On Jun 11, 2009, at 7:06 AM, Jack Coats wrote: > And even fewer know that rods and chains are legal units of measure > either.
Yep. 4 rods/chain, 10 chains/furlong 8 furlongs/mi. so many paces/chain .... obscure unless you were chasing fires for the USFS during the 50's. > > It would be interesting to know the real reasons for the various > units of > measure > as a historical tidbit. Much of that information seems to be lost > to the > general population. > > I grew up with imperial measures, but as metric comes even to the > heartland > of the US, I do find it challenging to do the conversions in my head. > > Even worse than length and area measures are energy and torque > measures. I contend that if we had marked the Interstate Hwy System in Km and sold gasoline in L at that time we would be metric by now. > > I look forward to the day that we are all in the same units, but it > won't > happen > in my lifetime. Hopefully in my grand kids. > > The conversion I thought that was odd was Shell Oil (part of Royal > Dutch > Shell) > converted all the pumps to liters. They were stoic and stayed with > it for > quite > a while. Eventually they went back to gallons in the US, because > their > market > wasn't ready. Actually I think that metric system was legislated > to be the > official units back in the Carter administration (I could be > remembering > wrong), > but the markets didn't follow, because customers didn't buy in. I saw cases where the markets converted but got greedy and marked up their prices way more than proportional thinking the customer was too dumb to figure it out. > > With reading and writing in groups like this and others, sharing > products > between > metric and imperial based countries, the conversion will happen > naturally. > But > it will be slow. > > When I was in school, we had to know the mks, cgs, and imperial > units for > weights, measures, energy, mass, power, etc. ... but living in an > imperial > mostly > society we tend to forget. > > My daughter just got a birthday present from a NZ friend. I > thought it was > interesting there are both imperial and metric measures (not > intermixed, on > a recipe by recipe basis). It would be nice to get a 'simple' > conversion. > (half cup is roughly 50ml? kind of thing for her) Most measuring cups are both systems. The inexpensive kitchen scales ( 5 Kg ) work well for dry measure. The problem comes with small amounts like spices. The druggies tend to use Mettler top loaders (good to .01 g ) which is why they get stolen from laboratories so often. > > I was wondering is the international standards on trading gold or > diamonds > in > imperial or metric? I really don't know. ... Always fun to speculate on what might have happened. Dave > >> <> ... Jack > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > -------- > Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial > Check out the new simplified licensing option that enables unlimited > royalty-free distribution of the report engine for externally facing > server and web deployment. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial Check out the new simplified licensing option that enables unlimited royalty-free distribution of the report engine for externally facing server and web deployment. http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
