Interestingly, the same people who brought you the metric system (the French revolutionary government, post 1789) tried to do just what Plynck mentions, namely metricize time. The day would be divided, from midnight to midnight, into 10 periods, each of which would in turn be divided into 10 subperiods, and so on, until you attained the smallest measurable increment of time. Each 30-day month would be divided into three ten-day periods, while the year would have 12 30-day months, with five or six intercalary festival days to make up the difference between that and the solar year.
You know, just a couple of nudges, and a little bit of despin, and we could fix it so a year is exactly 360 days (a nice, readily devisable number) and a day is 86400 seconds (another nicely divisible number), without having to muck about with changing changing any time units or recalibrating chronographs. And we could keep engineers and physicists employed for decades figuring out how to effect the change in orbit without destroying all life on Earth. I’d suggest that some constant velocity swinging motors on the Moon should serve as the orbital tug, while extending large masses out on counterbalancing beanstalks will serve to reduce the Earth’s rotational velocity.
Yes, it’s yet another modest proposal from your friends at the National Council on Brilliantly Preposterous Ideas. Please, hold your applause until after my presentation on how to transmute raw sewage into precious stones using only WD-40, rubber bands, and surplus volumes of Congressional Quarterly.
Stranger
Oops. I said chain, I meant rod. Get those mixed up all the time. 4 rods to a chain, and for some reason I always think it’s the other way 'round.
When I was a child, I thought we should make all 12 months exactly 30 days, and then lump the leftover 5-1/4 (roughly) days at the end (or beginning) of each year into a huge international party. Change the week to ten days with a three day weekend (you now have 30% of your days off work instead of 28.28%) and we’ve got exactly three weeks per month, 36 per year. The year-end party isn’t part of a week at all.
Today, the average person works 5 days per week, 50 days per year: 250 days. Under the new system, you’d work 7 days per week, 36 weeks per year: 252 days. The extra two days could be floating holidays. EVERY weekend is a three-day weekend.
Now that I look back on that idea, I like it even more than I did back then.
Aha! So there are ten chains in a furlong! I just knew that 10 had to show up as a conversion factor somewhere in the customary system! Prior to this, the best I could do was ten acres in a square furlong.
Is there any number (within reason) that doesn’t crop up? Plus, this measurement of 10 chains is purely a practical one, not something that came about through a desire for decimal simplicity. (And it’s less convenient when it’s measured as 40 rods!)
2 - cups in a pint, pints in a quart
3 - feet in a yard, miles in a league
4 - quarts in a gallon, rods in a yard, pecks in a bushel, etc, etc, etc
5
6 - feet in a fathom
7
8 - furlongs in a mile, fl. ounces in a cup
9
10 - chains in a furlong
11
12 - inches in a foot
13
14 - pounds in a stone
15
16 - ounces in a pound
There’s a few higher ones, but they get pretty sparse. I can’t think of any odd conversion factors higher than 3, unless we go with days of the week or square feet in a square yard, or other things that seem like cheating to me. Surely I’m missing some, though.
I’m determined to find a ‘five’ and a ‘seven’, at least! Gimme time…
One clove = seven pounds
One firkin = nine gallons
Two down, a handful to go…
Anyone remember the comedy routine set in ancient Rome with one merchant trying to convince another to switch to the decimal system instead of using I, V, L and so on?
“Enough! I shall never understand this if I live to be C!”
A pint’s a pound the world around. See, we English system people have metric (non-SI metric) system, too.
The imperical weight does not vary. The use of pounds as a force is defined as the weight of a one-pound mass where the accelleration is 9.8 m per s per s.
I would agree.
Unbeknownst to many, the Fahrenheit scale has almost twice the resolution as the Celsius scale for a given number of significant digits. Knowing this can come in handy in certain situations.
‘Celsius is too coarse’? Assuming you’re talking about everyday usage, I’d say that Farenheit is too fine. The weather can be predicted accurately to a specific degree on the Celsius scale, but only to ‘high sixties’ or similar in Farenheit.
Is that a US pint or a British pint?
Here we say, or used to say, “a pint of water, a pound and a quarter”.
There’s also nine hands in a yard.
How about 231 cubic inches in a gallon? Oh, and if we want to fill in that 5 gap, there’s probably something in the Imperial liquid measures. Certainly, there are 5 American quarts in an Imperial gallon, but that seems cheating. Cups in a quart, perhaps?
And there are 11 fathoms in a chain, too. And should we count a baker’s dozen?
Just a nitpick, but if you’re going from Thingies to Miles, you would want to do 32/12/5280. Your formula is for going from Miles to Thingies. 
When I did FAA Ground School, we had what our teacher refered to as the “Dummy Check” where you’d look at the result of whatever calculation and ask yourself if it made sense on it’s own. ie: If your Cessna 172 is crusing along at Mach 3, you fudged a number somewhere.