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Comment by saalweachter

3 years ago

> Measurements of mass don't follow measurements of distance. A ton is 160 stone, or 160 * 8 "hundredweights", or 160 * 8 * 14 pounds, or 160 * 8 * 14 * 16 ounces. Not only is it not dependent on the distance measurements, the conversion rates are also dissimilar.

Woah woah woah, don't put that evil on us in the USA, that stone madness is all British.

A US hundredweight is 100 lbs.

The metric system didn't invent water volume and weight correspondence -- a pint's a pound the whole world round. 1 pint of water weighs one pound, and one fluid ounce of water weighs one ounce.

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saalweachter

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usrbinbash  3 years ago

> Woah woah woah, don't put that evil on us in the USA, that stone madness is all British.

> A US hundredweight is 100 lbs.

The fact that there are more than one sort of imperial measurements, and that they are different, makes matters worse, rather than better. The metric system works the same, everywhere, in all countries, and in all languages. The only thing that changed since its inception, was switching from defining base units through comparison to physical templates, to defining them by natural universal constants, aka. making it even better than it already was.

> The metric system didn't invent water volume and weight correspondence

I didn't say it did, I said they depend on one another. And in metric, that works for ALL weights and measurements, and does so consistently. Cool, so 1 pint of water == 1 pound. How much is a pint in cubic inches? How many cubic furlongs of water do I need for 10 imperial Tons?

Oh, and btw.: What exactly do you mean when you say "pint"? Because there are many different ones. Just a short list of examples:

    - Imperial Pint (568ml)
    - Liquid Pint (473ml)
    - Dry Pint (551ml)
    - Indian Pint (330ml)
    - The Australian pint (570ml)
    - The South Australian pint (425ml)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pint#Other_pints

If I have to rely on context, locality and customs to have a chance to understand what a unit of volume actually means, then there may be some issues with the underlying system. One reason why the metric system was invented, and why today almost every country in the world officially uses it, was to solve exactly these problems of ambiguity.

When I say "liter", there is no ambiguity, it's always 1 cubic decimeter.