Once upon a time on usenet Percival P. Cassidy wrote:
On 09/07/2017 01:16 AM, rickman wrote:
Once upon a time on usenet rickman wrote:
Someone was talking about decimal time where the second is
shortened by about 15% allowing 100 secs/minute, 100 minutes/hr,
10 hr/day. I think the utility of this is limited and it would cause a
lot of
changes in society. We presently have a large number of convenient
time increments which would not be so convenient in the new system.

First, the hour would be 2.4 times longer leaving us with no
convenient unit about the same length of time as the hour. The
closest would be the quad-deci-hour which would be 0.96 old hours.
The deci-hour would be pretty convenient about 4% shorter than a
quarter hour. The old half hour would now be about a fifth of a new
hour, so we could call it a "fifth" which might become confused
with a non-metric liquor measure, a fifth of a gallon

So that's where that term comes from! I've heard it in American
movies / TV
and read it in books but couldn't work out how a bottle that wasn't
much more than a pint (~600ml) got the name 'a fifth'. I forgot
about the Merkin
gallon being less than a real gallon. In fact it's almost exactly 'a
fifth'
short!

which has since become 750 ml in metric.

Nah that is what the rest of the world called a 26oz bottle before
metric.
Of course in the US that would be closer to 25 fluid ounces. shakes
head
US water must be heavier.

A pint's a pound the world around!

No, it isn't. Even if we stick to the undersized US pints of 16 fl.oz.
instead of 20 fl. oz., the weight of something with a volume of one
pint varies considerably depending on what the substance is. Even if
we're talking about cooking and trying to convert recipes with
quantities by weight to cup measurements, a cup of sugar and a cup of
flour probably will not weigh the same, and the weight of the flour
will depend on how densely it's packed -- could be as little as 5 oz.
rather than the 8 oz. that the "pint's a pound the world around"
formula indicates.

At school I was taught 'A pint of water weighs a pound-and-a-quarter'. Then
again that was in England.
--
Shaun.

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy
little classification in the DSM*."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1)
(*Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)