[HN Gopher] Obsolete German Units of Measurement
___________________________________________________________________
Obsolete German Units of Measurement
Author : zeristor
Score : 60 points
Date : 2021-04-11 11:40 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| walrus01 wrote:
| In south asia traditional units of measurement are still in use
| for gold jewelry and similar:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tola_(unit)
| durnygbur wrote:
| Now do "Imperial units of measurement to be obsoleted".
| dang wrote:
| Let's not have a hellwar about this please. Anything so
| repetitive (and likely so nasty) is off topic here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| fanf2 wrote:
| They already are mostly obsolete!
|
| (American units date from before the British volume measure
| reform that created imperial units.)
| pmontra wrote:
| Believe it or not, the US rod is a close relative to the
| Italian pertica, which is a traditional unit of length and
| surface, coming straight from the Roman Empire. It's still used
| to refer to the size of fields. I found it recently in some
| sales announcements. Of course every city had its own variant.
|
| https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pertica_(unit%C3%A0_di_misura)
| shimonabi wrote:
| My country (Slovenia) was under Austrian domination for a long
| time, so we informally still use klaftra (Klafter in German) for
| firewood. It now means 4 m3, but I guess it was defined by the
| particular region in the past.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Sounds close enough to a cord in North America.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cord_(unit)
|
| What bothers me is that it, of course, depends how you
| cut/stack it. Different woods = different density.
|
| Firewood should be sold on based on dry weight, not volume.
|
| A lot of American recipes assume scales are for cocaine dealers
| and inappropriately use volume and dumb measures at that "a
| teaspoon???" While European recipes appropriately use grams.
| soneil wrote:
| I have precisely one teaspoon which actually measures a
| teaspoon. The rest of my teaspoons are spoons used for making
| tea, but don't actually measure a teaspoon.
|
| However, none of my cups are actually cups. they're just
| cups.
|
| It amuses me that these are actual (and accurate) sentences.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Different crystals will pack differently, so a teaspoon of
| table sugar from brand1 will be different than brand2. Same
| between icing and table sugar.
|
| And different syrups will have different surface tensions,
| so a 5mL flattish teaspoon will hold more than a 5mL deep-
| well
| erichurkman wrote:
| And if you own cookbooks, check the intro to see if it
| notes what kind of salt to use. Most recipes use coarser
| kosher salt for measure, at least with professional
| recipe writers.
|
| Table salt is made of finer crystals and will make your
| dish far saltier if you substitute them unknowingly.
| (Fine table salt packs about 2x the salt into 1tsp than
| Diamond Kosher -- 2 tsp Diamond Kosher == 1 1/2 tsp
| Morton Kosher == 1 tsp regular table salt.
| ghaff wrote:
| I use a scale at home but, for many purposes, it really is
| easier to use measuring spoons for things like spices and
| baking soda than to use the scale for everything.
|
| Even my cookbooks that do give weights as well as volumes for
| ingredients like flour, tend to just give measuring spoon
| amounts for the small additions.
|
| To your cord example, precision just isn't a big deal and I'm
| sure it's just easier for people selling to throw an
| approximate volume in their truck than weighing everything.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Measuring firewood is fun too. Here we have 3 different ways to
| measure it. Roughly: loose, piled and solid. And differences
| aren't small. Really matters what are you talking about,
| loosely piled, properly piled or actual amount of material
| minus all air...
| [deleted]
| kuschku wrote:
| Hopefully someday there'll be a page like this for the US,
| referencing the pound or mile as obsolete measures.
| endymi0n wrote:
| Conversation I had with a US guy a decade ago: ,,Hey now that
| I'll stay in Europe here for some time, I want to get a real
| feeling for the temperatures here..." - ,,Sure!" - ,,So what
| temperature is freezing water in Celsius?" - ,,Zero." - ,,Wow,
| that's funny. Like, exactly?" - ,,Yeah, it's the definition." -
| ,,Cool, but what temperature is boiling water?" - ,,100
| degrees." - ,,That... makes a lot of sense!" - ,,Doesn't it?
| You're welcome :)"
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Celsius is not that practical for everyday life though :
|
| 1.) The 0-32-96 degF range covers much better the range
| typically experienced by humans than 0-100 degC.
|
| 2.) It's more dozenal than decimal allowing for easier
| mathematics (even when stuck in a decimal number
| representation system like we are).
|
| 3.) For "non-human" fields, you are probably better off
| anyway using a scale starting at the absolute zero. (The
| triple point of water seems like a good candidate for 100
| degrees ? Or maybe a value directly related to log 2, e, kB
| ?)
