#(this is for US customary units. Imperial is slightly different IIRC)

[whumpster-fire]

1-3: fuck if we know. Maybe powers of 2 were easier to work with in ye olden dayes before electronic calculators? In any case, fractional inch measurements usually go down to around 1/64". Possibly 1/128" as well but I'm not sure who uses that. I do know that I've purchased 3/32" thick plywood and possibly 1/32" at some point, and I've seen 1/64" thick sheets for sale.

However our system is simultaneously not as stupid and far more stupid than you think, because we do have decimal inches as well and these are used pretty commonly in engineering/manufacturing. E.g. something might be measured to the nearest thousandth of an inch, or "thou." Sometimes even 0.0001" for extremely precise stuff.

It gets worse: we also have decimal feet (which of course do not neatly convert to inches), used in... I think a lot of construction-adjacent stuff like architecture and civil engineering?

5-7: the tablespoon is 3x bigger than the teaspoon so this isn't one of our stupid "binches" units but that joke has a grain of truth to it because we have a LOT of stupid industry-specific units, such as nautical miles (which in all fairness are a more sensible unit than regular miles because they're supposed to correspond to a minute of latitude), and also Troy ounces and pounds used by the precious metals industry.

("grain of truth" is a bad pun: a grain is a very small unit of mass used for weighing gunpowder and bullets, and also used to be used in medicine)

10: Pound as a unit of weight is what came first. The unit of currency "Pound Sterling" was originally supposed to be the value of a pound of silver - first pure silver, then the alloy called Sterling Silver used for coinage, but it obviously isn't worth a pound of silver now, and there have been numerous competing standards for what a pound weighs throughout history.

11-12: A gallon is 128 fluid ounces, or four quarts, or eight pints, or 16 cups, with a cup equaling 8 fl. oz, as well as 16 tablespoons, so one tablespoon is half a fluid ounce. This is nominally based on the density of water, where one fluid ounce is a volume such that one fluid ounce of water weighs one ounce, a pint of water-density liquid weighs a pound, and a gallon weighs 8 lbs. As a result, 1 gallon in US units is 231 cubic inches, which is a fucking horrendous number.

Things about the metric system that confuse me

Why are there 16 parts to an inch. Like yeah it's divisible by 4 but decimals and percentages on a system based on 100 are so much easier to calculate than fractions.

What are those little sixteenths called

Why don't you have millimeters. What happens if you need to measure something smaller than 1/16th of an inch. Why is your smallest area measurement the length of my fucking thumb

BECAUSE of your dumb inches and sixteenth and fractions, nothing else makes any fucking sense to remember. What's an inch? 16 little notches. What's a foot? 12 inches. What's a mile? 5,280. How the FUCK does anyone remember that. You know what's easy to remember? 10 millimeters are 1 centimeter. Do you know what centimeter means? 1/100th of a meter. You know how many of them are in a meter? 100. Easy shit

Okay this one is at Imperial but whose tablespoon is a tablespoon based off. Why are tablespoons and teaspoons both distinct measurements, they're fucking spoons. They're almost the fucking same. Like if you had "inches" and "binches" and binches were for no reason at all 1/42nd smaller and you only used them for measuring sawdust. Fuck completely off

Okay actually still looking at Imperial and speaking of Teaspoons and Tablespoons, the names don't indicate anything. How would ANYONE simply deduce by name which is bigger or smaller. Why would a spoon for food be bigger than a spoon for a drink. They both gotta fit in your fucking mouth don't they

Did we all standardize our fucking spoon volumes before we standardized our math? And CUPS? Who in the cholera factory was using scientific standard measurements to quality control your cutlery for any of this to be at all reliable for anyone following recipes

Alright back to you Metric WHAT DOES OUNCE MEAN AND WHY IS IT ABBREVIATED AS OZ

WHY IS POUND ABBREVIATED AS LB FOR LIBRA LIKE SCALES LIKE A CRYPTIC ASS ILLUMINATI SECRET MESSAGE WHEN "P" IS PERFECTLY AVAILABLE. YALL AINT PAYING MONEY IN POUNDS AND PENCE SO WHATS THE CONFUSION

Okay also why the hell would the British using Pounds to mean money run away to make America and start using Pounds to mean weight instead. Do I weigh a hundred dollars? Does Chadley at the gym bench press a thousand cents? I hate you

What is a gallon for. What does it mean. You know what's easy to convert to milliliters? Liters. What the hell is an ounce to a gallon

On top of that, what's your measurement transference? We have grams for weight, liters for liquid, meters for distance, and they're all like 1:100:1000 and shit. What do you DO to like. Show how many square inches of mass a gallon has or whatever

Oh shit I ain't even got into Fahrenheit yet

Actually fuck all of us, the end