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by CRConrad 1746 days ago
> United States customary units have been based on familiar Metric units since the Mendenhall Order in 1893.

No. They may be defined in terms of Metric units, but they aren't "based on" them. If they were based on them, they'd be a sensible integer (or decimal-factor) multiple of them, not some weird fractional measure. An inch being 25.4 millimeters may be the current definition of an inch, but that arbitrary length isn't based on anything in the metric world -- it's still just as based on the average length of the top joint of a medieval craftsman's thumb as it's always been.
1 comments
mulmen 1746 days ago
Ok, fine, defined in terms of.

There’s nothing odd about the fractional scale, nor is it unique to US Customary Units.

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CRConrad 1746 days ago
No, there's nothing odd about the fact that units based on one set of measures become fractional when expressed in units of another measurement system. It just shows that neither is based on the other.

And of course "the fractional scale is not unique to US Customary Units", since there is no fractional scale within that measurement system. Nor within any other, AFAIK. Your pound consists of an integer number of ounces (right?) and your foot of twelve-point-zerozerozero... inches. The "fractional scale" exists only between measurement systems. (AFAIK. Except maybe old British currency, that was really weird, I'd trust those crazy Englanders to have about six Pi pennies to the shilling or something.)

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mulmen 1746 days ago
The meter is based on a fraction of a second.
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genewitch 1746 days ago
https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt is one of the things i find myself reading and using to complain about things. Frink is a conversion tool and calculator, like "how many grains of rice worth of calories is needed to boil 1 liter of water" and even more esoteric stuff. It also can correctly convert between most of the esoteric units (rods, hogsheads, furlongs).

Frink has phone apps, so you don't need a data connection as you would with wolfram alpha or google.

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CRConrad 1745 days ago
Naah. It's defined in terms of the second, nowadays, but it's based on the circumference of the Earth: The meter was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the poles.
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