{"id":4090,"date":"2010-09-26T17:56:55","date_gmt":"2010-09-27T01:56:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=4090"},"modified":"2018-10-07T19:13:41","modified_gmt":"2018-10-08T02:13:41","slug":"weighty-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=4090","title":{"rendered":"Weighty Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

The metric<\/q> system has some points of genuine superiority to those of the English<\/q> (aka<\/abbr> American<\/q>) system, but that superiority tends to be exaggerated. For example, the every-day English measures for volume tend to be implicitly binary<\/em>, allowing easy halving or doubling. (If base 10 were everywhere superior to base 2, then our computers would be designed differently.)<\/p>

One of the things that I was told as a child was that the metric system were superior because it measured in terms of mass<\/em>, rather than weight<\/em>, with the former being invariant while the latter would change in the face of a gravitational field. Well, actually, the English system has a unit of mass; it's the slug<\/span>, 1 lb·sec2<\/sup>\/ft, which is about 14.6 kg<\/abbr>.<\/p>

Meanwhile, I observe that, in countries where the metric system ostensibly prevails, people typically use its names of units of mass (gram<\/q> and kilogram<\/q>) for units of weight<\/em>; they even refer to what is measured as a weight<\/span>. Now, the real metric system does<\/em> have a unit for weight, because weight is a force<\/em>; weight can be measured by the newton<\/span> (or by the dyne<\/span>, which is a hundred-thousandth of a newton). But people aren't doing that; they're using kilogram<\/q> as if it means about 9.807 N<\/abbr>.<\/p>

Much as it may be claimed that America is the only industrialized nation not on the metric system, really nobody's on it.<\/p>

I notice that the Beeb<\/abbr> most often wants to speak and write of weight, rather than of mass, but in the most ghastly unit of all, the stone<\/span> (pronounced \/stɛun\/, with at least one pinkie extended). The stone is 14 pounds (divisible by 2 and, uh, 7). When weights don't divide into integer multiples of 14 pounds, tradition is to represent weight in terms of a combination of stone and pounds, as in Me mum weighs 19 stone and 12.<\/q> Of course, if the Beeb<\/abbr> were using pounds at all, there'd be the two obvious questions of

Why aren't you just using pounds for the whole lot?<\/div> and
Wait, now that I think of it, what happened to that metric stuff?<\/div> So the Beeb<\/abbr> feels compelled just to round everything up or down to an integral number of stone, and somebody's mum either gains two pounds or loses twelve.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The metric system has some points of genuine superiority to those of the English (aka American) system, but that superiority tends to be exaggerated. For example, the every-day English measures for volume tend to be implicitly binary, allowing easy halving or doubling. (If base 10 were everywhere superior to base 2, then our computers would […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,676],"tags":[901,181,900,202,902,182,903,996,906,899,73,904,907],"class_list":["post-4090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-physical-science","tag-american-system","tag-bbc","tag-english-system","tag-everyday-frustrations","tag-imperial-system","tag-journalism","tag-mass","tag-measurement","tag-measures","tag-metric-system","tag-peeves","tag-weight","tag-weights-and-measures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4090\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}