28 May
2010
28 May
'10
6:55 p.m.
On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 9:22 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 28 May 2010 at 18:36, arcarlini at iee.org wrote:
Precisely my point. The alleged Imperial "standard" isn't even
standard: pints, quarts, gallons and so on all mean different things
on either side of the Atlantic. AFAICT America doesn't really use
things like stones and hundredweight, and frankly, I'll be buggered if
I am going to try to remember how many of one meaningless contrived
unit fits into another meaningless contrived unit. I don't know how
many ounces are in a pound, pounds in a stone, yards in a mile or any
of that nonsense. Never have, never will.
The argument about "human scales" is utterly specious and based merely
on parochiality. As for things like basing the 0 of the temperature
scale on one arbitrary quantity and 100 on something utterly unrelated
- if anyone proposed this to me as a system, I'd laugh them out of
court. It's risible. At the very least, use the same substance!
Metric makes sense. Everything's in tens and hundreds and thousands;
unit conversion is trivial. The different measurements are all
connected - 1 litre = a 10 x 10 x 10 cm cube, and that much water is
1kg. Freeze it, that's 0?C; boil it, that's 100?. It all interlocks
like clockwork, no fooling around with 24 of this makes 1 of those but
three-fourteenths of one of them, and a unit of weight depends on what
you're weighing and suchlike nonsense.
It's about as sensible, practical and useful as Roman numerals.
--
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Like it or lump it it's the law. Except in
pubs, where you will be
served pints not litres (and certainly never, ever liters :0).
Beverages are a mixed picture here. ?Beer is sold by the ounce, but
distilled spirits in 750 ml. bottles, sometimes called "fifths"--but
that's a cheat--a true "fifth" is 0.8 quarts or 757 ml. ?The
distillers didn't change their prices when the conversion was made.
Soft drinks are another matter--large containers are 2L, instead of
0.5 gallon, so that's a plus. ?But small containers are still 8, 16
or 20 oz.
Fortunately, drug prescriptions are now written in metric instead of
drams, minims and scruples. ?I can remember when they weren't.
Conversion of recipes for cooking can be a nightmare. ?What the heck
is a Gas Mark? ?US cooks tend to measure by volume, UK by weight (I
have never owned a kitchen scale and I've been cooking for a long
time). ?Even those things that appear to be straightforward very
often aren't. ?A "half pint" of water is 8 liquid ounces in the US,
but 10 in the U.K.
I'll stop here.