Comment by 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.
US Customary Units (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units) is not the same as Imperial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units)
For what its worth, our system was standardized in 1832, and has been bound to SI equivalents since 1895.
For a broader comparison of the differences - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_imperial_and...
> and has been bound to SI equivalents since 1895.
But then why not just switch to using them directly? Having arbitrary units of measurement, and then going on to define them in SI units anway, is like dividing the day into 17.5 "Foobars", each of which consists of 4200 "Baz", and then defining that 1 Baz == 1.1755102040816328 seconds.
If there was some tangible advantage to doing that, I wouldn't say anything, but there isn't. Sure, 1 inch is roughly something-with-thumb-idk, only it isn't really, because everyone has different fingers, feet, arms, etc., so the entire "advantage" of having a real world comparison is out the window anyway.
> But then why not just switch to using them directly?
Where it matters we already did. There's really nothing to see here.