ok - some clarification and background

"Bob (this one)" > wrote in message
...
> -- 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.
>

First, who standardized them? There was no ISO or like organization. A
standard is a device to assure common measure.

After the King left that business, the Royal Academy, formed of amateur
scientists (were there any others back then), standardized measures.
Since there were no lab service companies, they adopted the water
standard. And all measures from time before that, no matter where the WORD
came from be it sanskrit or latin, were changed to meet the standard.
The 15 ounces of a pound used from the 12 century was changed to 16
ounces,

http://www.lajzar.co.uk/unit/system/imp_brit.html

In our labs, we had to replicate all the old means of achieving a
standard for measures.

> 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."

I do have two very old cookbooks- and they do measure as you said, However,
first, an 18th century kitchen is not a lab, and second, they are measuring
weights by using volume, as acceptable a method as measuring a force by
using a mass.

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>
>

which has little to do with standardizing measures for the required
interchageability and science of an era that came 300 years later.

> " 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.

Weight NAMES were well established, but not the standard of that measure.

further, there were 31.5 wine gallons in a barrel; 36 beer gallons in a
barrel, 40 spirit gallons in a barrel, 42 gallons of petroleum in a barrel

>
> "A Chef of Fustian consisteth of Fourteen Ells. [A Chef of Sindon
> containeth Ten Ells.]" Ells are yards.

Sorry, you are wrong again - Ells vary from 27 inches (Flemish) to 45 inches
(French)

Fustian is a fabric and they're
> still measured by the yard in the US today.

We measure all cloth in shops by the yard

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.

Sorry, you are once again wrong.
First, anyone with leadership traning for high stress environments knows
the basic rule of three items for low level skills in humans. One of the
basics, an absolute fundamental. And the rule of four.
Second, I could once again explain it, but how about you tell us all why
there are 16 ounces in a pound and 16 ounces in a pint when before about
1500 there were 15 ounces in pound? If not made 16 from 15 by design, then
was it just coincidence that they changed the ounces to 16 when they already
had fluid ounces at 16 - that the body that was to standardize weights and
measures used the same number 16 was just coincidence?


>Ounces came from Latin, so did
> librum for pound. That's why they're abbreviated "lb."

The WORD came from latin. In the early centuries in England before
standardization, there were 15 ounces in a pound.
Did the romans have 15 ounces or 13 or how many in apound?

>
> 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-manuf...al-glossary/ph
armaceutical-abbreviations.html#Weights-measures>
>

I did look, and I found no such information. The link you put up has
absolutley nothing about measures coming from latin or Rome. And their are
only weights, not volumes.
And your link only has the abbreviations for frequency of dose in latin -
which by way was the language of the church and was in use as a dead
language in many sciences. Read your links more carefully next time.

> "...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."
>

the derivation of the word "meter" may well be greek, but it didn't mean the
greeks
defined the ISO meter

> 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.

Apparently you are not technically trained. base 10 is less common than
binary or octal. The binary method, the basis of all computers, was used by
Russian peasants for hundreds of years. It is the math of dna. Octal is the
basis for nearly all programming,
The other numbers you claim are bases are almost unheard of as bases. The
numbers you cite are used in the context of base 10 - a base 10 "12" is 12
units. A base 7 "12" is 8 units.

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.
>

So it is your learned position that all the measures noted are happenstance
and mere convenience.
-That they are all of the same 8 and its multiples are coincidence,
-that the universal standard for lab calibration being the nexis is just
coincidence
-that the steam/water measurement units that simplify calculation to an
eighth of that required by metrics are just coincidence
- that when the Academy coordinated all these measurements to a standard,
it was done willy- nilly and without coordination - so it is all just
happenstance

> > ------------------- 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.

No, you are once again wrong. Laws of physics are phenomena that merely
exist, they do not establish nexi.
On the other hand, humans wanting to be able to establish an easy
standard to calibrate instruments when unable to send the device out to a
calibration lab then must calibrate by using a common medium, and they NEED
a common point.

If you had basic technical physics, if you had ever done any of the
calibration labs which perform these tasks as part of the basic physics
courses, then you would know that you would pass the course after you
understood that the three basic western measurement standards were all
designed. western science is not based on happy coincidence.
And if you were on any of the committees that establish standards (I have
been on a US national standards committee for over 30 years), you would know
we integrate the standards all the time, but we don't publish explanations
of what parts we do or do not integrate.

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.
>

determined by measuring the original platinum iridium bar

> > ------------ humans remember 3s and 4s groups more readily than any
> > other values
>
> Hence phone numbers. But how about postal codes...?

check the names for the acronym for zip code and ask yourself if the
creators considered human parameters.

The common pop-conception that ten is basic to human is often accepted
without consideration by those who do not have to lead, but merely follow
and hold onto a technical touchstone. There is no one sytem that is better
than another for all things - thus mankind has many systems of numbers.

>
> > 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.
>

seen it in any cultures not already influenced by western culture?
You cannot have.

And if you will note, I said that the change was to 8 by human design, done
by those who felt they had the answer to ills by moving from the old 3-4 to
a new 8 system. I know well firsthand of the politics of the move to change
to metrics, and it was not for improved efficiency for the US.

> > 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.

And thus it must not exist, and so all information about it or its
derivation is false?

FYI, The "degrees" of 100 "degrees" in a circle are called gradians. All HP
engineeering calculators that I have seen have it.

FYI, Celsius and centigrade (and Kelvin) thermometers are calibrated by
making 100 gradations between boiling water and an ice water solution (they
are .01 degree apart.

> 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.
>

The use of 100 resisted because the ten was not a natural number and did not
work.

> > 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.

computer - (all binary)

and never even close to simpler for steam power calculations.

the europeans to this day can't even use the right measure for weight - they
use the unit for mass as weight.

> These numbering systems are holdovers from earlier times and remain
> conventions mostly because we're familiar with them.

If ten is so simple, why were those unnatural systems like the sexagesimal
of the baylonianian empire, the binary of the Russians, the septal of
Univac, and 3-4 of Europe, the egyptian system, and all the other
non-decimal systems, developed? Because they liked unnatural? One cultures
natural is another cultures awkward.

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."

again a four from a native measure system
>
> > 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.
>
no, it was well before napoleon. An early Louis.

> > or so the story goes
>
> Um, sure. Soon to be a major motion picture.

actually, it was in a documentary on maps.

>
> Pastorio

bottom line - all that you get to see is not all that occurs.
>