This thread is making me thirsty. I'm going to get a drink from my 2
liter bottle of Coke.
On 1/7/2014 4:46 PM, Ian S. Worthington wrote:
Damn right. Bloody Jacquard looms.
i
------ Original Message ------
Received: 05:38 PM COT, 01/07/2014
From: Steve Smith <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: OT: SI units and precision
This American colleague personally has no use for the metric system.
It's a completely arbitrary system that has no real advantage over our
ancient and traditional measurements. It makes no more sense than the
ten-day week. While France has given us many great things, their
preoccupation with multiples of ten is a rather silly one.
An inch, a cup, a pound, a foot, a pint and a grain all have a
relationship to the practical world that is much more useful than units
based on the circumference of the earth. And while it was once somewhat
difficult to convert miles per hour to feet per second (or furlongs per
fortnight), we have calculators and Google now.
sas
On 1/4/2014 7:20, Dougie Lawson wrote:
Rob,
The biggest stumbling block is getting our American colleagues to stop
using their Imperial (and modified Imperial) measures, AF screw threads &
cups in the kitchen and switch everything to SI units.
At the same time we need the Gov't here in the UK to switch from miles,
miles per hour, miles per gallon and pints to Km, Km/h, Litres / 100Km
and
half litres (it's only 68ml short of a pint).
I'm old enough to know pounds & ounces, inches & feet, grammes,
kilogrammes, centimetres and metres so a switch to the full Metric system
won't bother me.
After we achieve that we can then consider the millis vs centis vs kilo
vs
mega order of magnitude problems. But it's a minor problem when we have
the
Luddites who won't use the nice weights and measures that the French
invented for us.
Regards, Dougie
