On Jan 5, 2009, at 2:53 PM, Neal Hammon wrote:
So guess what, with 4.1666, you are back to fractions again, and so using the metric system has not [sic] helped you one bit!
Few of us regularly navigate over any distance where we'd have to worry about the miles/kilometers issue. Let's see how metric avoids fractions in real world calculations.
Since a cubic centimeter of water has mass one gram and a liter is 1000 cubic centimeters, a liter of water is exactly one kilogram.
On the other hand, water weighs 62.37 pounds per cubic foot. A gallon is 0.133680556 cubic feet (231.000001 cubic inches), so a gallon of water weighs about 8.3376 pounds.
Of course, the purists will note that the kilogram is a unit of mass while the pound is a unit of force, so comparing the two is like Apples and Windows. To really compare properly away from sea level, we must convert the English measurement to slugs. (How many people have heard of the slug?) That gallon of water is about 0.259 slugs.
Now let's talk about farmers.A farmer measures her square field as 100 meters on a side, or 10,000 square meters. This is a hectare, and it is how most of the world measures farmland.
The American farmer measures her field as 69.5701 yards on each side to get an acre. Let's hope she has a calculator!
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