I had always assumed, given the name, that a fluid ounce was the volume occupied by an ounce of water. I had also assumed, since I had always been told it was true, that a liter of water weighed exactly a kilogram. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that while a fluid ounce is 29.6 mL, an ounce is 28.3 g.

A fluid ounce is exactly one eighth of a cup, aka one sixteenth of a pint, aka one thirty-second of a quart, aka one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth of a gallon, which was originally defined as the volume of eight pounds of wheat (at least, if you trust Wikipedia) or possible eight pounds of wine (also according to Wikipedia). Eight pounds is, in fact, 128 oz, but not only do densities of different substances vary, today’s (U.S.) gallon is defined in terms of cubic inches (exactly 231), which bear no relation to weight or mass.

The metric version does better; these days, the liter (aka the cubic decimeter) is defined in terms of the speed of the light, and the while the kilogram is no longer defined as the mass of a liter of water at a specific temperature and pressure, it’s still pretty darned close (to within a tenth of a percent, anyway).

As an aside, the modern British imperial fluid ounce does a lot better: it is 28.4 mL, extremely close to the ounce’s 28.3 grams. While these days defined in terms of liters, the original 1824 definition apparently (that’s me trusting Wikipedia again) defined an imperial gallon as ten pounds of water at 62° F. Perhaps the error is due to the difference in temperature; the kilogram was originally defined by water at 3.98° C, or about 40° F.

Just finished watching season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation. As I previously wrote, the first bunch of episodes were impressively bad, but by the second half of the season, it had gotten quite good. I’m looking forward to season two, once Netflix sends it to me.

It has got me wondering whether the show’s growing pains might be tolerated in today’s TV market. The other day, I was thinking about the American version of Coupling, which was canceled after only four episodes. I think, generally, television series were given more of a chance to find an audience in 1987, although it helped that TNG was syndicated rather than sold to a network, and that it had a large built-in audience of Star Trek fans.

I bought The Missing Sync for Palm OS 5.0 on Thursday. When I got my Treo, I had assumed I would be buying the Missing Sync right away. It turned out that the included Palm Desktop worked okay, and none of the features that Missing Sync provided seemed compelling. I was excited to hear about the release of 5.0, though, since it includes a new Mark/Space-written conduit that does a much better job of syncing the Treo’s contact and calendar programs with Mac OS X’s Address Book and iCal apps in Tiger. In my particular case, I was thrilled to see that it properly synchronizes the “Location” field between the Treo and iCal, that iCal’s calendars are synced with Palm OS categories, and it even syncs up my Address Book photos. Definitely worth the $39.95.

There is still one major annoyance I had with the iSync/Palm Desktop solution that is not fixed by the Missing Sync: events spanning multiple days in iCal are still only transferred to the Treo as single-day events. This is noted in a Missing Sync support article, but it would have been nice if there could be some sort of solution. The Treo doesn’t support multi-day events, but maybe turn the single multi-day event into a repeating single-day event?