Historic relic. The prior system to metric in medicine was the apothecary system and it used a standard called barleycorn as its unit. One grain of barleycorn was approx 64mg, and the standard dose of aspirin was 1.25 grains, or 81mg. Now 81mg hangs around as an in-joke.
There’s a lot of stuff like that. In computer science, unexpected program errors are called “bugs” because the very first unexpected program error was due to a moth getting into the punch card system of an early computer.
QWERTY layouts persist in keyboards because they were copying typewriters. Typewriters were QWERTY to reduce the risk of colliding typebars by making common letters distant from each other, an intentional inefficiency.
Until 2001, US stocks were priced in dollars and sixteenth fractions, because the US stock system was based on the 1600s Spanish system, which used pieces of eight (1/8ths of a doubloon).
Historic relic. The prior system to metric in medicine was the apothecary system and it used a standard called barleycorn as its unit. One grain of barleycorn was approx 64mg, and the standard dose of aspirin was 1.25 grains, or 81mg. Now 81mg hangs around as an in-joke.
Why is it 81?
Because of barleycorns.
-–
It sounds like a bit.
There’s a lot of stuff like that. In computer science, unexpected program errors are called “bugs” because the very first unexpected program error was due to a moth getting into the punch card system of an early computer.
QWERTY layouts persist in keyboards because they were copying typewriters. Typewriters were QWERTY to reduce the risk of colliding typebars by making common letters distant from each other, an intentional inefficiency.
Until 2001, US stocks were priced in dollars and sixteenth fractions, because the US stock system was based on the 1600s Spanish system, which used pieces of eight (1/8ths of a doubloon).