Talk:Slug (unit)

message: How relevant is that unit slug today, and where and for what business? When there is written about an Australian act of 1960 (no citation!) then this is 53 years ago and Australia is metrificated since 20 years. So slug doesn't seem to be a legal unit for mass in Australia any more. Its coining in the 19th century and the 85 year old textbook paragraph doesn't make it youngeror more relevant.
Since Einstein's claim of 1907, that there is no difference between inert masses and gravitational masses (and energy), a special unit for inertia is not necessary. (Albert Einstein, Jahrbuch der Radioaktivität 1907, p443 + p462, "Über das Relativitätsprinzip und die aus demselben gezogenen Folgerungen")
Is there any relevant modern publication in which a producer, trader or scientist expresses the mass of e.g. a car, a bag of potatoes, an engine or a planet by its intertia in slug?
If there isn't any, it should be mentioned in the article that slug is an old, expired unit out of use and relevance. Its use in concurrence to the pound is over-subtle and obsolet (if one still insists to express something in imperial units).
--46.115.49.76 (talk) 15:23, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Slug is relevant as it is the only non-ambiguous and coherent unit of mass in the fps system of units. It is widely used in engineering (particularly aerospace). 203.129.23.146 (talk) 11:49, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

text: From my experience, slugs are mostly obsolete, but they do still occasionally pop up from time to time. For example, I ended up on this page after having to look up the density of water in slugs/ft3 (1.94 for anyone curious) to plug it into an equation in a building code. However, it is far more common to see pounds-mass (lbm) used than slugs, in both industry and academia. 108.52.118.74 (talk) 22:31, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relevance 

message: I reverted the recent edit because the original seems to be correct. See http://sizes.com/units/slug.htm and the following calculation.
:1 slug = mass that accelerates at 1 ft/s2 under 1 pound force = F/a = 1 lbF / (1 ft/s2)
:1 lbF = m g = g in ft/s2
:1 foot = 0.3048 m exactly (Foot (unit))
:1 g = 9.80665 m/s2 exactly (Standard gravity)
:1 slug = 9.80665/0.3048 = 32.17404856 pounds mass approx
Johnuniq (talk) 03:52, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Slug value 

message: The parenthetical disambiguation should be a generic class/context/subject/adjective, and not a noun.  I seem to remember that the context should be as broad as possible to, i.e. giving only just sufficient context to disambiguate.  Currently, the title is "Slug (mass)", which seems to be in violation of pretty much every guideline here.  There seem to be a large number of similar articles about units of measurement that are disambiguated with "(unit)", e.g., Atmosphere (unit), Barn (unit), Bar (unit), Chain (unit), Foot (unit), Gauss (unit), Gal (unit), Gray (unit), hartley (unit), henry (unit), Knot (unit), Lumen (unit), Mole (unit), nat (unit), shannon (unit), ...  There are examples where more specific disambiguation is needed, such as Pound (mass) and Pound (force), which are both units.  Perhaps we should rename this article to "Slug (unit)"?  —Quondum 02:56, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree.  Slug (unit) is a better title than Slug (mass). Dondervogel 2 (talk) 08:04, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Choice of parenthetical disambiguation of title