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I agree that imperial units are silly and we should probably run on metric for lots of practical reasons. But you gotta admit that they're a fun discussion prompt for trivia; everybody thinks there's an internal logic but it's just all weird history! For example nobody's gonna believe that it's just a weird coincidence that a Zacharia is slightly *less* than half of a Scaramucci
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Travis FW

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@daedalus metric system's practicality hinges on the ubiquity of base-10 math, and that's entirely because Pythagoras thought there was something hand-wavy significant about how if you draw a little pile of dots four layers deep, that's 10 dots! Woah! :mastoface_with_rolling_eyes:
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in reply to Glyph
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Stylus

my hobby: making up stories about "imperial units".

Like, how the story you usually hear about the dimensions of a "2x4" are wrong. yes yes, fresh vs aged wood, but that only accounts for about 28% of the actual size difference.

See, it's actually about the difference between the wine gallon and the ale gallon.

The gallon is BOTH defined as a certain weight of its constitutent liquid; wine and ale have different densities due to different alcohol content, so their gallons are of different weights.

But the gallon is also defined as 3×7×11 inches (nobody knows why! Usually imperial units like to divide into 2s, 3s, and sometimes 5s. 7s and 11s are really uncommon!)

How is this possible? Because there are wine-inches and ale-inches.

Most US lumber is actually from Canada, and in Canada they use a system based on wine-inches, while the US uses the larger ale inch.

in reply to Glyph
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bnuuy

the best cursed pressure unit still is and remains [unit of length] of mercury, like mmHg. calorie is also a funny unit, meant to be metric, but invented before it was understood that heat and energy are the same thing, and therefore is redundant with the joule. and why, of course we also have an assortment of conflicting standardizations for it.