Unit of Measurement WTF
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@Arantor said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
@HardwareGeek said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
In most former British colonies, if you order a pint of beer, you'll get an Imperial pint, or close to it.
I am reliably informed that in New Zealand, asking for a pint in a pub will get you a 500ml beverage.
I recently ran into a pub which served Guiness in special 400 ml glasses. The standard volumes for beers in Germany are either 330 ml or 500 ml. With exceptions for Cologne (200 ml) and foreign nations like Bavaria (1 l).
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@Rhywden said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
foreign nations like Bavaria
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@loopback0 said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
I can't believe nobody reacted yes, so let me : Myanmar/Burma does not use imperial system! It's just one of the three countries that haven't officially adopted metric.
They have their own units
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
They have their own [units]
áá°á¸ááŹá¸ mutha 2.04117 g 31.5 grain 2
áááşááŹá¸ mattha 4.08233 g 63 grain 2
ááŤá¸áá°á¸ááŹá¸ nga mutha[N 1] 8.16466 g 0.288 oz 2^ Literally "five mutha", but in fact it is only four.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
I can't believe nobody reacted yes, so let me : Myanmar/Burma does not use imperial system!
Neither does the USA. They use American customary units, most of which are similar to very similar or even identical to Imperial units, but there are a good number of minor differences and a bunch of units that arenât used in the Imperial system (and vice versa).
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@Gurth said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
Neither does the USA. They use American customary units, most of which are similar to very similar or even identical to Imperial units, but there are a good number of minor differences and a bunch of units that arenât used in the Imperial system (and vice versa).
The variation is entirely to be expected, of course, when you recall that the Imperial system itself only dates back to 1824; there would be no reason for (and definite reasons against) the US adopting it.
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@Gurth said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
They use American customary units,
And yet there's no shortage of Americans that call those units "English". More precisely, there was no shortage of Americans who did that in the parts of the US I lived in during the 1980s.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
And yet there's no shortage of Americans that call those units "English"
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@Watson said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
The variation is entirely to be expected, of course, when you recall that the Imperial system itself only dates back to 1824
Of course, and that is also why the Americans donât use Imperial units: they werenât part of the British empire anymore by then, and had no pressing reason to adopt the newly standardised British âsystemâ.
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
And yet there's no shortage of Americans that call those units "English".
And theyâre not wrong as such.
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@Gurth said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
I can't believe nobody reacted yes, so let me : Myanmar/Burma does not use imperial system!
Neither does the USA. They use American customary units, most of which are similar to very similar or even identical to Imperial units, but there are a good number of minor differences and a bunch of units that arenât used in the Imperial system (and vice versa).
For example force:
pound
orpound-force
instead of Imperialmidichlorian
(or metricNewton
)
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@MrL said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
Literally "five mutha", but in fact it is only four.
That's just a minor discount. Why would you object to that?
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
@loopback0 said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
I can't believe nobody reacted yes, so let me : Myanmar/Burma does not use imperial system! It's just one of the three countries that haven't officially adopted metric.
They have their own units
TIL. They have measurements in Pali, the language of the Buddha. So their measurements must be over two thousand years old. In particular, I had long wondered whether a yojana was an actual measurement, or just a rough term meaning a long ways. It looks like it's an actual unit of measurement, just less than 13 miles, which is about what I had read.
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@dangeRuss No, generally it would be measured on the surface, not below it.
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@jinpa said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
@dangeRuss No, generally it would be measured on the surface, not below it.
And yet the expression is under not less
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@dangeRuss
but we already established that there is no sanity when it comes to Murican measuring units
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@Gurth said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
And yet there's no shortage of Americans that call those units "English".
And theyâre not wrong as such.
Yes, they are. The thing the Americans call a gallon is part of this system of so-called "English" units, but you won't find anyone who's actually English in England using a gallon that size. (And not just because the British in general use litres for the things they used to measure in gallons, but because even before switching to litres, the British (Imperial) gallon wasn't the same size as the American gallon.)
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
@Gurth said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
And yet there's no shortage of Americans that call those units "English".
And theyâre not wrong as such.
Yes, they are. The thing the Americans call a gallon is part of this system of so-called "English" units, but you won't find anyone who's actually English in England using a gallon that size.
You would in the 18th century. English measures up to the 1820s were too much of a retarded mess, so the poms standardised what is known as the imperial system with the same names but slightly more consistent application. Naturally, yanks with their fierce British loyalty stuck with the double-retard units.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
@Gurth said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
And theyâre not wrong as such.
Yes, they are. The thing the Americans call a gallon is part of this system of so-called "English" units, but you won't find anyone who's actually English in England using a gallon that size.
