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Comment by xwolfi | Hacker News Reader

Not it's more you use body part names that sound funny as unit of measurement.

Like it sound backward to say stuff like "I'm 5 feet tall, but I can see as far as 20 inches! Maybe I can also count up to twenty teeth but I have only 5 toenails of time remaining".

Ok I exagerated a bit, but to the rest of the world that's how silly this all sound lol

Isnt it weird we all measure prices in USD between non US people when we need to compare price across countries, but the US cant use the meter, a unit so old and basic they re the one country left without it...

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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, 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!

An obscure one is the fingertip 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).

hogshead?

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

That is definitely a fair list of body-based customary units; thanks for pointing those out!

Ton ? Long ton or short ton ?

Or 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.

While 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.

Alpine hiking trails are also so measured. Once you know how many hours it takes you to walk an hour, you are good to go.

This 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.

Generally 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.

there are other countries that still use imperial. Britain officially uses metric, but there’s a lot of imperial in common use. most people will tell you their height in feet and inches and their weight in stones and pounds. you buy pints at the pub and older generations will probably give you estimates of distance in miles

apparently also Liberia - a country set up by Americans - and Myanmar still use imperial

Pfft, who names a currency after a German valley?? Those hilarious idiots...

Not sure how its relevat anyway, but that doesn't sound silly to me. Why would have a concrete, relatable equivalent be a bad thing?

It's a bad thing because as it turns out, feet are all kinds of sizes, vary over time both in individuals and in groups, and may have different sizes or averages in different geographical areas. Even the unit foot is different between Indian survey feet, US survey feet, and apparently the international foot. To add extra confusion, there's the ISO 2848's "metric foot" which is exactly 30 cm, which supercedes former "metric feet" of different lengths. If you take old feet into account, a feet can be anywhere between 25 cm and 33.5 cm. What a mess!

A standard foot corresponds to EU shoe size 48 - woe be upon the person who goes shoe-shopping with thus Goliath feet.

Then there's the randomness on how super- and subunits seem to be randomly defined (1 foot apparently is a third of a yard (which is a stupid unit name in itself, because otherwise, yard defines an area, which is much larger than around a meter), but 12 inches.

This being a stupid situation is something Europe has understood already in the 18th century, which led to unifying to rational - metric and eventually SI - units.

> yard (which is a stupid unit name in itself, because otherwise, yard defines an area

I assume you're referring to an enclosed plot of land. That has a different etymology than the unit, which comes from a word meaning stick or staff.

Those are problems that have nothing to do with having measurements that can be imagined with concrete analogies. Nobody uses "feet" to mean literally their personal feet. A foot is a standardized unit of measure about the size of a foot. I have no problem with that, that's not an absurd thing to do.

Yes, the US should move to the metric system. There are many reasons, but etymology isn't one of them.

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