Buzzkill53120

Well it’s an American Quarter Horse, so I guess it’s imperial. Typically they’re 16 hands high, weigh 65 stones and can attain a top speed of 107,000 furlongs/fort nite.

unterhausen

I forgot about half centuries. I might have actually organized a couple. I was pretty sure that metric centuries were held back in the '70s. Searching on google, I find a metric century patch from 1977

Bah Humbug

Furlong is a fun unit, actually. It's the length of the furrow on a one-acre field, which was also the length oxen were able to plow. If you're farming, that's a useful length to have a word for. Now it's mocked, because no one uses oxen in plowing anymore (ok I'm sure some hipster does somewhere once a week and posts it on Instagram) and it sounds silly, but when it was used it was used because it served a useful purpose. It didn't have to relate to other units in a meaningful way.

Buzzkill53120

I didn't know the true origin of the furlong. I thought its only use was measuring horse racetracks. Thanks for the insight. I realize furlongs/fortnight is a nonsensical unit for speed, I only remember it because I had an engineering professor who used it to demonstrate how to do unit conversion (he grew up on a farm).

Marcus_Ti

A really funny unit of measure, still actually used, is "tons" air conditioner capacity is rated by. They're actual tons, of ice, melting from 32F solid to 32F liquid....a relic of the old icebox days, whereby cooling capacity was limited by how much ice you could store in your icebox.

Maelochs

Right but an acre is a unit of area .... A one-acre farm could be one furrow wide .... in which case a furlong might stretch from here to Kansas ...

As far as I am concerned, society was doomed when we changed from cubits and spans to all these standardized measuring systems. if the length of the foot of the current king isn't a foot ..... right?

Maelochs

CNN - Metric mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter - September 30, 1999

scott967

A one-acre field would be 10x1 chains as 10 chains = 1 furlong. Since the vast majority of land in the US is in the PLSS, the basic unit of land area is the quarter-quarter section or 40 acres.

Metric made sense in the days of slide rules, but with computers not so much. You could argue a system based on binary is better as all you need to do is shift a register.

I have to say to this day I have no visualization of what size a "hectare" is.

scott s.
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Bah Humbug

I never said metric would be the doom of society. Metric is great for engineering, but it's lacking for daily tasks and that's why people around the world reject it for daily task use. Would you like to respond to what I said, or argue with the scarecrow you've built on your imaginary, non-existent, one-furrow-wide farm?

You also clearly missed the bit about a furlong being tied to the work interval of oxen, which means your imaginary, non-existent furrow from here to Kansas wouldn't be made, because oxen don't just keep going as long as you keep your foot on the pedal.

Maelochs

I didn't realize we were discussing pedal-powered oxen.

cyccommute 

Even with computers we still have to physically measure stuff. Being able to divide something simply is far easier in a base 10 system than in the Imperial or SAE system. In college we had to do an exercise in measuring that brought the beauty of the metric system home better than anything I’ve ever seen. Measure your thumbnail in both inches and milimeters. Now convert that measurement upward to miles for the Imperial system and to kilometers for the metric system...but don’t use a calculator. Do it the old way with arithmetic.

Sometimes I’m thankful for the Bike Forums. It makes me learn stuff. An “are” is 100 square meters. A ”hectare” (don’t put the “c” in there like I always do) is 100 ares or 10,000 sq. meters. 100 hectares is a square kilometer.

Although I grew up in a farm community and we used to talk about “acres” all the time, I’ve never really been able to grasp the size of an acre. It could be that an “acre” is 1 chain by 1 furlong. That means nothing to me. In feet, it’s 66 feet by 660 feet. I still can’t see it. And how many square feet is that? I’m too lazy to do the math (It’s 43,560 sq. feet...not helping)

I also know that a square mile...one section...contains 640 acres. I can visualize a square mile (kinda) but 1/640th of a square mile? Still not seeing it.

Happy Feet

For some reason, the person telling everyone to get over it has a pretty well worn speech prepared. Almost like he can't get over it.

Speaking of pound cakes.
I learned an amazing thing when we took our scout troop to Barkerville, a Provincial Park gold rush era town that employs re-creation actors. A lady was baking on a old wood stove - yes.. a pound cake! She explained the origin of the name:

1 pound of butter
1 pound of sugar
1 pound of flour
1 pound of eggs

Blew my mind and I went back home and baked pound cakes for a while.

Now... who measures eggs by the pound? (6 btw).

cyccommute 

It’s not really lacking for daily tasks, it’s just that people are afraid of the metric system because (put illogical excuse here). For a country that has a decimal monetary system and has had since the founding of the country, I’ve never understood the resistance. Just for everyday use, it would be so much easier to use. For example, if a recipe calls for 2 3/4 cups of flour, how much would you need if you cut the recipe in half? 1 3/8, of course but do you have a 3/8 cup measure? Do you even have a 1/8 cup measure? You might but how many tablespoons in a cup?