| diroussel wrote:
| "practical for everyday life" involves cooking, and I
| encounter 0degC and 100degC regulary, with ice and boiling
| water.
|
| To be honest, humans are likely able to adapt to scale when
| talking about the weather, or how hot the room is.
|
| The reasons the US should move to metric are: - The rest of
| the world is on metric - It's better for science and
| engineering
|
| I'm not suggested moving is easy, just that I for one would
| like it to be attempted.
| majewsky wrote:
| For room temperatures or air temperatures, integer degC is
| exactly the right amount of resolution. The difference
| between 20degC and 21degC is pretty much exactly what I
| would be able to tell apart.
|
| And on the other hand, for body temperatures, tenths of
| degC as a level of resolution is just right, whereas
| integer degF would be too coarse.
| ghaff wrote:
| >For "non-human" fields
|
| In those cases, Kelvin is customarily used with the same
| degree size as Celsius with 0 Celsius corresponding to
| 273.15 K. (There is a corresponding scale for Fahrenheit
| degrees but it's rarely used.)
| [deleted]
| gh02t wrote:
| Interesting tidbit, the original definition for Celsius set 0
| as boiling and 100 as freezing. It was swapped in 1743.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius
| dang wrote:
| Let's not have a hellwar about this please. Anything so
| repetitive (and likely so nasty) is off topic here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| burlesona wrote:
| I agree, I very much hope we'll switch to metric in my
| lifetime.
|
| That said, I do think but it's worth knowing that one of the
| reasons metric had a harder time catching on is that the US had
| already standardized its units a full fifty years before the
| metric system was developed. So, while our systems aren't
| mathematically consistent or elegant as the metric system, by
| the time metric came about they were at least geographically
| consistent, so the painful business problem this Wikipedia page
| illustrates - of not knowing "what is a foot" from town to town
| - didn't exist anymore.
|
| One final note, a common misconception I encounter with non-
| Americans online is that Americans have no idea about metric.
| That's not true. Metric is taught in schools and is the
| exclusive unit system for scientific work. We only have metric
| for electrical units. Certain other metric units are also
| common, for example liters, milliliters, grams, and centimeters
| are all used relatively commonly. Other units are frequently
| presented side-by-side with metric: mi/km or temperatures in
| f/c. So most Americans understand and can reason about metric
| units (perhaps with some discomfort), but unfortunately usage
| of the "American Customary Unit System" remains predominate.
| greenwich26 wrote:
| >Metric is taught in schools and is the exclusive unit system
| for scientific work.
|
| Not in astrophysics and cosmology. You almost never hear of
| meters or grams. We use a hodgepodge of different units
| depending on what is most convenient and sensible. Working in
| the solar system? AU. In the galaxy? Light-years or parsecs.
| And in theoretical work, you often will encounter mass
| measured in electron-volts, distances measured in solar
| masses, or temperature measured in square meters, or (more
| often) everything measured in unitless quantities with no
| dimensions at all.
|
| It really does feel a lot like the traditional medieval
| measuring systems, messy but once you learn them, useful and
| comfortable in the mind.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| _> Metric [...] is the exclusive unit system for scientific
| work._
|
| Lockheed Martin and the Mars Climate Orbiter beg to differ.
| ghaff wrote:
| Which was over 20 years ago. I'm sure it's not 100% but
| it's certainly fair to say that the metric system is used
| extensively in science and engineering.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| It's certainly used extensively, but exclusively is a big
| stretch, even nowadays. I've come across research papers
| from the last couple of years using feet and inches.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Metric might be good for scientific measurements, but it's a
| trash system for day-to-day human usage.
|
| This most stark in Celsius, where the useful range of
| temperatures where humans can live is compressed into roughly
| -20 C to 40 C, versus 0 to 100 in Fahrenheit.
| whatever_dude wrote:
| The first point you're trying to make doesn't seem to hold.
|
| You use a subjective opinion on one unit's range as a proxy
| for all other units. How is the meter (cm, mm, km, etc) trash
| compared to the foot (inch, yard, mile, etc)? They're
| objectively better in every regard, not just for scientific
| purposes but in everyday life.
|
| Come to think of it, it's the first time I'm seeing someone
| making that sort of statement rather than the usual "it's too
| difficult to change now" excuse.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Metric works fine everywhere it is used. It's just what you
| are used to. American engineering isn't any better or worse
| than engineering elsewhere. There's no inherent advantage to
| using a different way to measure stuff that you can
| objectively point at.
