diggerop wrote:
"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superseded by the International System of Units or S I (le Système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.

Yep, and according to NIST, the unit of volume in the SI is the cubit meter,
with the liter being a unit that is recognized but not part of the system.




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