I do indeed have the magazine, Norm. Thanks for pointing that out, though, as I don't always read Time from cover to cover and would have missed that one. One thing that article and another one one page 53 remind me about is that fact that I've always found the use of bbl as the abbreviation or symbol for barrel very annoying. It looks more like an abbreviation of bubble -- which may, in fact, be more appropriate these days. Bill
_____ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Norman & Nancy Werling Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 09:56 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:41052] Time magazine, June 16, 2008, page 20, "A Brief History of:The Oil Barrel" If you have the magazine, I commend the subject article for your reading. It was the old whisky barrel that became the measure of crude oil in the United States. The article explains that Japan measures crude oil in kiloliters and Russia measures it in metric tons (tonnes). An excerpt includes this, "1866--Oil companies agree to standard barrel size, 42 gal. (160 L) for tax purposes." In a posting I made about two weeks ago, I mentioned that Time includes SI-metric terms within parentheses with usually reasonable approximations. In this case, the exact calculation would have been 158.9872956 L (3.7854118 times 42) which would have been ridiculous if shown to such a degree of accuracy. It would have been negative toward promoting acceptance of SI-metric. Norm Werling
