[Wikipedia-l] Metric v. English

[Jaap van Ganswijk]

At 2003-01-03 06:30 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>Cup, pint, quart, half-gallon, gallon -- binary!  More rational than
>decimal, if you're likely to be multiplying and dividing by 2.  (As
>in, doubling or halving a recipe.)

Nobody forbids you to express the amount of liters
in the binary system:

bin   = dec
1       1     litre
0.1   = 0.5   litre
0.01  = 0.25  litre
0.001 = 0.125 litre

Or why not introduce the 'neg-2log-litre', being
the negative base 2 logarithm of the amount of
litres as a new unit:

0 neg-2log-litre = 2^ 0 litre = 1     litre
1 neg-2log-litre = 2^-1 litre = 0.5   litre
2 neg-2log-litre = 2^-2 litre = 0.25  litre
3 neg-2log-litre = 2^-3 litre = 0.125 litre

Makes more sense than cup, pint, quart, half-gallon,
gallon. I think that especially housewives would
welcome this new system!

You could abbreviate the unit to 'noglitre',
'nlit', 'nll' or 'decibel-litre'.

By the way, it's already in use in European
paper formats: A3, A4, A5 etc.

Perhaps we could also abbreviate the
volumes units to: L0, L1, L2, L3.

Hi bartender, L1's of beer and a happy new year
for everyone on this list!

;-)

Greetings,
Jaap