I donāt know where Britannica got that 9 to 28 feet stuff. A rodās been 5Ā½ yards for at least 200 years around here, and I suspect for a lot longer, since it was the primary unit of land measurement in English-speaking countries until Gunterās chain came out in 1620.
The most insane measurement system I know of is the iso metric system used for passenger automobile tires. Pure lunacy; itās got both Olde French Metric Units and Modern American Freedom Units embedded in it, and thatās not even really the crazy partā¦
Specifically, miles per gallon, or km/litre, comes out as length^{-2} [1]
You can make all sorts of cursed fuel efficiency measurements so long as the dimensions come out as 1/length^2. At the end of the day, itāll be convertible to any other fuel efficiency by a constant.
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Discourse markdown has footnotes, but not superscripts? Whatever, Iāve not had my coffee yet. ā©ļø
Bless that bus for dreaming big, though, eh?
The standard in Canada, and many other countries, is litres/100 km. This, of course, is inversely proportional to MPG.
I do like liters/100km. If I fuel up on a budget its easy to figure out how much I need for a 500km journey for example. In the mpg scenario you end up having to do long division
In these days where nearly everyone has a calculator in their pocket, that only means you hit different buttons.
This honestly drives me a little nuts (pardon the pun).
I grew up on MPG and of course American sources all still report MPG, and MPG is reasonably convertible to range in your head (even for km).
But inverting the relationship is so weird, especially when new cars (as mine does) report the new litres/100 km on the dash displays. Itās mind-bendingly difficult to convert that to MPG as well, making it hard to adapt to.
Maybe Iāll get used to it someday. I hope so. But right now I kinda hate it.
Me too. I grew up thinking big numbers were better, now itās small numbers. And I still say āmileageā because no one says ākilometrageā.
I wonāt say what exactly I do for a living because our weird little niche is small enough that I would dox myself, but I am a developer who works with lots of mileages mostly but not necessarily entirely expressed in metric units. So I encounter the term ākilometrageā more often than one would think.
Apparently I (we?) am behind the curve though. I was talking to an older fellow in a cafĆ© last week about my new truck. He saw it in the parking lot and wanted to know more about it. He asked about mileage and I said āAbout 30mpg- pretty good!ā. He stared at me blankly and changed the subject. Maybe if Iād said ā8.5 litres per one hundred kilometresā that would have landed, but I assumed with him being older than me, heād grok MPG. Hopefully I just misread his reaction. 
Well. I thought I had invented the term. Off to use it everywhere.
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Funnily enough, the French word for āfootageā, as in film footage, is mĆ©trage. Which makes sense considering it literally means the feet/metres of film used in a sequence.
Does an average Chihuahua weigh 5 pounds or is it a standard weight of one Chwow, which is 1/16th of a Labrador?
A further complication is that since 2001 the standard Labrador has been replaced by a weighted average of two standard dogs as the āNewfoundland and Labradorā.
Ah, crap, and I bet somebody out there is still on the Standard Retriever scale.
I saw this headline and immediately came running
the aritcle even references the corgi-sized meteor
