Hi Don
Aha, another journalist! And you seem quite at home with numbers too,
my word. Have you noticed how many journos can't get their heads
round numbers, whichever system they're in?
Much enjoyed your note, thanks. Long may such confusion reign. It
seems European engineers prefer Imperial to their native metrics.
They say you can't get a one-metre rule in your pocket, but a
six-inch rule fits just nicely. I'm beginning to think most societies
use a mix of systems, as you say, depending what people are
comfortable with.
To bring this back on topic a bit, I really struggled with local
measures when I did a farming research project in an old village here
in Hong Kong some years ago. Everything was measured in "mo", even
Chairman Mau did it: "One pig per mo." Fields, yields, planting
rates, everything was in mo. How big is a mo? "About 15 to the
hectare." About? Yes, about. It turned out a mo is the amount of land
you could sow with one basket of rice seed. The basket's okay, about
the same everywhere - not too heavy for a woman(!). The "about" bit
is because it depended on the land: on good land you could sow more,
so a mo of good land was smaller than a mo of poor land.
I ended up much preferring such measures, they mean something real -
standard measures just relate to other numbers really, or a bar of
silver in Paris, or the size of Good King George's foot. Well, at
least the last one was real. Similarly, a cubit is the distance
between the elbow and the fingertips, "usually about 18 to 22
inches", but it's precise when it comes to making something like a
scythe for a particular customer. A furlong - furrow-long - used to
be how far a pair of horses could pull a plough before they got tired
and stopped - further in sandy soil than in heavy clay. Acres also
have a heritage, way back through old Norse and German to Sanskrit,
but at some stage it became the amount of land a yoke of oxen could
plough in a day. Then it got all mixed up with rods and poles and so
on, also eco-measures, emerging as 4,840 sq yards, but yards were
also imprecise measures: originally the same as a rod or a pole, then
standardised at 16.5 feet, later at 3.
You're right, acres are much earthier than hectares. Interesting what
you say about the less earthy the journalist, the more they're at
ease with hectares. I can't visualise a hectare either, though I can
more or less manage an acre, but I'm quite happy with a mo.
Maybe all measures were this way before the Standards Committee got
hold of them, and before we all got so separated from nature. Oh
well. Nostalgia's just not what it used to be, is it? By the way,
have you seen that hilarious piece that's doing the rounds on the net
about the relationship between the Space Shuttle and the width of two
horses' asses?
Re your drip-feed oil drums (that sounds like a good system), someone
told me this:
>The US drum (or perhaps barrel) was originally 55 gallons (US), however,
when the oil industry was born and the wildcat oil wells were gushing oil
all over the place, they apparently collected the oil in OPEN 55 gallon
drums or barrels - However, after being transported by horses or in the back
of lorries over rough roads to the refinery they quite often (usually)
contained less. In fact they found that on average they contained about 42
gallons of oil. Thus the agreement that the US oil field oil drum should be
defined as a 42 gallons or an "oil field barrell" !!!
You'd've thought they'd've invented lids by then.
Best wishes
Keith
>Keith, writing regularly for a newspaper and local magazine I constantly
>have my feet tangled in the metric web. For a news article we must (by
>law) use hectares when describing an area of land. I also write regular
>opinion columns and in those we ignore the metric universe, I use acres
>because both I and my neighbours know what an acre looks like. We can all
>do the arithmatic to convert acres to hectares to acres but few of us can
>"see" a hectare in our mind or, better, when looking our across some land.
>The interesting thing among journalists is that the further one is from the
>land the more accepting they are to using the mysterious hectares. For a
>while in the construction business they used metric measure. Elevations
>were in millimeters. The pipefitters and electricians and others just
>couldn't get their heads around "elevation 65,342", so they spent the first
>day after getting blueprints converting everything to feet and inches. If
>the companies supplied metric measuring tapes, the workers just brought in
>their own. After a while the prints started arriving in feet and inches,
>everyone kept quiet and there was no fuss. We have sort of accepted
>temperature read in Celcius because no one really cares (except body
>temperature). We accept buying gas in litres because, at 60 cents per
>litre, we couldn't take the shock of what it cost per gallon (4.5 litres
>per imperial gallon equals $2.70 per gallon - if people thought about that
>every day we'd have a revolution). As to pascals (and kilopascals), even
>the guys in industrial instrumentation who know that a pascal equals one
>newton per square meter fill their tires in pounds per square inch. Have a
>happy metricless day
>
>Don Maroc
>Vancouver Island, Canada
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