Billion

[vison]

My reasoning for American usage of units...
its a large country, which is why a mile is longer than a km - it sounds like you have to cover less distance, feels better. And a pound is less than a kg, hence easier to lose.

When the American Revolutionaries threw off the hated yoke of English oppression, they kept British units of measurement. ** Those units were based on such things as the distance from the end of King Henry IV's nose to the end of his extended arm and fingers, the length of a certain number of grains of corn (WHEAT!!!!!) lined up end to end, and other scientific distances. I can't remember where the "stone" weight came from, but it's 14 pounds. The English Pound (money) was once a pound (livre, hence the stylized "L") of silver . . . . ohmigawd . . . . and then decimal currency always came to grief over farthings (1/4 penny).

The American dollar (from taler, a Dutch word) of 100 cents (not pennies, although people say penny sometimes) is the same as 8 bits, a Spanish real could be cut into 8 pieces (pieces of and now my head is going wuggawugga and I think I'll go and have a nice cuppa tea.

**To the extent that: when you Americans go to a liquor store and buy a fifth of Jack Daniels? You are buying a fifth of the English gallon, which is 5/4 of an American gallon. The American gallon is nearly 4 litres (3.785 L or something), but is, in fact, only 4/5 of an English gallon.

Now, how kewl is that? A post with a footnote.

[Primula Baggins]

Actually, vison, when we go to the liquor store and buy a fifth of Jack Daniels, we are buying 750 ml.

Or perhaps I should go buy one and check. It's been a long week.

hobby, I cross my sevens most of the time, left over from when I was a hospital lab tech in the precomputerized days. I wrote results reports on three-layered forms and it was often hard to read all the layers. Crossing the 7s kept them from being mistaken for 2s. Plenty of people did that in those days.

I did not put the little uptick on the 1—American eyes almost always read that as a 7.

Now, of course, results go straight from the assay machine to the computer where the doctor can find them. Much less possibility for error.

[vison]

The "fifth" is now 750 ml? It wasn't, at one time.

English gallon: 160 oz. ( 2 - 10 ounce English cups, 1 English pint is 20 oz, 2 - 20 oz pints, make 1 - 40 ounce quart, 4 - 40 ounce quarts make 160 ounces, 1 English gallon.)


American gallon: 128 oz. ( American cup, 8 oz, - 2 American cups make 16 oz American pint, 2 - 16 oz American pints make 1 American quart of 32 oz, 4 American quarts make 1 American gallon of 128 oz.)

English gallon (160 oz) minus American gallon (128 oz) leaves 32 American quart, so English gallon is 5/4 American gallon.

32 oz was once "a fifth", in other words. Is 32 oz about 750 ml? Jeez. I gotta look it up.

So I did:

Liquid Measure

US Unit Metric Unit
1 fluid ounce = 29.573 milliliters
1 quart = 0.94635 liter
1 gallon = 3.7854 liter
0.033814 fluid ounce = 1 milliliter
1.0567 quarts = 1 liter
0.26417 gallons = 1 liter


So the 32 oz "fifth" has become the 750 ml "fifth". That's odd, since 32 fluid oz ought to be 32 X 29.573 ml = 946.336 ml, a difference, more or less, of 200 ml. Of course, 1/5 USA gallon is about 757 ml. Was the "fifth" ALWAYS a fifth of a USA gallon? Was I lied to all my life? Jeez.

We went through this here, of course. For instance, coffee was once sold in pounds, which is 454 gms. Then, for awhile, we got 454 gms of coffee in the old container. Next thing, you know, the coffee containers contain 375 gms, and not a word said, just if you happened to read the label you saw that all of a sudden your "pound" of coffee was nowhere NEAR a pound. Deli meats are sold "by the 100 gms". So it looks like a good deal, Black Forest ham at $1.49/100 gms until you realize that "a metric pound" as they call it is 500 gms and you will fork out $7.45 for your "pound" of ham.

Canadian gas is sold in litres, not gallons. A litre of gas is $1.17 CDN today in my neighbourhood. The CDN dollar is about 92 cents American today. So. 1 L gas is $1.0764 US. 3.7854 L times $1.0764 = $4.0746 US a US gallon. Not so bad, after all, but awfully high just the same. I dither: it HAS to be higher, we HAVE to drive less to Save the Earth, but then, my gas bill goes up and up and up . . . and I HAVE to drive to get anywhere!!!!

