On Mon, 22 Jan 2001, Alberto Monteiro wrote:
>
> Charlie Bell wrote:
> >
> >> Do it for the kids. Ban imperial units in kid's toys and
> >> TV shows.
> >
> >Even in historical dramas?
> >
> *Specially* in historical dramas! I think that every old book should
> be translated to SI. It's horrible when I pick up a sf story and
> the author describes someone as "7 feet 13 inches tall, weighting
> 425 pounds" and I have no idea if this character is tall, short, fat,
> thin, or normal.
Um, first of all, it would be given as 8 feet 1 inch tall, and that's
TALL. (Pretty darn tall!) That's significantly over 2 meters tall. My
father-in-law, who's a pretty tall guy, isn't even 2 meters. (He's 6 feet
4 inches, IIRC -- after 6 feet, I just register people as "really tall",
and he's "really tall". My husband is *almost* 6 feet tall, so that's
why my "really tall" cutoff begins close to there....)
As for being thin, fat or normal, I have no idea how that much weight
would be distributed on that sort of frame.
3 feet 3 inches/3 feet 4 inches is close to 1 meter. 12 inches in a foot.
2.2 pounds in a kilogram. Would it help you if I told the same story
twice, using those dreaded imperial units first and then using metric
units the second? (I have a cute story to tell that involves height and
weight....)
Julia
