"Dan Coby" wrote in message
m...
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


You could take it up with the International Committee for Weights and
Measures. ; )

The committee is a worldwide body composed of member countries who are
signatories to the "metre convention" (Australia signed the convention in
1947,) which attempts to standardise units of measurement worldwide.

My understanding is use of both cgs and mks have been largely superseded by
the International System of Units or S I (le Système international
d'unités,) except for some areas of science. This was adopted around 1960.

For my mundane purposes, I find SI to be simple, logical and
straightforward, but then I'm no rocket scientist.