|
| The history of the Fahrenheit scale is actually quite
| fascinating. It's one of the less famous things to come out
| of the Dutch eighteenth century scientific community. Daniel
| Fahrenheit picked a few reference points to calibrate
| thermometers. None of these have anything to do with your
| level of comfort. That was never a thing or an intention.
|
| Zero was the temperature of a particular mixture of ammonium
| chloride and water and ice (a brine basically) reaching an
| equilibrium. The second point (30) was picked as the
| temperature of water with ice floating in it. The main point
| was to make this somewhat of a repeatable process. Basically
| water with ice in it has a very stable temperature because
| the transition from ice to water takes a lot of energy.
| Tossing in some ammonium chloride in a known quantity gives
| you a second point of reference that is different enough that
| it is meaningful.
|
| Daniel Fahrenheit was using those two points to calibrate
| mercury based thermometers. He came up with a third reference
| point: the temperature you get when you insert a thermometer
| into your mouth. This was originally supposed to be 90
| degrees. Later it was determined to be 96 and we now know it
| is 98.2 degrees. In other words, he kind of messed up there
| by picking something a bit harder to measure.
|
| The final reference point that Daniel Fahrenheit worked with
| was the boiling point of mercury. Which he put at 300
| degrees. The scale was redefined several times according to
| progressive insights regarding e.g. the notion that there are
| about 180 degrees Fahrenheit difference between freezing and
| boiling water.
|
| The latter is of course an attempt to reconcile the scale
| with the centigrade scale which is based on the freezing and
| boiling temperatures of water. That's technically also
| somewhat imprecise of course but quite easy to figure out.
| Basically take water, put ice in it, wait a bit. That's your
| zero point. Then put it on a fire, wait for it to boil.
| That's 100. Put two little markings on your glass tube with
| mercury where that happens and then divide that into tens and
| again into tens. That's a repeatable process for making a
| thermometer. Not super precise of course because it depends
| on air pressure (later of course factored into its
| definition). But if you are making thermometers, that's
| pretty easy to do if you are an eighteenth century instrument
| maker. You need ice of course but that would have been a
| commodity much of the year where Celsius was living
| (Stockholm).
|
| For better or worse, the metric system actually uses Kelvin
| which simply is the Celsius scaling (or centigrade as it was
| called originally) but adjusted to absolute zero -273.15deg.
| That last adjustment by .15 degrees happened only fairly
| recently actually. Fahrenheit only continues to exist as a
| derived scale from that. None of its original reference
| points are precise enough to matter these days. That's true
| for most remaining imperial measurements: they are defined
| very precisely in metric units. You can measure feet with
| your feet of course. But only if you don't care about
| precision. Any self respecting engineer uses more carefully
| calibrated instruments.
| bserge wrote:
| Shame you're downvoted, because it's a comment that shows why
| this imperial/American vs metric "competition" is silly.
|
| It's like saying Cyrillic is better than Latin script. Or
| driving on the left is better than on the right. In reality,
| it just doesn't matter. Whichever you grow up with will seem
| like the easier one.
|
| When I think -5C, I know how the temperature will actually
| feel. Someone who thinks "25F" will feel the same in their
| head. Same for 25cm, 5 inches, 10kg, 40lbs, 9 stones, 7
| shaku, etc. Whatever you grew up with will feel better.
|
| Metric just seems to have won in most of the world, including
| in countries like the US and Japan which use it in
| science/industry. It just makes sense to have one standard
| for communicating with as many other people as possible.
| majewsky wrote:
| > It's like saying Cyrillic is better than Latin script.
| [...] It just doesn't matter.
|
| Out of all the examples that you gave, this is the one that
| doesn't fit your argument. Cyrillic has a wider range of
| letters which makes it a better fit for certain languages
| with a specific phonology. I don't remember which language
| it was, but I remember reading about one of the countries
| between Russia, Turkey, Iran, etc. switched from their
| indigenous writing system to Latin script in the
| 1930s/1940s to enable usage of standard typewriters etc.
| And just a few years later, they switched again, to
| Cyrillic script, after finding that Latin script does not
| fit their language all that well.
| birdsbirdsbirds wrote:
| In other words, it's Fahrenheit that doesn't make sense
| because it goes from arbitrary -20 C to 40 C. Even the
| originally targeted alignment with human body temperature to
| 96 F doesn't match.
