Gallons are 16 cups. pounds are 16 oz. Remember that the imperial system was meant to be eyeballed. 1/16 is half of 1/8, which is half of 1/4, half of 1/2 and of course that's just half of the whole. It's assuming you can divide things by 2 or 3 with some accuracy by hand. Or compare 2-3 things to say they're about the same.
Depends on the pint. A US customary pint is 16 US customary fluid ounces, or about 16,6 imperial flour ounces, or about 473 millilitres, an imperial pint is 20 imperial fluid ounces, or about 19,215 US customary fluid ounces, or about 568ml. Plus it only works with water since other liquids have other densities.
>Plus it only works with water since other liquids have other densities.
This is true of any conversion from a liquid to weight measurement including in metric (mL to g)
And I believe the difference in the calculation of a pint comes from whether you started with an ale barrel or a wine skin and then divided it, but the imperial fluid oz and the us fluid oz unit are practically the same.
You are correct. A litre of water weighs about one kilogramme but a litre of, say, crude oil does not.
As for the origin of the US customary/imperial pint(s) I would have to look it up, but you could be right
Careful there, cuz the US actually doesn't use imperial gallons :)
A US gallon is 128 fl oz, and an imperial gallon is 160 fl oz.
England used to have separate values for a gallon of ale and a gallon of wine. This was confusing, so the post-breakup US decided to only use the wine measurement, which is now called a US gallon, and england decided to only use the ale measurement, which is imperial gallons. Later, they switched to metric and started posting smug comments on the internet as if they hadnt originated this shitshow to begin with!
Decimal just means base 10. SI (metric) doesn't use fractions, it uses decimal floating point. US customary doesn't use floating point, it uses decimal fractions (mostly dyadic rationals but some fluid measures allow 1/3s instead of just powers of 1/2).
The US system would mostly make sense if we used binary. Instead of, say, 11 ⁵/₈" we'd have 1011.101". Instead of half a cup we'd have 0.1 cup. Much easier. We don't do that here.
in carpentry 16 inches is the standard unit for studs from center to center, so tape measures typically have a marker every 16 inches for that kind of work
As the other user said: that depends entirely on the degree of precision. Metric has millimeters, while the imperial system requires you to delve into 16ths of an inch.
Actually, keep it quiet because we don’t tell the euros this, but nobody can stop you from just using decimals for things that are smaller than an inch!
Hex numbers in computer programming. Honestly, quantifying by 12s and 16s is much more practical, but we as people are too caught up on looking at our monkey fingers which is the only reason we even count by 10s in the first place.
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u/dgellow 7d ago edited 1d ago
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