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gravi-tea t1_j63h0lh wrote

Reply to comment by smithsp86 in TIL to decide what measurement system America should use, John Quincy Adams took 3 1/2 years to produce a 268 page Report on Weights and Measures that ultimately concluded changing to the French metric system would be too difficult for the young nation. Congress took no action on the report. by iamveryDerp

Nice job!

I'm curious how knowing the acre/furlong relationship helps with knowing square feet per acre? Is it just that you have memorized there are 43,5602 square feet in a furlong and divide by 10?

I actually find imperial units and stuff fun and interesting. Recently I was doing some personal land surveying and re-learning the relationship between acreage and square miles. Such as forty acres being equivalent to a quarter mile square.

Interesting and explains why large parcels of land often consist of multiples of 40.

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smithsp86 t1_j63rhix wrote

A furlong is 1/8th of a mile and a chain is 66 feet. So it's just a matter of doing a bit of multiplication. Chain is a super useful measure because most surveying measures are whole multiples of a chain.

The biggest hangup most metric people have with imperial units is conversion factors but once you learn those it's not difficult to use them. My favorite example is tea spoons in a gallon. Yeah it's not immediately intuitive but it's not difficult to figure out if you actually needed to know for some reason. Four quarts to the gallon, four cups to the quart, sixteen tablespoons to the cup, three teaspoons to the tablespoon. Just do a bit of simple multiplication and you're done.

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gravi-tea t1_j63sjxr wrote

Interesting. Yeah totally. I recall having to do such calculations when fermenting stuff like hot sauce and kombucha.

Like you said it's not bad once you are familiar with the converssions. And some math would also have to be done if one was cooking in metric - but those calculations would likely just be a little simpler and quicker.

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