Comments by "ke6gwf - Ben Blackburn" (@ke6gwf) on "Today I Found Out"
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While you put this together in a way that makes it sound confusing and contradictory, in reality most of those sizes don't associate with each other, because they are in different regions or different fields.
For instance, there is no need to compare a shotgun size with a wire diameter or a railroad track width, and houses wired with 12 gauge wire in the US are not going to confuse British electricians.
And with wire gauges its the current carrying charts that actually matter and where it gets really confusing, because the same copper wire gets a different rating depending on the type of insulation on it, the ambient temperature,, inside conduit or in a wall cavity, etc etc.
Railroad gauge is an entirely different use of the word so it doesn't fit in the same sentence as wire gauge.
Since in many of those examples the gauge referred to some combination of figures, diameter and wall thickness etc, it doesn't matter if it's metric or not, because it's giving a bigger picture.
For instance, Standard Gauge railroad track is not just talking about the width, it includes the other dimensions of the tracks as well, camber and curve and slope and super elevation and a whole long list of specs that allow a train to run properly on the track.
And since most things listed by gauge, the users don't need to know the actual thickness or measurement, what it's based on is not really important.
For instance if you are an electrician in the US, everything is called out in Gauge, so you get a device rated for a certain size wire, and you look at a chart to see what diameter hole you need, or how many wires you can fit in a conduit, and the physical diameter of the wire is rarely needed.
And when it is, usually it's outer diameter of the insulation that's needed anyway, and if it's on thousandths of an inch or fractions of a mm, it doesn't really matter much.
So while interesting, this video makes the subject seem worse than it really is, which is normal for people who think they are smart, but have never actually worked in the fields they are talking about.
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