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why is the US not Metric

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vk6zgo:

--- Quote from: Cerebus on November 09, 2019, 11:31:48 pm ---
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on November 09, 2019, 10:15:56 pm ---[snip]A pint's a pound the world around is one I picked up in grade school[/snip]

--- End quote ---

Except it isn't, anywhere, let alone the world around.

The, naturally superior, British pint of water (at 568.26125ml exactly) is ≈ 1 1/4 lb, the weedy American pint (at 473.176473 ml exactly) is ≈ 1 lb 0.69 oz*. Which all goes to show that you should not trust school teachers.  :) The British school teacher's dictum, that a gallon (eight proper, full strength, Imperial pints) weighs 10 lb is much closer to the truth, being only 0.22% in error.

[The 1959 international pound of 0.453 592 37 kg has been used in all cases, which is the current lb in the US and was the current lb in the UK from 1963 until lbs ceased to be an official unit.]

* I could have used drachms (1/16 oz) and/or grains (1/7000 lb) instead of decimal ounces, but nobody, even those using ounces on a daily basis know what the heck those are (except possibly for people who deal with bullets day in and day out, which for some reason are still regularly referred to by their weight in grains even when the calibre in use is inherently metric. e.g. I have shot 7.62mm Lapua 168 gn target rounds.). Just for the record it's 1 lb 0 oz 11 dm 1.45 gr  for the 'merkin pint and the British pint weighs in at 1 lb 4 oz 0 dm 19.61 gn.

--- End quote ---


On the back cover of the "Exercise books" we used to do our school work in back in the 1950s  were a lot of bits of useful information, such as the Metric system (pre SI version), relationships between the various Imperial  measures, such snippets as the diameter of the Earth, & the following bit of doggerel:-

"A Pint of clear water weighs a Pound & a quarter".

KL27x:
I propose a pint should be redefined to the maximum size of an alcoholic beverage that is considered to be consumable before going warm by an average adult who is not a raging alcoholic. Of course this will vary country to country.

In my life in America I have probably used the word "pint," twice, and I have been to plenty of bars. Even in our bars, pints are not that common. When by the bottle, it's 12 oz. In the pintish sized glasses that might or might not be 16oz, we usually order "drafts," in my experience. That's not another nonstandard unit to add to a list. It just indicates the beer is from the tap rather than the bottle.

soldar:
The issue with beer is that a person will pee more quantity of beer than they injested in the first place. This is a mystery that has baffled scientists in bars for centuries.

TimFox:
This gets us back to the proposed definition of the "Falstaff" as 1 liter/minute.

SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: soldar on November 10, 2019, 08:10:32 am ---The issue with beer is that a person will pee more quantity of beer than they injested in the first place. This is a mystery that has baffled scientists in bars for centuries.

--- End quote ---

 :-DD

Edit: there may still be some scientific basis for that: eg. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1393383/

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