h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hm, are we talking about troy ounces here?

Personally, I want my gold weighed in Maria Theresa ounces, once popular in Ethiopia. (Go figure.)

Yes Dmitri gold is usually weighed in Troy ounces which weigh a little bit more than normal avoirdupois ounces.

Is that the same Maria Theresa who called young Haydn a "straw-haired blockhead" when he climbed the scaffolding to see in the windows at Schonbrun Palace?

Didn't Haydn write a Maria Theresa Mass.

Yes, he did, but it was a different Maria Theresa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresienmesse

The Maria Theresa of Haydn's childhood died in 1780.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Theresa

She could not possibly have sung the soprano solos in Haydn's Theresiemesse in 1801.

Furthermore, here a hundredweight is (was) 112 pounds, though that may not be the case in the US.

I remember as a young schoolboy wondering why they just gave us the names of the units without illustration. Dry volume measures for example:

A peck is two gallons or 16 pints. Nobody ever mentioned the very helpful word "bucket".

A bushel is eight gallons or four pecks. "Barrel" or "dustbin" would have helped, even though there is no standard size for these.

In the days when I bought coal for my fireplace, I came to realise what the hundredweight was good for: it's what a normal chap like me can carry on his back.

NB These are the (now obsolete) English pints, gallons, and so forth. YMMV.

Nope, we don't use hundredweights here in the States, at least not commonly.


I was one of those kids growing up in the '70s when Jimmy Carter tried to switch us over to metric. When I was introduced to metric, it made so much more sense than the confusing system I had just been learning. They stopped really teaching imperial units as part of the switch-over. They were starting to require new cars to use both km/h and mph. Products were listing both metric and imperial measures. It was starting to make more sense...


Then REAGAN!

"We don't want no commie metric units here!"

And canned the whole program.

Except, for us kids that never really learned the whole imperial system. We were just forgotten. So I'm like that kid from Belize in my Spanish Class. His next class was ESL. He couldn't speak Either English or Spanish very well. Stuck between standards is how I still feel today.

I always thought Napoleon was responsible for imposing the metric system (as well as driving-on-the-right, since he was left-handed).

Not a commie, though keen to promote the (incompatible) values of liberty, equality, fraternity.

According to Reaganites, Napoleon was a pinko commie because he was French.

Thomas Jefferson was forward-thinking about weights and measures. He drew up his own plan for a decimal-based system in 1790, before the Metric System was even developed
http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/usmetric.html

In 1866, Congress passed a law allowing the U.S. to use the Metric System, but not requiring that it be the sole system.

The nice thing about metrics is that units of length dovetail with units of volume. One cubic millimeter is also known as a milliliter, so if you know the length, width, and height of something, you can easily calculate its volume.

Well, both are also tied to mass as well, but more arbitrarily.

Arbitrary, but still easier than pounds/ounces.

A 10cm x 10cm x 10cm cube is a litre. A litre of water weighs one kilogram. That's not the definition but it is almost exact.

The equivalent in British Imperial is "a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter". I think the Americans may have solved this by having smaller pints.

I don't know... I know our pints are only 16oz (from drinking beer ). But I can't remember how many ounces in a pound; I think it's either twelve or sixteen, but I can't be sure without looking it up. Nor can I be sure how many ounces in a quart, again, I think it's either twelve or sixteen. Probably one is twelve and the other sixteen.

I think there's two cups in a quart and four quarts in a gallon but don't ask me how many teaspoons or tablespoons are in a cup.

I can only make a rough guess that there are five thousand and some-odd feet per mile. I know it's over 5000, but not by how much. I know it's not an even number.

I know how many feet in a yard, but I have no idea how many square feet or yards are in an acre or hectare.


Seriously, I probably know no more about imperial measurements than a fairly well educated grade-schooler in Europe.

And I don't get to use metric enough to grok metric units.


Stuck between standards.

A milliliter of water weighs one gram

I grew up with, 'A pint's a pound the world around.'

As my piano teacher (born in the 19th Century) always said, sooner or later, everything you learned in school becomes obsolete.

Personally, my attitude was always to use the measuring system of wherever I was at the time, but steadfastly refuse to mess with those dratted conversions. In other words, when in Rome, do as the Romans do and buy 125g of prosciutto.

I have an easier time with the units that aren't too dissimilar from Imperial units -- a liter and a quart are vaguely comparable. Likewise a meter and a yard. I like kilometers when I'm exercising because they take less effort than miles. I've worked with enough centimeters and inches to have a vague idea how to convert. 30 centimeters are roughly equal to a foot.

I don't use metrics when I'm cooking, though. My measuring spoons make things very efficient.

One of the biggest problems in the US is almost all of our machinery is calibrated in inches, albeit most precision machines use decimal inches. The fabricators in our shop use only inches and fractions. I do almost all my work in decimals of an inch, but convert them to fractions before I send them to the shop. I know most of my co-workers use fractions on their drawings and if I have to use them later it takes me almost as long to correct them as I would have spent drawing them myself

F S

That is a major problem. There is a similar thing in Ireland, though less headache-making, in that land surveys (to do with roads) seem to be dealing in miles and decimals of a mile. Sheesh!

My father was born in 1913 when Imperial was, well, imperative, but he still learned handy conversions at primary school:

Two-and-a-quarter pounds of jam
Weigh about a kilogram

and

A litre of water's
A pint and three quarters

--both very handy. The reason we are so slow to take up metric measures in domestic life is the current movement in commerce to pamper the client. Here's a good example



Guinness decided to make their cans half-litres, no doubt for export reasons, in 1988. This was with the invention of the widget that starts off the nitrogenation of the beer, giving it the creamy head that allows them to call it "draught". Before that there had been cans that came with a squidgelator (sorry, that's our family name for it) -- a little plastic syringe that would initiate nitrogenation when you drew some liquid in and expelled it forcefully into the drink sitting flatly in your glass. High tech!

The previous cans had been 330 ml -- a third of a litre. Bottles had always been either pints or half-pints, though 330 ml bottles were (I'm relying on memory here) creeping in with continental beers. Today the measures sold in Irish (as in English) pubs are still pints and half-pints. People don't want nearly-a-pint or nearly-a half-pint, they want a pint (or a half pint).

One of Guinness's strongest points has always been its advertising. So how were they to get people to accept a can containing seven-eighths of a pint?



Brilliant. They promoted the 500 ml widget-cans as being stupendously bigger than the previous cans, without referring to the volume at all. "Will your fridge be big enough?"

It can only be said, it worked seamlessly. Even pouring the 500 ml into a pint glass, the head rose to fill the available space and no complaints were aired. In Britain the widget won The Queen's Award for Technological Achievement in 1991, having been voted the best invention of the previous 40 years. Unsuccessful contenders for that vote included... the Internet.

My local "British" pub (run by a British expat and his American wife, owned by her mother who decorated the place with all the British kitsch she could get her hands on) lets their loyal customers to bring in their own beer mugs. I picked up one of these krouvi cups at a box store years ago and brought it in to hang above the bar.

http://images.crateandbarrel.com/is/image/Crate/KrouviBeerMug20ozSHS16/$web_product_hero$&/160122145035/iittala-krouvi-beer-mug.jpg

When I first went to that bar, they served proper 20oz pints. We determined that by filling this mug to the top and trimming off the overflowing head, you can get 20oz in a 50cl mug. Due to rising costs, they've since switched to 16oz pints so I'm coming out just a bit ahead.