We don't have that yet with cans of beer. (The can being "universal" in North America.) A can of beer is 355 ml, or, 355 divided by 29.573 = 12 oz. A bottle of beer, however, is now 341 ml, or about 11.5 oz. (Bottled beer is a bit cheaper than cans, but that is a whole other argument, when you think of the weight of glass compared to aluminum and the cost of shipping, etc., the price of beer has no relationship to reality, being mostly taxes anyway . . . .)

[truehobbit]

American eyes almost always read that as a 7.

Mmmh, yes, I suppose that's why it's risky on letters.
When I write American 7's, I always try to make a very long straight top line and a properly slanting vertical line to make it unlike a 1, but when I look at it afterwards it's still beyond me how you can not see a somewhat crooked 1 in that.

Is 32 oz about 750 ml? Jeez. I gotta look it up.

Don't you guys have a version of the saying 'Trying is better than studying'?

[Primula Baggins]

I think the old fifths were fifths of an American gallon, because 32 ounces is a full quart, more like 900 ml, not 750, and the change in size when the metric conversion happened wasn't that dramatic.

But I don't really know, and as hobby so aptly points out, when theoretical speculation provides no satisfaction, it may be time to acquire some hard (so to speak) data.

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

The American dollar (from taler, a Dutch word) of 100 cents (not pennies, although people say penny sometimes) is the same as 8 bits, a Spanish real could be cut into 8 pieces (pieces of 8 ) and now my head is going wuggawugga and I think I'll go and have a nice cuppa tea.

The connection to the spanish "8 bits" is why stocks on the New York Stock Exchange and other exchanges were valued in 1/8's until April 2002.

IBM closing price 70 1/8
Xerox closing price 35 3/8

etc

That has since been abandoned and converted to decimal values. The conversion from the "pieces of eight" system occured in April 2002.

It might have occured earlier but the exchanges were occupied with Y2K before that, which was a sizable endeavor of its own, and the impetus to go to a decimal system was really only strong once trading became more highly computerized.

Using the pieces of 8 system, there was less variation in pricing to keep track of in an open outcry system. However, most exchanges are largely electronic now. The NYSE uses a mixed system, with floor traders using open outcry and electronic trading mixed.

With computers, keeping track of all the variations in pricing is not as complicated.

BrianIs AtYou

[baby tuckoo]

My attempt to fathom all of this has tied my stomach into knots.

[Primula Baggins]

<hands the baby a jingle toy>

It amazes me, looking at trading floors, how things actually get bought and sold in all that apparent chaos, and how transactions are monitored.

[Crucifer]

The other thing that drives me absolutely BATS, and I mean BATS, is the European (and Quebec) way of using a comma for the decimal point, and no comma between the sets of digits in large numbers. Confusing?

Let's see: American (and Anglo-Canadian way): $25.19. Quebec way: 25,19$. American way: $1,000,000.25. Stupid way: 1 000 000,25$. Teh thing with the commas is that you know you have a "set" of 3 digits, and you can very easily read the numbers. With only a space, the numbers can easily run together, especially when the space is small or not there . . .123,346,789.98 Easy. 123456789,98 (hard)

I hear ya, vision. I was brought up with £5.99, for 1,000,000,000,000 grains of sand. (Not really, it's just an example). But I prefer imperial measurements. If someone says 5'9", I will be totally ok, but 1m79cm is like

To quote that fountain of wisdom, Grandpa Simpson:

My car does 17 rats tails to a hog's head and that's the way I like it

[Jnyusa]

ah, international measures! what fun.

Imagine giving an economics exam, and realizing as you are correcting the results that all the European students have read the comma in the prices and quantities as a decimal point. Lucky for them that I knew immediately why all their calculations were so weird and didn't just give them all -0-.

Where measures of distance are concerned, I do have an idiosyncratic preference for measures based on the human body. There is something very 'human' about this, unlike the metric system. But the metric system is much more convenient for scientific purposes of course.

In Ncaragua the measure of land is a manzana. A manzana is 100 square rods. A rod is the distance from the center of your chest to the tips of your fingers on one arm. Two rods are a baron, your wingspread. This is a delightful measure. Every town has one man whose body is the standard of measure. When land has to be bought or sold, they pay him a fee to come out and measure it off with his wingspread.

