Upon graduation as a chemical engineer in 1975 I took a job as a process developer at a California oil company. There I learned that a barrel amounted to 42 gallons—not the 55 in the drums at my previous employer—a specialty chemical company. In the wacky British system of volumes, the number of gallons in a barrel depends on the material—31 for beer, 53 for rum (yo ho ho!), 60 for wine, etc. Their weights and distances are just as unfathomable (pun intended).

That same year of 1975 that I first became employed as a degreed engineer, President Gerald Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act, which went nowhere before being abolished in 1982 by President Reagan. Having endured all this measurement mess throughout my career, I thoroughly enjoyed this October 28 Saturday Night Live skit:

I raise my US pint (16 fluid ounces) of beer to SNL’s clever comedy writers, though a British pint (20 fluid ounces) would be more filling and a liter even sweeter. Let’s not get into US versus Imperial ounces (or gallons)—that would get us over our head by at least a fathom (equivalent to 4 cubits, by the way).

PS. This rant about measures brings me full circle to an outburst at the outset of this year involving a whimsical unit of distance called the ‘smoot’.