"Wizard of OS" wrote on 2002-06-30 01:12 UTC: > > - The exact meaning of the old units could be undefined by > > making it officially/legally equally valid to use alternative > > definitions for the colloquial terms, in particular: > > > > 1 pound = 1/2 kg > > 1 pint = 0.5 L > > 1 inch = 1/40 m > > > > and from that follows > > > > 1 hundredweight = 100 pounds = 50 kg > > 1 ton = 2000 pounds = 1000 kg > > 1 quart = 2 pints = 1 L > > 1 gallon = 4 quarts = 4 L > > 1 foot = 12 inches = = 300 mm > > 1 fluid ounce = 1/128 gallons = 1/32 L > > > > etc. > > Nice asset but what we are trying to realize is to kill ALL old units and > not to make them accomplish to SI
One can be of great help to accomplish the other. The original introduction of the metric system in France stalled, until the government decided that people are allowed to continue trading in pounds, as long as they used metric pounds (1 lb = 500 g). Common words like pound/inch/foot cannot easily be extinguished from a language. You can easily remove them from technical parlance and measurement instruments, but a less educated person in a rural area, who is concerned with applications such as home cooking, where measurement tolerances of 10% or more are perfectly acceptable, will continue to use the traditional terms for a long time after a country has gone completely metric. In the light of that, it can be highly productive to allow someone to sell you around 500�g using a scale calibrated in g or kg, if you ask for a pound. I'm not talking about school curricula for young people here, I'm talking about migration aids for less flexible people, in particular older people without a minimal technical education. > It really bothers me that still many people in Germany use pound! It is never used in written form and it is not used in any field where accuracy matters. It is still used by older people as a synonym for half-a-kilogram when shopping for groceries. Curiously it is sometimes also used by the same people to refer to body weight (yeah, I know!) differences, as in "I've just lost 4 pounds, I'm now at 73 kilos." At least that was the state in the 1980s. Usage of the metric pound has dropped very significantly since then, and has probabaly mostly vanished by now in Germany. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
