On Wednesday 22 December 2004 00:22, Peter J. Alling wrote: > Those definitions of imperial measure haven't been used in about 500 > years. The founders more or less > Americanized them anyway. They are way ahead of the metric system > anyway, haven't you noticed that > they're binary. (Whereas the meter is actually based on an old French > yard, which was then justified by a > manufactured relationship to the circumference of the Earth. They got > that wrong as well and fudged the > results). >
The derivation of the measures doesn't bug me as much as having to do conversions mentally. I do not reckon in base two, base six, base twelve, or base twenty: I reckon in base ten. I can appreciate the organic nature of some measurements. I like old Roman paces, for instance. And culturally, I like hearing and repeating my parents' parents' measurments for rice (salup, ganta, cavan...all since given metric equivalncies, incidentally). And, as my Dad likes to say, it's something when you say a girl is 36-24-26, and something else entirely when you say she's 91-61-91. But figuring angular momentum in slugs, or mass in stones? No thanks, not me. I'm happy to adapt that old French yard and its base-ten system. -Luigi Libert�, Egalit�, Fraternit�--ou la mort.
