On 3/13/2016 1:52 PM, Mr Macaw wrote:
On Sun, 13 Mar 2016 20:33:58 -0000, Dean Hoffman wrote:

On Sun, 13 Mar 2016 13:22:28 -0500, Mr Macaw wrote:

What do Americans call this sign? #

72# = 72 pounds.
#72 = number 72.
My dad used to refer to some distances as 40 or 80 rods.
We still use gallons, pints, quarts, fluid ounces etc.

Dash, pinch, tsp, tbsp, jigger, gill, etc.

Miles, yards, feets and inches.

That must make school hell.

Why? 2T = 1oz 2oz = "double" 2 doubles = gill 2 gills = cup
2 cups = pint, 2 pints = halfG, 2 halfG = G, etc.

But, most folks don't care. They buy things in a "familiar
size" and think of that thing *in* that familiar size.

E.g., flour comes in 5 lb sacks; sugar (recently) in 4 lb.
OJ comes in (nominally) 56 oz containers.

Do you buy your ketchup by the liter? (I suspect ketchup,
here, is sold in a dozen or more different "sizes")
What about your horseradish? And, are your spices sold
in 1g, 10g and 100g units? Never "3g" or "7g"?

We also don't need to drag out a *scale* to bake things
as we KNOW that chemistries tend to require common rations
(e.g., 2:1, 4:1, etc.) and can use volumetric measures
(instead of laddling ingredients onto a scale).

How big is an "egg"? Do you have metric dozens of eggs?
Do you have 100 minutes in your hours? 100 days in your years?

"That must make school HELL!" -- having to remember TWO different
schemes of measurement, one that deals with radix 10 and others
that deal with 12's, 24's, 60's, 365's, etc.

We can change from one thing to another, like
metres to kilometres simply by multiplying or dividing by 1000.

Really? How many stones in a kg? How many 0's in a Billion?

A meter in my world measures electrical stuff.

Meter, metre.

Most of us might be crazy but it's the crazy people that
invent things.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the
unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the
world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends
on the unreasonable man."

George Bernard Shaw.

Wise words.