Well, no â for the basic reason @kazitor mentioned above. The Imperial âsystemâ standardised a bunch of measures across the board (well, almost) instead of having each town, city, county, guild, trade, and whatever else in the country use their own sizes for a given unit name. Per Wikipedia:
English system gallons
There were a number of systems of liquid measurements in the United Kingdom prior to the 19th century.[3]Winchester or corn gallon was 272 in3 (157 imp fl oz; 4,460 mL) (1697 Act 8 & 9 Will III c22)
Henry VII (Winchester) corn gallon from 1497 onwards was 154.80 imp fl oz (4,398 mL)
Elizabeth I corn gallon from 1601 onwards was 155.70 imp fl oz (4,424 mL)
William III corn gallon from 1697 onwards was 156.90 imp fl oz (4,458 mL)
Old English (Elizabethan) ale gallon was 282 in3 (163 imp fl oz; 4,620 mL) (1700 Act 11 Will III c15)
Old English (Queen Anne) wine gallon was standardized as 231 in3 (133 imp fl oz; 3,790 mL) in the 1706 Act 5 Anne c27, but it differed before that:
London 'Guildhall' gallon (before 1688) was 129.19 imp fl oz (3,671 mL)
Jersey gallon (from 1562 onwards) was 139.20 imp fl oz (3,955 mL)
Guernsey gallon (17th century origins till 1917) was 150.14 imp fl oz (4,266 mL)
Irish gallon was 217 in3 (125 imp fl oz; 3,560 mL) (1495 Irish Act 10 Hen VII c22 confirmed by 1736 Act Geo II c9)But the Americans had forked off their own âsystemâ before then, basing it on who-knows-what but almost certainly taken from (some of) the above mess.
As for the modern measures, an Imperial gallon is 4.54609 litres and made up of 160 Imperial fluid ounces of 28.4130625 ml each; a US gallon is 3.785411784 l and consists of 128 US fluid ounces of 29.5735295625 ml each. Interestingly:
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@Gurth Wow! Your calculator does not even fuck up the last decimal.
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@BernieTheBernie macOS Spotlight, my go-to calculator these days.
Afterward, I realised that of course this calculation works out perfectly. I think I was too tired to think of that yesterday.
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@kazitor said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
You would in the 18th century.
Perhaps, but I'm not in the 18th Century, and haven't been at any point in my life, and I was talking about today (well, the 1980s, but the same logic applies then and now).
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
I'm not in the 18th Century, and haven't been at any point in my life
TIL
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@boomzilla EWRONGSIZE. The Yorktown class was a bit over 800 ft, but this is much bigger than 800 mm (and it looks like it's less than 800 cm).
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@Bulb said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
@boomzilla EWRONGSIZE. The Yorktown class was a bit over 800 ft, but this is much bigger than 800 mm (and it looks like it's less than 800 cm).
mm, cm, km, who can keep them all straight anyway? Why do you even need so many different meters? We get by with just one feet.
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@izzion said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
We get by with just one feet.
Yeah, you finally deprecated the other one at the end of last year.
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@Bulb I believe that Louisiana still uses the Imperial French Foot for some land measurements, and is the last place in the world to do so. Often only along one dimension of a plot of land...
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@izzion said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
We get by with just one feet.
I'll get back to you on that after I've finished reading this one books.
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@Bulb said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
and it looks like it's less than 800 cm
800 cm == 8 metres == 26-27 feet is believable for the length of the "ship" they are standing on, in fact. It's certainly the right order of magnitude even if it isn't exactly right.
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@Steve_The_Cynic 800 inches (66'8", 20m) would be a reasonable guess if this is an actual scale model, but that's definitely too high. 400 inches (33'4", 10m) is possible.
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@dkf said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
@Bulb I believe that Louisiana still uses the Imperial French Foot
That's quite a feat, since Louisiana never was part of any Empire, French or otherwise (and neither French Empire used the foot as official measurement either).
Often only along one dimension of a plot of land...
That's... impressive. Not in a good way, but still impressive.
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@remi said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
since Louisiana never was part of any Empire
Fussy: in 1762, in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, France ceded Louisiana (the larger territory that includes the present-day US state of Louisiana) to Spain. Er. To the Spanish Empire.
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@remi said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
That's quite a feat, since Louisiana never was part of any Empire, French or otherwise (and neither French Empire used the foot as official measurement either).
Regardless, the French had quite an influence on Louisiana. And to this day, Louisiana has a lot of light-skinned blacks.
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@Steve_The_Cynic well spotted, I even thought that this might have happened but didn't bother checking. Have your .
Though () Louisiana still wasn't part of an Empire. It was given to Spain i.e. the kingdom of Spain (I think the empire in "Spanish Empire" refers more to the structure of this entity than to its actual formal name). Spain for a long time happened to be ruled by someone who also ruled an Empire (the HRE), but I don't think Spain was ever considered as being part of it. And in 1762, it wasn't anymore since quite a while.
So I might take your back.
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@remi Which is besides the point. At the time when New Orleans was founded, there was a unit in use in France and its territories that was either called by that name (in translation) then or later, and which was used to measure land plots. Along one of the dimensions further later subdivisions happened (probably using US feet) but not in the other; this made the plots become less square, but that's not surprising in any city of reasonable age.
I used to work with someone from there.
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@dkf said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
Which is besides the point.
YMBNH
At the time when New Orleans was founded, there was a unit in use in France and its territories that was either called by that name (in translation) then or later
Random ing aside (), I am mildly curious about that. Yes, this is most likely what happened, but AFAIK there never was any unit in use in France that was called "imperial" (no part of France at that time saw itself as part of an Empire and by the time it did, it had switched to metric).
