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> Why is the distance between the two most common weight measurements separated by a factor of 1,000? Not 10 or 100?

I'm surprised you don't know, being a doctor and thus having a scientific background.

Intervals of 1000 are standard usage in scientific and engineering practice and have been for a very long time. It's not just weight (gram/kilogram). It's fractional time (millisec, microsec, nanosec, etc.), large quantities (thousand, million, billion, trillion, etc. and kilo, mega, giga, tera, etc.) and so forth.

1000 is the accepted interval where you switch to the next name, in most areas of science and certainly engineering. Indeed, whereas "scientific notation" uses integer powers of 10, "engineering notation" uses only powers of 10 that are multiples of 3 (10^3 being 1000).

Aside: the "MKS" system (meter/kilogram/second) has largely won out over the "CGS" (centimeter/gram/second) system which is still used in some scientific sub-fields.

I'm surprised you don't know, being a doctor and thus having a scientific background.

I regularly clarify that "Doctor Sivana" is a fictitious comic book doctor of the evil mad scientist variety. My Bacehlor's is in Political Science and Economics, and I do not have a Master's , much less a PhD.

I am not talking about the scientific measurement world, where grams and milligrams, etc. are very useful, and better than grains and ounces. I am talking about every non-scientific day life, which is where 90%+ of human activity activity takes place.

If you go to Canada, and wanted to order fish from the supermarket, a kilogram is usually too much, and a gram is way too little. Do they use hectograms? No. They sell it by the "100 gram". One can easily picture in one's mind, an ounce, or a gram, or a kilogram. One cannot easily picture 100 grams in the same way one can picture a half-pound. Hectogram never got picked up in day to day life, and we were all taught in the American schools that factors of ten were the way to go. You will NEVER see scientific notation used in day to day commerce or casual exchange, outside of a Dilbert comic strip or XKCD.COM.