In Israel and several other Middle Eastern countries, the dunam is used for measuring land - it’s equal to 1,000 square meters, or 1/10th of a hectare.
Deciliter (dl) is a very common unit in recipes here in Denmark.
Thank you for that. It’s been a long day.
On programs about obesity from the UK, they always use the measurement ‘stone’ when discussing the weight of your bigger Brits.
Americans will never learn the metric system. 
4’x4’x8’ of neatly stacked wood is a cord (whether it is lumber, logs, or firewood). A “face” cord is a stack of firewood 4’ high by 8’ long one facing deep (12" to 16" long pieces, typically), thus a face cord is 1/4 to 1/3 of a full cord.
For a full cord, firewood typically occupies 85 cubic feet of that 128 cubic foot stack, the rest being air space and voids.
Unless you are in Maine, in which case there is a “thrown cord” which is defined depending on the length of the cut pieces.
The cord in the back of thed pick-up is most likely closer to a face cord than a full cord, unless the sides are extended upwards to contain the higher pile.
It’s been light-years since I had a megaton of barleycorn furlong; it always gets used up quicker than a bushel of hogsheads; makes me wanna say goddrammit.
Just get a full grapple load and be done with it.
:smack:
A microhelen is a unit of beauty sufficient to launch one rubber duckie.
It was about 48 gigabytes per nanojoule outside.
I’ve got a lot of friends in the UK, they do occasionally use stone but we generally use kilograms when we’re talking to each other.
Here in Missouri, we have a "rick,’ which the guy with the pickup calls a “half-cord”, but is actually what Dancer_Flight calls a “face cord.”
But whatever you call it. a 4’X4’X8’ stack of firewood is going to weigh several thousand pounds, so the guy driving an F-150 can’t haul that much, no matter how big his tires are!
I stumbled across that unit in a discussion of … temperature, I think, and it makes NO sense to me whatsoever.
[sub](GiB/nJ or GB/nJ?)[/sub]
I’ve been seeing candelas on lightbulbs lately. For several years, LED bulbs have been saying they were equivalent to an incandescent lightbulb of thismuch or thatmuch wattage; now that everybody is already expecting LED, some brands are starting to provide the actual luminosity value.
I was in grade school in the 1970s, when the U.S. embarked on its original, ill-fated attempt to switch to metric. Due to this, learning the metric system was a big part of our school curriculum for several years. There were educational TV shows (sort of like The Electric Company, only all about learning metric measures), and lots of workbooks.
One thing that I remember us having to spend a lot of time on was mastering the metric prefixes, and what they meant. In retrospect, some of those prefixes are in everyday use a lot more than others – kilo-, centi-, and milli- all come into play reasonably often, but the others (particularly deca- and hecta-) come up far more rarely, if at all, in metric context, “hectare” being the one example I can think of. For those who do use metric measures in daily life – how often do you find that you actually need to be converting from one prefix to another (i.e., from millimeters to centimeters, etc.)
I was going to mention this. Lightbulbs are a nightmare to buy to begin with — umpteen different sizes, shapes and connector types and sizes, arranged in no particular order — but if I’m having to choose between incandescent, halogen, compact fluorescent or LED as well, and work out which is the nearest equivalent to a 60w incandescent, or whatever, I can feel one of my headaches coming on. Much simpler to go by how bright the damn things are.
Though the ones I have are labelled in Lumens; so if yours are in Candelas, we’re not much further forward, and I’m back on the paracetamol.
My parents’ quite modern-looking bathroom scale is in stone and pounds.
Just out of interest I checked up some stores and stone+pounds scales still seem to be on sale there, despite the official metricisation (not as common as kilo scales though)
Kilolitres is used on water bills, and occasionally when describing larger volumes, they’ll be in mega- or giga- litres. There used to be roadside signs in Canberra telling us how many megalitres of water we’d used the previous day to remind us to go easy during dry periods.
Well, the quantity will usually come with the right qualifier eg no one will be described as 1760mm tall. But even if they were, 1760mm, 176cm or 1.76m are instinctively understood as all the same, if that’s what you mean by converting.
In engineering/manufacturing (in aus), dimensions are all always given in mm. Because decimal conversions are not instinctively understood.
Natural gas trading in Canada has contracts quoted in gigajoules (compared to millions of BTUs for U.S. trading).