Yeah, I was under impression that medicine is also one of the fields that exclusively use metric.

there's not really "smaller than an ounce" that is commonly agreed upon, so milliliters for liquids and milligrams for solids wins out by default.

Same thing with manufacturing. Most places switched to being able to do metric measurements by the 80s, but for older parts it's still in "thou" and other metric sounding divisions of inches.

Drug dealers on the other hand talk about eighths and teenths, though. But everyone knows that a nickel is 5 grams. Both literally and figuratively.

> there's not really "smaller than an ounce" that is commonly agreed upon, so milliliters for liquids and milligrams for solids wins out by default.

Milligrams? Grams are already quite a bit smaller than an ounce. A millilitre of water weighs one gram.

I was referring specifically to the medical part. an IV bag might have a half liter, but it's 500 "mil". ~28 grams in an ounce, which is unwieldy, even by american standards, and medicines are usually scant amounts of active ingredient, so milligrams is used.

Occasionally microgram is used, just as i have to occasionally measure things down to ~20 microns. I'd never use inches, there, and i'd never say "a kernel of corn weighs 1/250th of an ounce". This whole thread kinda caught me off guard. Normally i am making fun of the metric system, but something rubbed me the wrong way up-thread.

Ah. I was thinking of a comparable scale for liquids and fluids, as in, say, cooking. I can't decide if recipes that are obviously translated exactly from wierd-old American-and-British units but expressed in metric are more infuriating than ridicuolous or more ridicuolous than infuriating; probably six of one and half a dozen of the other: "Take 138 g butter and 267.5 ml milk..." No, for fuck's sake! Take 140 g butter and 250 ml milk! Or 150 and 300 -- i.e 3 dl. Sheesh...

We still measure weight and height using dumb people measurement systems.