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I hope the U.S. will adopt the metric system in day-to-day life (I used to be a member of the U.S. Metric Association), so I'm not disputing your larger point,
by schoen 4y ago
I hope the U.S. will adopt the metric system in day-to-day life (I used to be a member of the U.S. Metric Association), so I'm not disputing your larger point, but I can't think of anything but the foot that's named after a body part.
The commonly-used U.S. customary units are inch, foot, yard, mile (distance); ounce, pound, ton (mass); teaspoon, tablespoon, ounce, cup, pint, quart, gallon (volume). I only see the foot there as a body part.
(Also for time the hour, minute, day, week, month, and year are not based on powers of ten, but the U.S. does share these and the SI second with the rest of the world.)
There are lots more weird and obscure U.S. customary units that are rarely used by most people, like for length (link, chain, rod, furlong, league), but I'm still not thinking of anything else named after a body part!
- Someone 4y agoAn obscure one is the fingertip unit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_tip_unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_tip_unit) I wouldn’t call that a unit, though, as it is scales with the size of the patient’s fingertip (https://dermnetnz.org/topics/fingertip-unit https://dermnetnz.org/topics/fingertip-unit).
- eesmith 4y agohogshead? Wikipedia-ing around, I knew about "hand" for measuring the height of horses, and had heard of "finger" in the context of "a finger of whiskey". It was apparently a unit of measurement too. The "digit" Wikipedia entry mentions "finger (7/6 digit), palm (4 digits), hand (16/3 digits), shaftment (8 digits), span (12 digits), cubit (24 digits) and ell (60 digits)" as body-part-based measures - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_(unit)#Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_(unit)#Britain
- schoen 4y agoThat is definitely a fair list of body-based customary units; thanks for pointing those out!
- hulitu 4y agoTon ? Long ton or short ton ?
- SonicScrub 4y agoOr metric tonne? Don't worry, the spelling is different, so you can count on that to encode your unit information. Authors of scientific papers always pay attention to proper spelling/ grammar so you'll never have to worry! /s I once read a paper that had mixed units (unfortunately common in my field), and the author was very lazy about throwing the words ton and tonne around with zero care. I had to carefully examine every instance of the word with it's context to make sure I was getting the right information. I still haven't quite recovered from that experience.
- LordDragonfang 4y agoWhile we're listing weird American units, don't forget the American tendency to measure any distance greater than about a mile in units of "minutes" or "hours", because of our compulsive car culture.
- mannykannot 4y agoAlpine hiking trails are also so measured. Once you know how many hours it takes you to walk an hour, you are good to go.
- kortilla 4y agoThis is how distance is measured in cities with public transit… “It’s about 30 mins on the subway, etc” Giving miles for distance between things in dense metros is worthless for people who want to know how long it will take to get somewhere. What is car centric is giving distances between far apart cities in miles. That’s only meaningful for someone with a car who knows how fast they can drive roughly on the highway.
- Dalewyn 4y agoGenerally 60 to 80mph, though for reasons of objectivity we usually just use the legal speed limits (which is generally 65mph). So if someone were to say the next big town over is 4 hours away, I can do some simple mental math and understand it's 260 miles away give or take.