I
know Al,
But
it was LOTS of fun.
Jack
Ah, yes; but I think it
may have been at I my expense;
although I was confused about who was disagreeing with who, or who was
mixing
weights and volumes. But it was my fault for bringing up this
technicality, and I guess somewhere in there I got caught cross-wise
with it.
But now
that my
anniversary celebrations are over, and my headache is almost gone;
allow me to
digress. The culprit is this *fluid*
oz; which, dang-it, is a slang unit. Just like “dang-it” is
not in the dictionary; the fluid oz is not in the Handbook of
Chemistry and
Physics, or in the official listings of the International General
Conference on Weights and Measures. Ounces and pounds are units of
weight, and teaspoons and pints and quarts are units of volume.
You see,
somewhere is
the distant past; some of our ancestors were measuring other fluids
with a
measure calibrated in ounces of water at 59F, and calling it a certain
number
of ounces of that fluid. When their error was pointed out; they were
like
– “er, ah; OK, we’ll call it a ‘fluid’ ounce then”,
and it has been commonly used as a measure of ‘volume’ ever since
for recipes in the kitchen - and in measuring 2-cycle oil.
But as
long as we agree
that a quart is always 0.94645 liters, and that a pint is not
always a
pound, we can get along quite well.
Now if we
could get
rid of this strange and ambiguous ‘British’ system of units this
confusion would all go away. Did you know that in 1960, at the Eleventh
General
Conference on Weights and Measures, 36 countries, including the United
States, officially
sanctioned and agreed to adopt the ‘International System of units’
(known
as Systeme International d’Inites, designated SI in all languages)
based
on the metric system? Even the National Bureau of Standards officially
adopted
it. Unfortunately, in this country the effort to convert failed due to
the
immense mental inertia; and, of course the billions of dollars invested
in
tooling.
So now we
are stuck
with building our airplanes in inches and feet, while we build our
engines
millimeters and centimeters; and measuring 2-cycle oil in FLUID oz.
Al (maybe
I’ll
go back and lie down now)