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When a pint is not a pint. (FILE)

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So a 12-stone bloke walks into a pub, orders a pint, and plops down 10 bob.

Unless you spent some time in England prior to 1970 or have read more than your share of old English novels, that previous sentence may be a bit obscure.

The reason is that the Brits used to pride themselves on the obscurity of their system of weights, measures, and currency.

Let me translate. A stone, when used to describe a person, is 14 pounds. That's pounds as in weight, not pounds as in money. So the bloke weighs 168 pounds. A pint...well, you probably think you know what a pint is, but we'll see if you do when we return to that shortly. A bob is British slang for a shilling. Before decimalization of their currency in 1971, a British shilling was worth 12 pence and 20 shillings made a pound (money, not weight). So a pound was 240 pence.

Are you following me, because now it begins to get complicated? A florin was 2 shillings, a crown 5 shillings, a guinea 21 shillings, that is a pound plus a shilling.

I used to think that the British did these things just so they could fleece tourists or at least make Americans feel stupid. But I've now decided that our system of weights and measures is at least as crazy, particularly as we are the only industrialized country that refuses to go metric.

Consider that pint in the first sentence.

In the U.S. we have pints too. We inherited our system of weights and measures from the British, so you might expect that they would be the same. They are not. The U.S. pint is 20 percent less -- 473 milliliters (to bring in a rational unit of liquid measure into the conversation) - than a British pint, which is 568 milliliters. In both England and the U.S. a gallon is 8 pints, so American gallons are about 20 percent smaller than British gallons.

We have inches, feet, yards and miles. Twelve inches to a foot, three feet to a yard, 1760 yards to a mile. And then there are those quaint measures of the horsey set, the hand - 4 inches - and the furlong -- 220 yards. Our measure of land area is the acre, which as we all know is equivalent to the area enclosed by a rectangle one furlong in length and one-tenth of a furlong (a chain, that is) wide. Are you telling me British currency is crazy? Maybe it was, but at least they've changed it.

Don't even get me started on ounces.

Okay, I'm started. In America we use ounces in two ways - one to measure volume (a fluid ounce), the other to measure weight (an avoirdupois ounce). Usually, we ignore this difference and if you're measuring water, then they are pretty much the same. However, for other substances, such as flour for instance, one type of ounce is about twice as much as the other. Of course, British ounces and American ounces are different too.

The advantage of the metric system is that it makes intuitive sense. It is based on 10's and decimals like our numbers. Like our fingers and toes. You have grams, meters, and liters. Put a prefix, milli-, cent-, deci-, in front of any of them and it means one-thousandth, one-hundredth, or one-tenth, respectively. For those of us in the sciences who often work at smaller levels, there is also micro- and nano-, a millionth- and a billionth-. Kilo- means one thousand. Instead of the chain-by-furlong acre, the metric system has the hectare, equivalent to the area of a square 100 meters on a side.

Thankfully, Alexander Hamilton made our currency sensible in 1792 when the Coinage Act officially established the dollar. Originally, the dollar was based on the considerably less sensible Spanish dollar, also known as a "piece of eight" as it was worth 8 reales. We still have a vestige of that original Spanish dollar in our all-but-vanished unit of bits, which were also eight to the dollar. "Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar," as the jingle went. I remember as a boy my father telling me that something cost 6 bits and having no idea what he was talking about. Other than that though, we have a nice pseudo-metric monetary system. A dollar consists of 10 dimes and 100 cents. In Hamilton's day there was also an eagle worth 10 dollars and a mille, worth one-thousandth of a dollar. You wonder what could be bought with a mille?

It's worked well with our money, which is now the international currency of choice, so can we please all go metric as the French did in 1799 and science also did long ago? Actually, as almost all science did long ago. You might recall that in 1999 NASA sent a $125 million weather orbiter crashing into the Martian surface because one of the two teams of engineers working on the navigation system was using the metric system, the other was using so-called English measures. That's an expensive lesson on why we all need to go metric - the sooner, the better.

Steven Austad is Chair of the Biology Department at UAB. Before becoming a research scientist, he had various lives as an English major, a newspaper reporter, a New York City taxi driver, and a Hollywood wild animal trainer. Living now in Birmingham with his veterinarian wife, 6 dogs, 2 parrots, and a cat, he enjoys nothing more than communicating how science works to the general public.