’s favor is the fact that 1024 = 210. But I think that’s what caused this entire MiB vs. MB confusion in the first place.

                However, having said all that, I would have been happy with just using an entirely different set of prefixes, and kept the values based on 210.