Posts Tagged measures
British system of messed up measures hilariously skewered
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’.
Smoot points about measurements
Posted by mark in science, Uncategorized on January 4, 2023
Does it really matter that the calendar turned over from December 2022 to January 2023? From where I sit nothing much changed from one day—12/31/22—to the next—1/1/23. It’s just as cold here in Minnesota—below freezing (32 F or 0 C: Take your pick). Must we pay any attention to an irrelevant measure of time passing by? Of course, the answer is “yes” for everyone to party on a timely basis for the New Year, birthdays, and anniversaries. However, I feel badly for my niece’s daughter born on Leap Day 2020—no 1st birthday until 2024. That’s a measurement failure. Anyways, Happy New Year!
Also, why do we continue to favor English versus metric units here in the USA? That is a huge waste! Let’s begin the conversion by expanding the football fields to 100 meters. The players won’t even notice the 10 percent increase in required effort. My feeling is that this will be the breakthrough to the far more sensible and scientific metric system—a movement that seemed certain to succeed when Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975. Unfortunately, this became a political football when folks here in the Midwest resisted being told to post their distances in kilometers rather than miles.
The silliness of the archaic English anthropometric measures, such as height in feet and quantities of spices in pinches, came to a head in 1958 when frat brothers from MIT flipped a pledge named Oliver Smoot over-and-over the length of the Mass. Ave. bridge for a total of 364.4 Smoots (plus “one ear”*). In 2016, the MIT Alumni magazine published this April Fool’s joke that the Institute planned to recalibrate the Smoot to its namesakes current height (presumably a bit shrunken by the decades). What I find most interesting is that Smoot later served as chairman of the American National Standards Institute and president of the International Organization for Standardization. He went all out, literally, for the sake of measurements!
By way, it snowed 4 and 3/16ths of an inch yesterday according to my double Helix measuring ‘stick’. For my own purposes, I always use the metric side of this ruler—much preferring its decimal system (m/cm/mm, etc.) over the cumbersome fractions of inches. But to keep things simple, I pay the teenager next door by the inch.
PS It snowed another 6 inches overnight, bringing the total to 25 cm or so (deliberately mixing measurement scales to make my point). In any case, I need a taller ruler!
*Per Smoot in this 1995 interview. I first heard of him from the November 21st Wall Street Journal review of “Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants.” For details and reader ratings (assuming you like accurate measurements!) of this new book, I recommend you go to this Goodreads site.
Digging into numbers to the last vigintillionth of a yoctometer
Posted by mark in Basic stats & math on September 25, 2009
I love esoteric measures, for example when working early in my career for an oil company where barrels ruled, I made it my business to know the number of firkins in a hogshead.* Therefore I was piqued by “Coding the Wheel” blogger James Devlin making a point about precision to level of “the last vigintillionth of a yoctometer” (yes, evidently those are real units of measure!).
Fyi, math whiz Landon Curt Noll made a “heroic attempt to put names on hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian numbers” (quoted from this web page on Naming Large Numbers). He provides this utility for getting the English name of any number you enter. I entered 1,000,000,000 and got “one billion” as the result. But then I changed from the American to the European system and Noll’s number-namer spit out “one milliard”! So then I tried 1,000,000,000,000,000 and came up with “one billiard”!! That sent me back for a draft of brew from my firkin (depicted in this video).
Thus fortified, I kept after these mind-muddling measures and verified that this pool-player’s favorite number (billiard) is considered acceptable under the “long scale” (European) branch of the SI (Système International) of units – the modern metric system.
Who knew? (Please forgive my ignorance of European styles, being that I’m a mid-continent dweller of North America. I am learning!)
*See this picture of a 19th century hogshead barrel and learn how it varies in gallons depending on whether it contains beer, wine or tobacco.