diggerop wrote:
"Dan Coby" wrote in message
m...

The part in my earlier post about the metric system having two slightly different
versions is still relevant and a great source of confusion and errors. Why is
the unit of volume a litre and not a cubic meter?

The first thing that comes to mind is that a cubic metre is 1000 litres ; )

Yes, an example of a 'hidden' power of ten conversion factor i.e. 1000. Why
chose a cubic decimeter as a unit of volume? For the mks system it should be
a cubic meter. For the cgs system it should be the cubic cm. For those people
the really really like the size of litres, they could use either milli-m^3 or
kilo-cm^3. (One of the things that I like about the metric system is the various
prefixes (pico, micro, milli, kilo, mega, giga, etc.) fo handling scaling
issues.)

Once again I really dislike that there are two separate but similar systems.
That maximizes the chances of mixing units from the two systems or a conversion
error. The silliness about the base mass unit for the mks being a kilo-something
and the base length unit for cgs being centi-something just emphasizes the
confusion.


Dan