6 ms·
Freedom units?
by avmich 3y ago
Freedom units?
- usefulcat 3y agoPossibly a reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries
- jes5199 3y agothat event is older than this website
- moffkalast 3y ago> Chairman of the Committee on House Administration, Bob Ney, renamed the menu item in three Congressional cafeterias. The political renaming occurred in context of France's opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq "Refuse to go to war with us? We'll... remove you from our cafeteria menu! Take that!" "... what do you mean they're actually Belgian?"
- promiseofbeans 3y agoA joking way to refer to the American units of measurement - feet, gallons, pounds, etc. It's a commentary on all the unique and interesting ways Americans appear to measure things. Sometimes people will take it further by, for example, converting a length in meters into football fields or bald eagle wingspans.
- avmich 3y agoThe confusion comes from naming American units "imperial" - after British, and having international - metric - system created by the French revolution, with "liberte" an important goal. So it could be argued that it's actually SI which has freedom units. On the other hands, Americans are quite often characterized as freedom "distributors"...
- jrmg 3y agoAmerican units of volume are different (most smaller by about 20%) to Imperial units.
- jdblair 3y agoThe American system is called "customary units." The pint, quart and gallon are all smaller than British imperial versions.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoMost Americans that I have pointed this out to look at me in disbelief. The vast majority have never heard of US Customary Units. Whenever they refer to their system of measure they say imperial, and many are unaware that volume measure in the Imperial system is different from US Customary. I fought again the use of imperial as the name for the system for over twenty years in a multinational company to no avail.
- jdblair 3y agoSend them this handbook from NIST! :) Section 2 covers all of the customary measurements, some with names hardly anyone knows (Apothecaries Units? Gunter's Chain Units?) https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/pml/wmd/pubs/2016/02/18/appc-16-hb44-final.pdf https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/pml/wmd/pubs/201...
- kwhitefoot 3y agoNIST is also a good source for information about SI!
- civilitty 3y agoAmerican, Liberian, and Burmese. Can’t leave out our fellow beacons of freedom!
- edgineer 3y agoMyanmar has moved to metric
- NikkiA 3y agoAnd liberia is in the process of doing so, but so is the US technically.
- interestica 3y agoI've never met a Canadian who gave their height or weight in metric units. Or a recipe in Canada that doesn't set a temperature Fahrenheit. Also: the size of TVs and screens. Or paper.
- phanimahesh 3y agoNews articles in particular tend to go out of their way to use strange units of measurement. Bananas, fishes, football fields, car lengths, swimming pools... Anything but SI system of units. Even the feet gallon pound values are rare finds that need perseverance.
- cagenut 3y agomy least-favorite is describing every energy project by the number of "homes" it can power
- michaelteter 3y agoEagle wingspans isn't something I've seen used, but the football fields unit does make sense when talking about something which is relatively long (can be measured in 1/2 to 3x the length of such a field). If you tell the average (US) person 1000 feet, they won't be able to envision it. But if you say "a little more than three football fields", they can visualize that. The point of strange units of measure is just to make a quantity relatable.
- ProtoAES256 3y agoWhich football are we talking about again? That's a problem too.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoAn easy rule of thumb to remember this for temperature units; °F for "Freedom", °C for "Science".
- rainbowzootsuit 3y agoThere are two kinds of countries on earth: Those that use the metric system. Those that landed a man on the Moon.
- defrost 3y agoThe country that landed men on the moon adopted the metric systems as the basis of its measures before most other countries and programmed its moon landing systems using metric. The country is a metric country (see: Official definition of the US foot). Its citizens, however, largely still roll coal measured by chains to the hogshead.
- rainbowzootsuit 3y agoThe previous moon thing is a joke and at least partially an explanation for "freedom units," which is a joking (I think) commentary about the citizenry's beliefs about "their freedoms," and somehow these freedoms translates to freedom from using the metric system when they roll coal along a couple furlongs of interstate (in a truck that contains only metric fasteners.)
- Smoosh 3y agoLiberia landed a man on the moon?
- guappa 3y agoCan you list a country that landed men on the moon who didn't have to hire German scientists to achieve that?
- littlestymaar 3y agoYet the governmental agency responsible for the moon landing acknowledged that metric is a better system and adopted it…
- detourdog 3y agoMy problem with the metric scale is that when values are expressed in scientific notion they lose all reference to me. I try to learn but the only thing I think I have retained is that if the number has a negative 6 its most likely a small number.