$ 3 billion gold bullion - photo

[mklotz]

We're going back in time, following Marv making rounds of different institutions as they're conceiving all the systems of measurement. Epic, the today Marv vs the historic organizations.
There are many potential outcomes. Two most likely;
a) Everything winds up base 10.......
b) All as we see now, and they have his middle finger right next to Galileo's......
Ladies and Gentlemen, place your bets.

And the idiocy marches on...

Shotgun gauges...

The logical measure is diameter (ball OD or barrel ID) and the means to measure such certainly existed if shotguns were being manufactured but no, let's calibrate the gun according to some obscure tradesman's (the lead caster) measure of convenience. If I developed a new type of super drill and decided to label them with a number that represented how many of them it took to make a pound of weight, wouldn't you think me nuts?

Then there's barrels...

There are seven different barrel sizes used in the USA, with the size being dependent on the contents. Their names and metric equivalents are as follows: US cranberry (95.5 liters), US dry (115.628 liters), US liquid (119.24 liters), US federal (117.348 liters), US federal proof spirits (151.416 liters), US drum (208.4 liters), US petroleum (135 kg.), US petroleum statistical (158.99 liters).

And all those quaint, folksy names that conceal what is being measured...

In the inferial system, which of the following are names of legitimate units?
grad, sack, minim, pinch, mil, turn, oscar, point, jeroboam

grad, pinch, turn, and oscar are not inferial units, AFAIK. However, as the idiocy escalates, this may change in the future. The oscar would be an ideal unit for measuring the weight of small statuettes :-)