[Dr. Sivana]

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.

[dayglored]

> I regularly clarify that "Doctor Sivana" is a fictitious comic book doctor of the evil mad scientist variety.

My apologies for a bad assumption. I have managed to miss your comments about it in the past, sorry about that, Doc. :-)

> I am talking about every non-scientific day life, which is where 90%+ of human activity activity takes place... One cannot easily picture 100 grams in the same way one can picture a half-pound.

Point acknowledged. With regard to weight, I have a fairly good concept of how much is a gram and a kilogram, as well as an ounce and a pound. All the others, metric or customary, are puzzles and I have to convert to one of those four units mentally. In particular, the British "stone" (nominally 14 pounds) eludes me as a weight unit. "He weighs 13 stone"; I have no idea what that is until I multiply.