Comment by raffraffraff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raffraffraff | Hacker News Reader

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Oh I know. I get it. It just sounds weird as F to a European. Imperial scales don't increase in nice multiples of 10/100/1000. I remember Imperial weight measurements as grain, ounce, pound, stone, quarter, hundred weight, ton. In Ireland back in the 70s/80s if you were asked your weight, you'd give it in stones, pounds and ounces (and of course, you had to remember how many of one was in the other). I don't remember "old money" but I'm old enough to remember adults talk about how much something cost "in old money" (£,S,D) and being a child of the 70s, I laughed and wondered how the hell they calculated anything back then when a shilling was 12d and there were 240d in a £. It's why I've always found it odd that the US stuck hard to measurement systems that are inherently difficult to remember and calculate because they don't use multiples of 10/100/1000, and easy type of measurement uses its own words and multiples.

So kilopound... Sounds weird.

Imperial measures were not about scale. They were about picking something one can easily relate to and then use that to express the quantity. If one needs more then 2 digits, one pick up a new thing as a reference. For more precision halve or quarter was used, as they were easily relate to, than decimal fractions. And for even more precision bigger units were serving as a common base to subtract with smaller units to express variations from the base.

For example one uses inches to measure things one can handle with hands as the inch is related to fingers. Then one use feet to measure size of houses. For a height of a person one uses 5 feet as a base (in past height outside that was much less common in adults) and inches to express the difference from the base.

From that point of view measuring the weight of person in pounds is a wrong way to apply imperial system as it requires 3 digits. It used to be stones. Typically one can guess a person weight in stones with no problem. And even when dieting a change of weight in one pound is mostly noise. The real change is more on the scale of quarter/third of stone.

You might find this to be an interesting watch:

[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iJymKowx8cY / "a defense of the imperial measurement system: it's not as bad as people say it is (but it is still pretty bad)"

The primary point of the Imperial "system" is that it's not a single system. The fact that there are 5280 feet in a mile might seem insane, but feet and miles are from different systems, and they are used for entirely different things. For example, when driving in a car, distances are measured in miles, and if you were to direct someone to make a turn, you would say "turn right in 0.25 mile", not "700 feet". It's a compelling argument, and it's largely tempered my opinion of the USA's systems of measurement.

As an American I see imperial as no worse than time measurements. There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 7 days in a week, ~4 weeks in a month (which can be from 28-31 days, depending) and 12 months/52 weeks in a year.

If you can manage to keep all this straight (and from what I can tell the rest of the world has no trouble using clocks and calendars) then you won't have much trouble with inches/feet/miles or ounces/pounds/tons since it's pretty much the same deal.

As a kid, I used to wonder why time was never "corrected" into an easy-to-calculate system. Our calendars have months of varying length and nonsensical names (SEPTember, OCTober, NOVember and DECember should be they 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months, but that didn't stop someone from shoving new months behind them to honour emporers).

While 60, 60, 24, 7, 12, 365 don't make much sense (and might be improved on) the problem is that time and date are based on the planet's orbit and rotation, which makes days inconsistent. (I've never worked out how Planck time divides into earth's rotation or orbit, but I'm sure it's not assume lovely round number like 1x10^x). If we wanted the same number of "units" in every year (standardising on our solar orbit and killing of the leap year) then "1 O'Clock" would slowly drift throughout each day. We'd look back and say, "Oh, do your remember when we were kids and 1 o'clock was around mid-day?"

Other measurements like weight, length (and therefore speed, acceleration) are not bound to something variable like night and day, winter and summer.

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