James wrote:
John Hart wrote:
The Metric system is just as idiotic as the English.
Metric measurement is good for people limited to thinking
terms of ten, but it's hard for the eye to divide and a
millstone around the neck of carpenters not using CNC.
So What! Please keep the left wing political rants off
the list!
Why is it harder for an eye to divide than imperial? Most
of those who rant about the metric system are those who've
never bothered to learn it. I was also opposed to it,
when I first came across it in high school science
classes, but having worked with it for many years, it's
superiority is clear. In the old "imperial" measures,
there are a few different ounces. An imperial gallon is
larger than a U.S. but a U.S. ounce is larger than
imperial. And a U.S. gallon is 128 oz, but imperial 160.
Does that make sense??? It's also a lot easier to scale
from, for example, centimetres to kilometres, than inches
to miles. In metric, that's a simply multiplication by
10,000, but inches to miles is × 12 × 5280. Or do you
prefer × 36 × 1760? Power of 10 conversions make is a
heck of a lot easier to do mental calculations than
multiplying all sorts of different numbers for the various
units. Lessee now, it's 12 inches to a foot, but 3 feet
to a yard and 1760 yards to a mile. Or 8 ounces to a cup
and 4 cups to a quart. Or is that 5 cups to a quart?
Yeah, that makes for real easy mental arithmetic.
And then you have people like me... Living in USA, I
use the Imperial system at times, and the metric system at
other times. When it come to distances in my personal
preferences of LO, I use cm, because I can align things more
closely than I can with inches. mm seems like it would be
overkill on alignment. (personal preference)
Wait a minute, isn't that what this fuss is all about,
personal preferences? Talking about beating a dead horse,
isn't that what we are doing? By modifying a spreadsheet
column widths to whatever we want, we can save it as a
template and also select it as our default template (perhaps
this is called standard template is some languages). I'm not
sure what the rest of the emails have to do with the
original topic.
--Dan
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