-- wrote:

> > wrote in message
> ...
>
>> In rec.food.cooking, "Bob (this one)" > wrote:
>>
>>> Dry ounces are still volume measure, like fluid ounces.
>>
>> Does anyone know how it happened that "ounces" refers to either
>> weight or volume, depending on usage? Is there some nexis
>> between the two? All I can imagine is that one fluid ounce of
>> water at STP weighs one ounce. Is that it?
>
> as i understand -
>
> the old labs of the amateur scientists 400-500 years or so back
> needed a way to calibrate their instruments (tolerance was somewhat
> slack back then than now). Later, after merchants picked up those
> measures, they also needed an easy way to be checked.
>
> Water was commonly available, so weight and temperature scales were
> established and agreed upon using water-related parameters. If you
> had the container of the correct dimensions, call it one "pint",
> and you filled it with water, you had a lb weight. Calibration can
> be done.
>
> So the volume of a pint measure hanging on the wall of the lab
> defined the weight of one pound, and the volume of a pint.
>
> Volume meets weight.

Um, no. Weight measures were standardized back then (and before) all
over the world, volumes weren't. Merchants came way before scientists.

If you read old recipes - I mean OLD - you'll find that volume
measures were given as "half an eggshell" and "a wineglass of..." and
"the size of a pigeon's egg." Whereas weights were given in specific
units. Commerce demanded transferable units hence the tiny "carat"
which was the weight of an exceedingly small seed. Here's a document
from the 13th century that deals with weights...
<http://www.sizes.com/library/Britain/ponderibus.htm>

" the wine gallon is the space occupied by a quantity of wheat
weighing 8 pounds. This interpretation is made explicit in some of the
other manuscript versions. However, what we now call the wine gallon,
used time out of mind by the English excise before being legalized in
1707, and the basis of the U. S. gallon, contains 231 cubic inches.
That volume is as close to the volume of 8 liber mercatoriae of wine
as to the volume of 8 Troy pounds of wheat." Weights were
well-established, volumes were not.

"A Chef of Fustian consisteth of Fourteen Ells. [A Chef of Sindon
containeth Ten Ells.]" Ells are yards. Fustian is a fabric and they're
still measured by the yard in the US today. By the meter elsewhere.
Old, old habits die hard.

> The old easily-remembered-by-ordinary-uneducated-humans 3 by 4
> system in use at the time was not good enough for them, so someone
> wanted to change it to a more logical 8 based system.
>
> Divide the measure into 2x8 parts and call it an ounce, and if you
> are not too careful defining which measure it was, and either by
> design so we could remember it or by accident, we get 16 ounces
> and 16 ounces, weight and volume.

This is unfortunately all fictional. Ounces came from Latin, so did
librum for pound. That's why they're abbreviated "lb."

The language of the pharmacy is Latin. Look here for measures still in
use millennia later. And note that volume measures were merely the
volumes of known weights.
<http://www.pharmaceutical-drug-manufacturers.com/pharmaceutical-glossary/pharmaceutical-abbreviations.html#Weights-measures>

"...The avoirdupois ounce, the unit commonly used in the United
States, is 1/16 pound or about 28.3495 grams.... The word ounce is
from the Latin uncia, meaning a 1/12 part, because the Roman pound was
divided into 12 ounces. The word "inch," meaning 1/12 foot, has the
same root. The symbol "oz" is from the old Italian word onza (now
spelled oncia) for an ounce."

and...

"fluid ounce:

"A traditional unit of liquid volume, called the fluid ounce to avoid
confusion with the weight ounce. In the U. S. customary system there
are 16 fluid ounces in a pint, so each fluid ounce represents
1.804,687 cubic inches or 29.573,531 milliliters. In the British
imperial system there are 20 fluid ounces in an imperial pint, so each
fluid ounce represents about 1.733,871 cubic inches or 28.413,063
milliliters. A fluid ounce of water weighs just a bit more than one
ounce avoirdupois."
<http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20000717.html>

Base 8 is a rare system with 10 being the most common, then 7, 12, 24,
60, and 365 for measuring time. Nothing is commonly base 8. These
units are a triumph of human resistance to change, not some superior
calculational creation.

The cup being 8 ounces is a coincidence of convenience.

> ------------------- Similar for the metric system, except someone
> in France decided that one millionth of the distance from the
> equator to the pole was better than using the weight of water in a
> measured container that those evil English were using.
>
> They then set the nexis at 1ml liquid = 1gram mass = 1 cubic
> centimeter volume when using water, so instruments could also be
> calibrated easily in the metric system.

The laws of physics set those relationships, not some committee. But
it is why the basic unit was so designated. It's no longer that
distance measure, but something hopelessly out of the hands of
amateurs. It was redefined in 1983 as the distance traveled by light
in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

> ------------ humans remember 3s and 4s groups more readily than any
> other values

Hence phone numbers. But how about postal codes...?

> sets of 8 is the most natural when using octal or counting when
> your thumbs are used as the next digit (why octal for the
> uneducated? count to eight twice using your fingers as the ones and
> use the thumbs as the next-place-holder eights, and you get two
> thumbs worth, i.e., 16 - you can count to sixteen on your hands
> without remembering in octal, while the evil enemy the french with
> their new-fangled metrics can only count to ten before they have to
> scratch a mark in the dirt to go higher)

Primitive people don't use anything like that. They work off base 10
for the most part as the numbers of commerce and trade and make
multiples of 10 by secondary gestures. Count all the fingers - that's
10, then count them again and tap the wrist - that's 20. Then count
them again and tap halfway up the forearm - that's 30, and so forth.
I've seen that in widely separated cultures.

> the original metric had (and some still do have) 100 degrees in a
> circle, 100 degrees between water boiling and freezing,

I've never seen anything even remotely like this. Thermometers were
always linear because they measured expansion in two dimensions.

> 100 parts
> to a time and geometry minute,

Military minute. Time-study minute. But not common currency.

> 10 increments in everything. works
> ok in theory, and quite well in many applications, but in geometry,
> in time, in most water-based applications such as steam
> calculations which were devised to be simple by using "specific"
> parameters, forces (several measures), pressures (there are
> probably six or seven metric measures that can drive the engineer
> nuts), and rapid mental calculation of small digital amounts, the
> British 3-4 and octal length-force-second system and the 60
> multiple time, temperature, and geometry units beats the original
> metric length-meter-mass hands down.

Sorry. No. If that were the case, all those engineers I worked with at
Westinghouse would still be using those units. The simple fact of the
matter is that functioning in 10s and multiples and divisibles of tens
is simpler for any sort of computation you want to consider.

These numbering systems are holdovers from earlier times and remain
conventions mostly because we're familiar with them. Getting people to
change is an interesting exercise. My grandparents were born in Italy
in the late 1800's. The spoke of both "kili" and "libri" when talking
about weight measures. "Gallone" was the standard liquid measure,
except they also said that "quatro litri fa un gallone." "Four liters
make a gallon."

> All those odd measure - chains, barrels, tons, are standards for
> specific purpose that were used by both countries in international
> commerce are blamed on the british system.

Every culture has had unique measures that suited the needs they
filled. No one blamed measures on anyone else, they merely used their
own. And still do except for commerce that crosses borders, and even
then many still do. You can still buy koku of rice in Japan.

> As I understand, one of
> the french kings had all of France surveyed in great part to scrap
> the old and get the new measure in place

That would be Napoleon. And he had all the houses in France uniquely
numbered. That's where the cosmetic company called "The house of 4711"
got its name.

> or so the story goes

Um, sure. Soon to be a major motion picture.

Pastorio