xkcd

this guy gets it.

pfff at 2.7V that aint much of a danger, now show me 50F @ 2kV

It is my understanding that XKCD's "characters" are somewhere between an actual character and an archetype. It isn't clear...and kind of doesn't matter, if Black Hat is the same guy in every comic or if he's a different devious schemer in each. Randall hasn't bothered to name any of them so the community has given them unofficial nicknames.

I remember reading about their names in explainxkcd. I think the only one never named in the comics is Cueball.

For a while, there was a blog, but I don't think it named any character.

The joke wouldn't have worked as well.

A gram is actually a pretty small unit of weight, and the joke relies on the base units. It's actually a weird little abberation in the metric system that the "base" unit is considered the kilo gram. so a 1 gram rock would be a little pebble, strangely small.

Wikipedia currently says:

the international avoirdupois pound, [...] is legally* defined as exactly 0.45359237 kilograms

So, technically, a pound is a metric weight, only a niche one whose use may or may not be permitted by local regulations.

Similar is true* of the inch, which is defined as precisely 25.4 millimetres.

* The US, UK and a handful of others collectively signed this into their respective laws in 1959. You might think we don't use the pound in the UK any more but it still shows up often in informal situations. Ditto inches and feet.

Worked with an industrial robot one that had 700V 0.5F electrolytic capacitors on its power supply. Those things were massive.

You see low voltage ones for things like memory backup on hi-fi gear. I have some 3F/5v capacitors in an old Technics tiner.

So, you don't understand the joke, but you detected an excuse to say America Bad. Your employer must be pleased.

The joke of this comic is based around most units in both the metric and imperial system being fairly mundane quantities. A one meter long stick is about half the height of a man, a one pound rock is about the size of his fist, a one volt battery has the potential of a dead AA.

The Ferad is the SI unit of capacitance, equal to 1 coulomb per volt. A one ferad capacitor can hold enough energy to do a number of exotically dangerous things.

And I have to say, the chemistry math that resulted from the metric system is elegant. I've forgotten most of it by now, but at some point, I was able to envision the machinery behind it all, and it was beautiful.

That stucks ;-)

There's nothing in the SI system that says ratios have to be between base units. Units that involve mass are defined against the kilogram not the gram.