I was immensely curious how this would stack up to an acre on average, but Nica being the traditional culture that it is, I thought it unwise to ask permission to measure the chests of all the men in town. It happened, though, that my contact person in this town, who'd immigrated from England, had done just that. He determined that the average length of a rod was 33.5 inches.

Which makes a manzana equal to 1.789 acres, or 0.724 hectares.

Jn

[Primula Baggins]

Fascinating, Jn!

A wingspread is also a fathom, of course, but that was standardized as six feet fairly early on.

[Crucifer]

Ah. So that's what a fathom is...

[narya]

When I was in college in the late 1970s, engineers still used English units (they may yet, I don't know), meaning that in physics classes the non-engineers got a miserable taste of how extremely ridiculous the English system is for complicated measurements and calculations. (A "pound" is not a measure of mass, for example, the way a kilogram is; it's a measure of weight, which is mass times the acceleration of gravity, which introduces huge complications in calculations involving mass.) And don't get me started on the conversion factors.

I wish we would just adopt the metric system, but politically, it's not going to happen.

When I was in college in the mid 1970s, we engineers had to learn both metric and English. I'm still a little fuzzy on the whole system, but I seem to recall there were pounds-mass, pounds-force, and slugs. Until recently, the few roads designed with Federal dollars, rather than local dollars, had to be formatted in metric. Which made everyone very unhappy, because it meant thinking in English 90% of the time, and metric 10% of the time. The feds finally gave up, and allowed us to design in English.

Perhaps it had something to do with that Mars spacecraft that crashed because it was built partly to metric specs and partly to English specs.

Of course, I still have to deal with old surveyors' documents in rods, chains, and links.

[vison]

And then, of course, there was the Gimli Glider.

[Primula Baggins]

vison, thanks for that link—what a great story!

I agree, narya, that a consistent set of measurements that the users are comfortable with is needed. I was just nostalgically grumpy about having had to learn the English units, which are of less than no use to a chemist. (The thought of doing any kind of chemical calculations, such as dilutions , in anything other than metric units makes my blood run cold.)

[MithLuin]

I agree that metric is much simpler, but if you have the conversion factors on hand, English (or whatever we're calling the system the Americans currently use) isn't that bad.

I got my chemical engineering degree in 2002, and we worked with slugs, etc. We learned to do most physics and engineering calculations both ways, though of course the chemistry was all metric. Either system can be used fine - the problem comes when you have to convert an entire problem (or project!) from one to the other - very tedious, and introduces room for errors. Most people just stick with whatever their constants or charts are in.

Kilograms aren't as simple as they appear. We use them in everyday speech as a weight, but they are really a mass. The weight is given by Newtons. Thus, a person with a mass of 62 kg has a weight of about 600 N. (I think that comes out to something reasonable, like 125 lbs). Pounds are, of course, a weight, and slugs are the mass value. To get slugs from pounds, you simply divide by the acceleration due to gravity: -32 feet per second squared. That is no trickier than finding Newtons by multiplying kilograms by the acceleration due to gravity: -9.8 meters per second squared.

I currently make my chemistry students convert from Celcius to Kelvin, and they complain about that. It would be much worse if I made them deal with Fahrenheit! But I try to tell them what the numbers mean. Just a rough idea. So, 0°C is the freezing point of water, 20°C is room temp, and 100°C is the boiling point of water. If they ask, 37°C is human body temp.


Most Americans who are educated in science beyond the high school level are comfortable with metric...but I would not say that most Americans are comfortable with metric. And then there is the (separate) issue of unit conversions - my Mom still insists she cannot double recipes accurately because she did not learn fractions in 5th grade. She may have been sick a lot that year, but she managed to become an Arcitect, so I really don't believe her when she tells me she can't double 1 3/4 c. That has nothing to do with anything, perhaps...

[axordil]

In high school we once had to work out the speed of light in fathoms per fortnight.

That was stolen from an old "law" about constants being looked up being expressed in the most useless units possible, IIRC. The original used furlongs per fortnight, which is one step more useless.

BTW,

1 fathom per fortnight = 1.51190476 × 10-6 m / s

So sayeth Google.

Also BTW--

I've never seen milliards outside my old CRC books, but the usage "one thousand million" is fairly common in British parlance of a while back.


Found the reference!:

Klipstein's Third General Engineering Law: Dimensions will always be expressed in the least usable term. Velocity, for example, will be expressed in furlongs per fortnight.