|
| On the other hand, freezing and boiling water makes sense,
| because you know that you have to drive carefully when the
| temperature is below 0 C.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'll actually defend Fahrenheit more strongly than other US
| units. 32 degrees is a single number it's probably worth
| remembering. Balanced against that, environmental
| temperatures are usually going to be positive unless it's
| really fricking cold and the degrees are about twice as
| granular. The main advantage of Celsius is just that it's
| what's used in most places (and that it's tied in with
| metric units).
|
| The absolute scale of Celsius (as opposed to the size of
| the degree) isn't the most useful anyway because you tend
| to use Kelvin for a lot of purposes.
| ruph123 wrote:
| I hear this again and again from Americans, but it is simply
| a matter of what you are used to, e.g. what you grew up with.
|
| Its funny how it is so important to have a wider range of
| temperatures whereas I most often hear Americans use ranges.
| And instead of saying "today temps will go up into the 70s"
| you just give the actual number, "it will go up to 23C", what
| is the problem with that? You could also say because a
| celsius degree is greater, the number matters much more and
| it is often not necessary to give a range like that. Ranges
| or not, it does not matter. A celsius is certainly small
| enough that decimals are not necessary for humans day-to-day.
|
| What I also often hear from Americans is that the inch is
| such a perfect unit and "2.5cm" is so awkward but then I hear
| "6/8 of an inch" and similar units or the mixing of feet and
| inch and I just don't get it.
| soneil wrote:
| This is pretty much where I'm at. Below 30 I put on a
| t-shirt. Below 20 I put on long sleeves. Below 10 I put on
| a jacket. I have absolutely no idea what I'm expecting when
| the Americans say 65.
|
| This isn't a feature of either system, it's straight-
| forward familiarity. I'm sure if the weather man used
| Kelvin, it wouldn't take me long to figure out how to dress
| for it.
| zikzak wrote:
| I grew up when metric was replacing "imperial" in Canada. The
| road signs had mph and kph, thermometers all have C and F,
| tape measures have both (lumber is still sold as a 2x4, its
| pre-finished dimension). Socket sets. God.
|
| Anyway, metric just makes sense for most things. The
| attachment is cultural. My parents talked about my height and
| weight in the old units. I still use them and so do
| government forms.
|
| But there's nothing "good" about the old stuff. It's just
| what you are used to.
| [deleted]
| chki wrote:
| But if you actually need more accuracy (which I do not in my
| daily life) you can simply add a decimal point? Also, that's
| a difference between 60 and 100 data points, which is not
| really that much.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Americans don't seem to like decimal points. Everything has
| to be expressed in fractions.
| AlexanderDhoore wrote:
| 5 kilometer = 5000 meter = 500 000 centimeter = 5000 000
| millimeter. Now you do this for 5 miles (yard, feet, inches).
| greenwich26 wrote:
| 1/8 mile = 220 yards = 660 feet. Now you do t--actually
| wait.
|
| 1/110 mile = 16 yards = 48 feet. Now you do this for an
| one-hundred-and-tenth of a kilometer.
|
| Or...
|
| 1/3 pound = 1/2 mark = 6 shillings & eightpence = 80 pence.
| Now you do this for a euro. 1/3 of a euro = , ummm?
|
| The point is, the traditional measures are built out of
| very highly divisible numbers, which is very useful in
| certain applications, for example surveying, bartering,
| baking, etc. Just like the metric measures are built out of
| powers of ten, which is very useful in certain other
| applications, like seamlessly moving between scales of
| magnitude in scientific work.
| ruph123 wrote:
| 1/8 km = 0.125km = 125m = 12500cm
|
| So freaking what. Use decimals and you can easily convert
| anything into everything. And you don't have to rely on
| those few cases where you can exactly divide.
|
| 6.8m = 680cm = 0.0068km, etc.
|
| Who writes out prices in fractions?
|
| Its even worse with baking. Scaling up units from recipes
| is really hard if you have fractions of different units
| like tee spoon, table spoon and cup and when ounces can
| both mean a volume and a weight. ("fl. is not always
| specified") No thank you.
|
| Also your examples are really poor, when the base systems
| keep changing in the same dimensions (e.g. length) there
| is not benefit at all, just confusion or reluctance to
| convert to other units because it would be too awkward.
| greenwich26 wrote:
| When you need to partition a field using crude tools,
| there is nothing "easily" done with decimals. Integers
| are far easier to work with and measure out. This is
| simply proven by the most basic outdoor experience, which
| I suppose you don't have.
|
| Being able to divide by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, and
| 12 is not a "few cases", it's the chief part of the small
| integers into which stuff often needs to be divided
| evenly.
