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| It's just not possible to measure anything small in length or volume in inches or pints and cups.
And you always have to compute anyway, I bought punches for leather belts that are gauged for instance as 5/32. The size below is NEVER 4/32 or the size up 6/32, it's 1/8 and 3/16. Three different ratio bases for 3 consecutive sizes. I do prefer millimeters so much better, at least there's no mental computation to make to know which one is smaller. Even if it's instant, it's not, it still takes milliseconds. I like to keep my mind sharp, but not through unnecessary computations, I much prefer to do it through sterile political discussions! ;)
I also find the water phases easier to relate to, it freezes at 0°C, it boils at 100°C, even if we know it's an approximation.
The gallon is another nightmare, as the American gallon is not the same as the English one. Before you can make sense of any mpg data on a car site, you need to know if the site is American or English, and even so, the data might have been reblogged from one site to another, losing the country context altogether. In that case, a simple change from imperial mpg to metric km/l will probably not work, since consumption in metric countries is usually rated in liters per 100 kilometers.
Same for the ton, there's a short one, a long one, a metric one. Or for the 3 ounces: the one for food weight, the one for gold, the one for volumes. Probably have to blame the French for both ounce weight units, as the name for the former comes from French for "goods of weight" (avoirdupois) and the trading city of Troyes, near Paris.
I don't even know how the bushel survived to this day, as all recipes for food or feed use weight measures, not volume. Even for the same crop and assuming the same moisture content, farmers growing varieties with large grains will have a totally different bpa yield than the exact same weight with smaller grain varieties or dryland conditions. Not sure if anybody has any weight comparison data between a bushel of irrigated soybeans and one of dryland in drought conditions soybeans.
Acreage measurements should probably stay as they are though, because land parcels are usually based on multiples of a square mile, like the typical 80 acre parcel or its subdivisions. Plus EAckerman would never accept to change his name... ;) | |
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Units of measure
