Measurement system

loverboy wrote: few inches more   thats what i want thats all < =text/>

The Miracle wrote: Metric all the way. Old British crap sucks ass. My fourth year living in US and I still haven't completely figured it out. I'm sure no American knows exactly how many inches there are in a foot and how many feet they are en a mile, etc. because it has like, 10 decimal points. And the Fahrenheit scale is ridiculous too. On what is it based??? does anyone know? With Celsius it's obvious, 100 degrees=boiling point of water, 0=freezing. It would be great if the whole world used the metric system. Well, at least scientists do

12 inches in a foot, 5280 feet in a mile, piece of cake.

Seriously, I understand. When I was in elementary school during the Carter administration there was a strong push to metricize the U.S., but it clearly failed. It obviously has worked better in other countries. Not sure what the problem was here. Could've been the economics of switching over? The metric system is clearly easier to use. Many products sold here use both measurements, like food for example. Our cars use both systems on the speedometers.

The Fahrenheit scale was invented by the German physicist Gabriel Fahrenheit. He determined 0 degrees to be the lowest temperature he measured in the harsh winter of 1708/09 in his home town of Danzig (now Gdansk). The 100 degree mark was his own body temperature (he either was inaccurate or had a fever as the average human body temperature is 98.6). Fahrenheit chose this scale so that he could avoid negative numbers, which in most cases rarely occurs, except for high latitude parts of the planet in the northern and southern hemispheres during winter.

Most scientists actually use the Kelvin scale which has no negative numbers as 0 degrees is defined as absolute zero, where molecular motion stops. I believe this is an international standard, although in everyday life, Celsius is the most popular around the world.


Edited by progaeopteryx

12 inches in a foot, 5280 feet in a mile, piece of cake.

Seriously, I understand. When I was in elementary school during the Carter administration there was a strong push to metricize the U.S., but it clearly failed. It obviously has worked better in other countries. Not sure what the problem was here. Could've been the economics of switching over? The metric system is clearly easier to use. Many products sold here use both measurements, like food for example. Our cars use both systems on the speedometers.

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I remember those days too.  Two of the things that helped cause the failure of metric conversion, you may recall, were 1) oil embargo leading to very high oil prices (to our European friends - high being a relative term in this case).  Many people were convinced that government was in collusion with energy companies to confuse people as to exactly how much they were paying (liters vs gallons).  Also, conversions of road signs and local public facilities like swim pools, running tracks, and highway scales would have cost billions and with a high (not relatively speaking) unemployment rate and runaway inflation in the late 70's, there wasn't a lot of public support to commit tax monies to do this.  And there was also a question of what this might mean to our beloved American sports (football, baseball, hockey, and basketball in particular).  Somehow the idea of a 100 meter field goal just wasn't too appealing.  And really - everybody knows Americans are just mule-stubborn anyway.

And 2), there were a lot of conspiracy-minded religious zealots back then who were convinced that the metric system was somehow a sign of the "end times" (i.e., "mark of the beast" kind of thinking) since most of the school and public announcements pretty much suggested people needed to learn to live with the metric system or be left behind in the marketplace and elsewhere.  Kind of funny considering there aren't a heck of a lot of "6s" in metric.

Anyway, I'm a southpaw so driving on the left side of the road wouldn't bother me a bit, and would make it easier for me to check my mailbox without getting out of the car.  But I'm so used to doing the mental math to convert inches to feet to yards to miles and grams to ounces to pounds (well, not the grams so much now that I'm grown up and with a family) that I wouldn't know what to do with the spare time if all my measurements were neatly lined up with ones and zeros.

And whatever would become of trusted local measurements like "as the crow flies", "hop, skip, and a jump", "over yonder", and c*#t hair"?  Naw, too much work - better just to leave things be.

Would be good to know what the hell a "stone" is though...

Edited by ClemofNazareth

The Good Old Brits introduced metric when we joined the (then) EEC in 1973.... the only problem is that they decided to 'phase it in' and are still doing so 32 years later....

That meant that kids like me had to use both systems at school, and logerithm tables beside calculaters in our Maths exams..

Pint of milk anyone???

Okay, it must be a slow night, as I’ve bothered to actually go look this up.  This speaks sadly to my social life, but that’s a tale for another thread.

 

Apparently the stone is a measure of mass, and one stone equals 12.5 pounds.  For our friends all over the world, one stone also equals -

23,563.24 assarion

994.72010965 bekah (bekum?  bekai?)

28,349.523125 carats

3.4144968008e+27 daltons

1,472.7025 denarius

833.80950368 didrachma

5,560,277.0191 dyne

9,947.2010965 gerah

87,500 grains

5,669.904625 grams

0.0125 kip

188,505.92 lepton

16.676190074 menah

200 ounces

3,645.8333333 pennyweight

94,252.96 quadrans

4,375 scruples

0.38851187714 slugs

and

15.190973101 troy pounds

I feel so much more enlightened now.  So now I know that a guy who weighs 20 stone is a pretty fat dude…

Edited by ClemofNazareth

About the 'stone'...

I'm gonna search the value for 'obolus' and 'sestertium'.