|
| If you ever went to the market before decimalisation, you
| would meet many who write prices in fractions. Something
| would be priced at X pounds/crowns/marks per Y
| items/weights. Then, the cost of Z units/weights is XZ/Y.
| When the coins are highly divisible multiples of each
| other, you have a lot of choices to be able to pay the
| exact amount and don't have to bother with getting change
| back. Even better if we price by the dozens (Y = 12)
| instead of 10s: 12 has twice as many factors than 10.
|
| I understand that this all requires a certain numeracy
| however. Thankfully nowadays we can just buy things using
| their credit cards on Amazon: makes mindless consumption
| much easier.
| ema wrote:
| The important feature of the metric system, for day to day
| use at least, is that it plays nice with decimal numbers. I
| grant you that in this regard Celsius has no advantage over
| Fahrenheit. However for measuring lengths calculating in
| thousands of inches, power of two fractions of inches, and
| even tenths of feet (apparently excavator operators use that)
| seems more an opportunity to showcase one's mental arithmetic
| skills than something selected for ease of use.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| The horror of having to manage all those different competing
| measurements from town to town. This definitely played a role in
| the advancement of technology and industrialization. Precision is
| critical to most modern engineering challenges like jet engines
| and rockets and long lasting cars.
| usrusr wrote:
| Or Mars Climate Orbiters, to state the obvious.
|
| But your inclusion of long lasting cars is a very good one,
| tiny differences that seem good enough but aren't can have
| extreme impact on durability whenever you deal with moving
| parts. If we had a large number of competing units (like all
| those pre-metric German foot variations) we'd have a huge
| number of possible translation pairs of questionable precision
| and an absurd lack of dimensional conventions (try procuring a
| ball bearing with a dimension anywhere between full-numbers in
| mm), leading to lots of "it did fit without noticeable play
| when I set it up, why is it broken now?" situations. Compared
| to that, the American duality of imperial and metric is mostly
| harmless.
| zokier wrote:
| I think that long lasting cars was a reference to how Ford
| was notoriously early adopter of gauge blocks, which
| eventually became the standard references for inches.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block#History
| usrusr wrote:
| Ah, much less obvious, at least for us non-Americans, thank
| you.
| Lev1a wrote:
| Also see:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58
| ruph123 wrote:
| Fun fact: Even the Americans define their fantasy units in terms
| of metric units:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmSJXC6_qQ8
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post flamebait or swipes to HN. It leads to
| tedious, nasty threads.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Some of these are so obsolete that even the awesome Frink [0]
| doesn't handle them From: 10 Wegstunde To:
| metres Result: Warning: undefined symbol "Wegstunde".
| Warning: undefined symbol "Wegstunde". Unconvertable
| expression: 10 Wegstunde (undefined symbol) -> 1 m (length)
|
| [0]
| https://frinklang.org/fsp/frink.fsp?fromVal=10+Wegstunde&toV...
| gxqoz wrote:
| Germany was not unique in this. From Ian Mortimer's book The Time
| Traveler's Guide to Medieval England:
|
| "There are considerable complexities attached to other measures.
| It is not so much that they vary as they may be differently
| interpreted, according to what you are trying to measure. A foot
| in length is the same as your modern foot of 12 inches but if you
| are measuring cloth you use the ell, normally 45 inches--but 27
| inches if the cloth is Flemish. Probably the most complicated
| measures are those involving liquids. A gallon of wine is not the
| same volume as a gallon of ale. A standard hogshead contains 63
| wine-gallons or 52.5 ale-gallons. Except that there is no such
| thing as a standard hogshead; there is a standard for wine,
| another for ale, and a third for beer (which is imported). If you
| are buying beer in London, a hogshead amounts of 54 ale-gallons;
| if you are buying ale, it amounts to 48."
|
| And so on.
|
| https://books.google.com/books?id=NF_8YUhO7CUC&printsec=fron...
| zeristor wrote:
| Even earlier didn't they have different counting systems fo
| different items?
|
| Like a brace of birds.
| greggman3 wrote:
| Japan has several. Not sure if they are obsolete. Rooms are
| often measured by tatami mats. a 6 mat room, an 8 mat room,
| etc... I also once bought a tape measure assuming there was
| only one kind and it was metric but it turned out there are at
| least 2, metric and the shaku and I bought the wrong one.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_units_of_measurement
| ilamont wrote:
| Taiwan (former Japanese colony) still uses Ping (2 tatami
| mats) to measure the size of homes. Street markets often use
| Jin to measure weight and price items. It's .6 kg and the
| English term is "catty"
| Scoundreller wrote:
| In a way, we all do this.