In wood working, divide a 25 3/8 board into thirds. 25 divided by 3, 3/8 divided by 3, add the products back together and then find the appropriate fraction on the tape measure. If you do it by making it into a decimal, you have to convert the decimal back to a fraction and hope that you have the right fraction.

In the metric system, 350 g of flour (about 2 3/4 cups) is 175 g...easy to do in your head and weight is a much better way to measure dry ingredients like flour than volume. 64.45 cm into thirds is 21.48 cm...again, easy to do in your head.


The problem most people have with metric measurements is that they try to do the conversion rather than get a feel for the system. I was press ganged into serving as a metric translator on a Bike-and-Barge trip in Belgium a few years ago. The Dutch guides didn’t know the US system and the Americans on the trip didn’t know the metric system. Since I use both (metric at work and US at home), I had to tell people what the expected temperatures given at the morning briefing were in Fahrenheit...25°C is about 70°F.

And I had to translate the distances on the cue sheet throughout the day so that us silly Americans wouldn't get lost. The cue sheets would say “left turn 0.1” and all the Americans would think a 10th of a mile. I had to constantly remind them that the “0.1” is kilometers which meant the turn is “right here!” I even had to chase some of them down when they overshot.

GamblerGORD53

I was born in Canada. My bike is still set with MILES. Farm roads will always be set in miles too, 4 miles to the next turn is 4 miles. 62 miles is an EASY ride on my CCM 3 speed. I have done 126 miles with my SA 5w. I do admit having km markers in Vietnam was great because I was less tired getting there. LOL
When talking about room temps, I will also still say in F and a lot of the time otherwise. Kpa for pressure is mostly a mystery to me. Same for Newtons for tightening bolts, WTF is that??

Air Canada learned metric the hard way, in 1983 with a Boeing 767. They ran out of gas in Ontario and glided to Gimli Manitoba. LOL Lucky it was in summer so they could see the drag strip/ old airport.
I was a wood worker for 22 years. I avoided metric like the plague. I wrote + for 1/32. eg. 5/8+".

tomato coupe

Nearly 95% of the world's population uses the metric system. The "people who reject it for daily task use" are a tiny minority.

dedhed

You want fun measurements, try land surveying.
Links, rods, poles, rods, chains, arpents and many more depending on age and location of original survey.

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.njspls.org...onversions.pdf

billridesbikes

Everyone knows that thread is measured in deniers.

livedarklions

I have a dream that someday someone will produce some sort of mechanical device that can perform the functions of oxen.

livedarklions

Seems to me the logical conversion to metric is to just make the cake 2.2 times larger.

The metric system is better because you get more cake.

livedarklions

I am just old enough to remember when the supposed transition to metric was underway. I was in grade school, and am quite convinced that it was killed by the well-intentioned attempts to start it by teaching the conversions. Especially galling was the conversion of Fahrenheit to Celsius. Difficult to do in your head, and completely pointless.

cyccommute 

kPa is kilopascals. A pascal is just a measure of the force of air on a unit area but it is really, really tiny...1 pascal is roughly 1 millionth of an atmosphere (9.869 × 10−6atm). Standard atmosphere is about 100 kPa. A standard atmosphere is also 1 bar. kPa inhabits kind of a funky place in most science. People really don't like using it because it a rather large number. They don't really use megapascal because it's a small number. People tend to use bar or mm of Hg or even just atmosphere for pressure.

It's Newton-meter and is the torque given by a weight on the end of a lever just like foot-pounds. A 1 Newton force on the end of a meter lever is 1 N-m The torque wrench we have at my co-op is only in N-m. But it's not that hard to convert. One foot-pound is 1.3 N-m. 30 foot-pounds is 40 N-m

What do you mean by "wrote + for 1/32"?

scott967

I always seemed to me what killed it is the hwy dept would go to the road sign that said next town 100 miles and stuck a sign under it 160.934 km. They could have just put 160 km and then folks would get used to it.

scott s.
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GamblerGORD53

Funny nobody has yet mentioned how cars used to be said to go a mile a minute. The fastest runner could do the 4 minute mile.
On a roadster bike, also using the same 4 minute mile is how I judge a good speed and my progress. 3 minutes for race bike guys.
Older people will give directions for driving in minutes too. LOL
I guess driving manuals still say 88 feet/sec too and say spacing as 2 or 3 sec.
Canadians were happy the speed limits went up 1 or 2 mph with the change, for 50 and 100 km/ hour.
0 F is still where I separate cold from bitter cold.
I mix metric and english on here all the time.

livedarklions

I really don't think there's any strong reason for people to want to use a different distance or temperature measure, so conversion is just something they don't want to learn.

Phil_gretz

This reminds me of cooking with my wife. She's really an excellent cook. I eat fabulous foods daily, freshly baked breads and rolls, home made tortillas, coq au vin, you name it. When I sous chef for her, I do okay. Chopping, stirring sauces, etc.

But now we come to the measures, specifically … ounces. Is it a measure of volume, or is it a measure of mass? Give me 4 ounces of cream. Okay, got it. Give me 4 ounces of cottage cheese...whaaaat? Who comes up with a system with this kind of ambiguity?