For the international audience who don't use freedom units, 6.4 (US) gallons is ~24.2 liters.
"Refuse to go to war with us? We'll... remove you from our cafeteria menu! Take that!"
"... what do you mean they're actually Belgian?"
It's a commentary on all the unique and interesting ways Americans appear to measure things.
Sometimes people will take it further by, for example, converting a length in meters into football fields or bald eagle wingspans.
https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/pml/wmd/pubs/201...
Can’t leave out our fellow beacons of freedom!
If you tell the average (US) person 1000 feet, they won't be able to envision it. But if you say "a little more than three football fields", they can visualize that.
The point of strange units of measure is just to make a quantity relatable.
Those that use the metric system. Those that landed a man on the Moon.
The country is a metric country (see: Official definition of the US foot).
Its citizens, however, largely still roll coal measured by chains to the hogshead.
I try to learn but the only thing I think I have retained is that if the number has a negative 6 its most likely a small number.
> My problem with the metric scale is that when values are expressed in scientific notion they lose all reference to me.
As if the two are connected. But my point is that scientific notation is not part of the metric system at all. If you problem is with scientific notation, that is a problem with scientific notation, not metric.
If anything, with metric units most people outside of the sciences will use the metric prefixes and never ever use scientific notation at all.
As said above, it has nothing to do with the metric system anyway, it's just about dealing conveniently with very big or very tiny value (1⋅10^-9 meter is 3.9⋅10^-8 inch, no matter the unit you're using you'd be using scientific notation to express things that small instead of dealing with 8 or 9 zeros).
I think my particular problem is when dealing with electricity and physics.
I never once blamed the metric system and identified the problem as my in ability to comprehend values in scientific notation. I appreciate I shouldn't be so dumb and try to read about things I don't understand. It's a life long struggle.
You may be getting confused over prefixes vs base units because some pairs of prefixes and base units are so common they sort-of end up treated as a unit in themselves.
E.g. "kilo" is not a metric unit, but sometimes used as short for "kilogram", where "kilo" is the prefix for 1000 and "gram" is the metric unit. These prefixes are consistent for all metric units.
Fun fact: the metric unit for mass is … the kilogram, not the gram because f*ck consistency.