|
| A 4-person tent can hold about 4 teenagers travelling with
| nothing.
|
| An airline seat is built to the "standard" person, but the
| average person is overweight/obese in USA.
|
| A "lunch" can vary from 500 to 2500 calories.
|
| A medium coffee = ???. When a Canadian coffee chain expanded
| to USA, an order for a medium was put into their L cups.
|
| A Tetra Pak of Tropicana has gone from 2L to 1.89L to 1.75L.
|
| Don't even get me started on clothes.
|
| Surprisingly, the government has done a great job at
| maintaining standards in the tobacco industry. Nobody is
| selling packs of cigarettes with 19 slightly-shorter
| cigarettes.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| nothing makes me angrier then slightly-shorter products.
| I.e sandwiches packets etc. It's cheating and wrong.
| zokier wrote:
| The whole reason why French invented the metric system was
| because they had similar mess of various local measurement
| units all over the place, which notably made taxation and
| regulation complicated.
| kazen44 wrote:
| and the reason most of continental Europe started using
| metric was thanks to napoleon and the Napoleonic wars.
| fanf2 wrote:
| England was better off than France in the 1700s: in England
| there were national standards for the various measures, but
| in France they were local and differed from place to place.
| This opened up all sorts of opportunities for arbitrage and
| petty fraud.
|
| American customary units are a simplified version of the old
| English measures: the main remnant of different measures for
| different goods in America is the Winchester bushel for
| volume of dry goods, and the Queen Anne wine gallon for
| volume of liquids.
|
| The main difference between US customary measures and non-
| metric British measures is due to the reform of volume
| measures in the 1800s, which abolished the various old
| bushels and gallons, and replaced them all with the imperial
| gallon. (America does not use imperial units.)
| azepoi wrote:
| It was a mess
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement_in_France.
| ..
|
| each town had variations
|
| https://fr.geneawiki.com/index.php?title=Fichier:Instruction.
| ..
| robocat wrote:
| And in modern times we have made Mega and Giga mean different
| numbers when applied to memory, computer files, or hard
| drives... I find this embarrassing and disturbing as an
| engineer/technologist.
| jalk wrote:
| That has been fixed with mebi/gibibytes for the power of 2
| variants - although it doesn't seem to catch on very fast
| usr1106 wrote:
| I wonder why Zentner is not on the list. People still used that
| in colloquial talk in the 1970s. Well, being exactly 50 kg it was
| already kind of ISO.
|
| Measures of area are missing. I still remember very old people
| talking of Morgen, whithout having any clue how much that would
| be. Used to describe the size of a farm. I guess it was somehow
| metric already, but I'm sure farms where measured centuries
| before.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Because it's not obsolete. It's still in colloquial use.
| anoncake wrote:
| Pfund (500g) is on the list and also still in use. I think
| it's more common than Zentner.
| leipert wrote:
| Depends on whether you tend to buy meat (only use case for
| Pfund for me) or you work in construction / gardening etc.
| where Zentner is still commonly used. At least where I
| live.
| FabHK wrote:
| Yes, people still sometimes use the Morgen (=morning).
|
| It's the area "tillable in the morning hours of a day by one
| man behind an ox or horse dragging a single bladed plough"
| (about 2500 m^2, though regional variations were 4000 or even
| up to 10000 m^2).
|
| Interestingly, the acre was also historically determined as the
| area that can be ploughed in one whole day by a team of eight
| oxen, namely 1 furlong x 1 chain or 4047 m^2.
|
| Not sure what that says about German vs Anglo-Saxon working
| hours or oxen...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgen
| majewsky wrote:
| FWIW, I've never heard the word "Morgen" used in that meaning
| outside of poems. Maybe this is a regional thing? I'm in East
| Germany (born and raised in Mecklenburg, now living in
| Saxony).
| mgerullis wrote:
| Never heard it either, born and raised in Stuttgart, living
| in Berlin
| groby_b wrote:
| fwiw, heard it used regularly (NRW, "Bergisches Land") - in
| the late 70s, by people 70+.
| haunter wrote:
| Has its own page though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgen
| usr1106 wrote:
| Not even linked... (Reminds of other Wikipedia projects I
| have "ongoing" (which is really: haven't done anything for a
| while) Cleaning up some confusing article splits, it's a
| tedious task.)
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(page generated 2021-04-11 23:01 UTC)