Bushels and Foot-Poundals: the UK is back on the cutting edge!

There is a vast resource here:

Which someone has taken the trouble to refine further:

I think my favorite might be the beard-second, approximately 10 nanometers.

“Some kind of happiness is measured out in miles”
[ . . . ]
“Some kind of innocence is measured out in years”
      – The Beatles “Hey Bulldog”

They’re a unit of weight, not of mass like that heathen kilogram :wink:

Who measures weight using a unit of mass? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

John Allen Paulos, in his book Innumeracy, mentions that he liked to challenge his students to estimate the rate of their hair growth in miles per hour. His point was that most students had no concept that hair grows in miles per hour.

Can we start measuring distances in poronkusema

A largely French driven movement. Fuck those cheese eating surrender monkeys! We’ve shot ourselves in the foot once with Brexit, but it doesn’t stop there - we can blow the other foot off by de-metrification

Take that Froggies!

That’s the kind of lyrics that sound like they should have a meaning, something profound.

No, especially for those measurements. A UK Imperial gallon is 160 oz and a US Customary gallon 124. Similarly, quarts are 32/40, and pints 16/20. But wait! The US ounce is 4% bigger, so they don’t match up. And of course ounce weights are the same in both, because why not?

The whole exercise is silly, the US routinely uses non-metric alongside metric as colloquial units, but as far as official defintions are concerned the base units are metric and have been for a long time, and the customary units are translated from those. In other words, nobody is forced to use metric, but they’re not saying you can’t.

Well, you know what they say: in for a penny (plus 19 schillings and 11 more pennies), in for a pound.

I think you may have missed my point. I said:

The US uses the Queen Anne gallon, which is what Britain used before the Imperial gallon was introduced in the 1820s. The Imperial gallon was a half-hearted attempt to “metrify” the English system of measurements, since its definition was the volume of ten pounds of water at 60 degrees Fahrenheit. But all it actually did was introduce yet another incompatible unit.

This well-known, much-quoted commentary is relevant here:

Ah, I had looked it up, and the Wikipedia page mentions it but doesn’t explicitly say it’s the same, though it gives the same quantities.

In order to tell whether they are the same, you would need some sort of “international system of units”, with reproducible reference standards, to compare the two.

Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity showed that this is impossible. There can be no universal absolute reference frame.

Typical woke, lefty nonsense.

It’s super Terranormative to assume that someone’s weight is equal to their mass.