So I have no idea which empire this foot came from.
ETA: there is almost nothing relevant showing up for "imperial french foot" (with or without "louisiana") and no clear story or definition of that unit.
However, I did find a mention that, while the meter became the official unit in 1799, its adoption was slow and in 1812 Napoleon introduced "commonly used units" which were the old ones (foot, pound...) but defined from the meter, kilogram... (and kept being used for at least 25 years afterwards) Of course by 1812 Louisiana was no longer French but also of course the population probably still was about as much French as it was in 1803, so they might have adopted that foot because they were aware it existed, and called it "imperial" for obvious reasons.
If someone can find a definition of that Louisiana "imperial French foot" we could see whether it matches the mesure usuelle of 1812 (apparently defined as exactly 1/3 m).
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@remi said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
If someone can find a definition of that Louisiana "imperial French foot"
Here perhaps?
In Louisiana we say that 1 arpent equals 192 feet.
In North America, 1 arpent = 180 French feet = about 192 English feet = about 58.47 metres
So 1 French foot = 192/180 English feet = 192/180 * 30.48 cm = 32.51 cm. But itâs âaboutâ so call it 32.5, or 2 cm longer than the English foot?
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@Gurth thanks. Not quite the mesure usuelle though. Maybe my idea was wrong.
(the mesure usuelle apparently started at the toise equal to exactly 2 m which was then divided in 6 feet, the feet in 12 inches and the inch in 12 lines -- the goal was explicitly to restore the easy sub-multiples of the imperial system, while keeping a universal reference (the metric system, which at the time was mostly based on physical objects))
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Incidentally this situation is why Napoleon was supposedly short - being 5 foot whatever in French feet is taller than 5 foot whatever in Imperial feet, but it suited the English to spin it as such.
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@Arantor said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
Incidentally this situation is why Napoleon was supposedly short - being 5 foot whatever in French feet is taller than 5 foot whatever in Imperial feet, but it suited the English to spin it as such.
And Napoleon did have two imperial French feet!
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@Arantor said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
Incidentally this situation is why Napoleon was supposedly short - being 5 foot whatever in French feet is taller than 5 foot whatever in Imperial feet, but it suited the English to spin it as such.
Thatâs French propaganda to make themselves feel better.
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@DogsB said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
@Arantor said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
Incidentally this situation is why Napoleon was supposedly short - being 5 foot whatever in French feet is taller than 5 foot whatever in Imperial feet, but it suited the English to spin it as such.
Thatâs French propaganda to make themselves feel better.
Sometimes, though, even the best propaganda efforts come up short.
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@remi said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
the goal was explicitly to restore the easy sub-multiples of the imperial system, while keeping a universal reference (the metric system, which at the time was mostly based on physical objects)
A different but comparable thing was done in the 1820s in the Netherlands (which included modern Bâ˘â˘â˘â˘â˘m at the time): stick the old commonly used names onto standard metric measurements, making a âNetherlands elâ equal to one metre, a âNetherlands inchâ to a centimetre, etc.
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@Gurth said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
@remi said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
the goal was explicitly to restore the easy sub-multiples of the imperial system, while keeping a universal reference (the metric system, which at the time was mostly based on physical objects)
A different but comparable thing was done in the 1820s in the Netherlands (which included modern Bâ˘â˘â˘â˘â˘m at the time): stick the old commonly used names onto standard metric measurements, making a âNetherlands elâ equal to one metre, a âNetherlands inchâ to a centimetre, etc.
The main one to survive in common use is the "ons" (ounce, 100g, way off the original). "pond" (pound) is also still in common use, but for 500g (pretty close) rather than the envisioned 1kg.
When dealing with land registration, the "are" (acre) is 100 m², but I've never heard it in any other context. Interesetingly, metric prefixes are used with this - a "centiare" is 1 m² and likewise only sees very specific uses, while a "hectare" is 10000 m² and is used pretty widely.
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@loopback0 said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
Google's correct this time. An imperial pound is ~454g, 14 of them is ~6.35kg.
An imperial hundredweight is 112lb.
This is one of my favorites: it's 112lb because all of the other countries in the area had a thing called a "hundredweight" (using their own units, of course, and often not 100 of them!). 112lb is roughly equivalent to everyone else's hundredweights. So merchants could talk hundredweights and be correct in nearly every market.
And it just gets sillier with the long ton/metric ton/short ton thing. Americans said "112 is a very silly number for a hundredweight", so the US Customary hundredweight is, in fact, 100 pounds. And since a "ton" is twenty hundredweight, the US Customary ton is 2000 pounds, while the Imperial ton is 2240 pounds. As it happens, the metric ton is pretty close to the Imperial ton, and pretty far from the short ton, because the US didn't get much input into the metric system.
Everything is awful, and it's great!
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@PotatoEngineer said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
As it happens, the metric ton is [...]
pretty far fromfalling short of the short tonFTFMBPO
Except it doesn't work as it's the short ton which is short but teleprinter-fence-playing card.