I agree that imperial units are silly and we should probably run on metric for lots of practical reasons. But you gotta admit that they're a fun discussion prompt for trivia; everybody thinks there's an internal logic but it's just all weird history! For example nobody's gonna believe that it's just a weird coincidence that a Zacharia is slightly *less* than half of a Scaramucci
Oct 16, 2026, 8:40 PM@glyph Imperial units as in the fall of the Roman empire.
@glyph It is unfortunate that it's called "pulling my leg" and not "pulling my foot" otherwise there's be a metric ton of jokes there
@glyph few people know the realm of the lesser imperial units
Oct 16, 2026, 8:48 PM@glyph Getting rid of ounces - the _worst unit in the universe_ - is worth it.
@moira what's wrong with fluid ounces? (snare hit)
@glyph the proper term is "former international associate Chinese lawyer" Bambi Zacharia
@glyph There's also the UK political measurement 1 Truss < 1 lettuce
Us Americans really will do anything to avoid using the metric system.
@glyph I blame the Queen for doing the Fandango.
@glyph I think a Scaramucci is just under half a Truss? That's a neo-imperial unit that Britain introduced after leaving the regulatory stranglehold of the EU.
@glyph my favourite bit of relevant trivia is that the Chinese weight unit jin was only ever properly standardised after grams were invented so they standardised it to 500 grams.
@jeremy_list @glyph chinese jin 🤝 german "pfund"
@glyph Many a mickle makes a muckle , you can take that with a smidgen o salt . 🥂
@glyph my hobby: making up stories about "imperial units".
Like, how the story you usually hear about the dimensions of a "2x4" are wrong. yes yes, fresh vs aged wood, but that only accounts for about 28% of the actual size difference.
See, it's actually about the difference between the wine gallon and the ale gallon.
The gallon is BOTH defined as a certain weight of its constitutent liquid; wine and ale have different densities due to different alcohol content, so their gallons are of different weights.
But the gallon is also defined as 3×7×11 inches (nobody knows why! Usually imperial units like to divide into 2s, 3s, and sometimes 5s. 7s and 11s are really uncommon!)
How is this possible? Because there are wine-inches and ale-inches.
Most US lumber is actually from Canada, and in Canada they use a system based on wine-inches, while the US uses the larger ale inch.
@glyph the best cursed pressure unit still is and remains [unit of length] of mercury, like mmHg. calorie is also a funny unit, meant to be metric, but invented before it was understood that heat and energy are the same thing, and therefore is redundant with the joule. and why, of course we also have an assortment of conflicting standardizations for it.
Have you participated yet?💯🔎🎁
This is reaI,🤩
Oct 17, 2026, 2:36 AM@glyph Is there a shit ton in metric?
@feisty_lemming no, category error. those are the two kinds of ton. shit ton; metric ton
@glyph @feisty_lemming this why I'm always getting 5 kilos of shit in 5 pound bags.
Oct 17, 2026, 4:00 AM@glyph See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measurement#Zacharia (not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefinite_and_fictitious_numbers obvs....)
The counterargument for keeping Imperial (and to be clear, I'm *extremely* pro-Metric) is that the surviving units tend to be of handy sizes for doing day-to-day stuff and can easily be defined in terms of their metric counterparts and converted between them with low-precision FP arithmetic.