I am baffled by Tim May comments and I assume that he has never been in a
metric country, otherwise he could not have written such trash. He must have
been well educated by The Sun and other anti-European newspapers.
I would state the following to Mr. May:
"Asking for 568 mL of beer? Do you really mean this? Are you a student of
the science of 'nonsensology'? The Belgians call 500 mL a 'pint', and that
is just the right size for them. Do you also think that we have speed
limits of 48.xxxx km/h in our built up areas?
As we have adopted the English language as the lingua franca of the world,
any demand that we should adopt Imperial on top of it is an outrage. I
could just as well say that adopting English as a second language by us and
adopting metric by the English speaking nations is equal sharing of burdens.
BTW, learning English takes years, learning metric can be done in hours.
Adopting Imperial by metric countries is the same thing as reverting from
high speed trains to stage coaches and river barges, reverting to operations
without anesthetics and re-introducing public flogging with the cat o'nine
tails. We will never revert to medieval weights and measures. I challenge
you to
find out on what basic units Imperial is now standardized. You will be
surprised.
The factor 12 is only used in the relationship between the foot/inch and the
troy pound/troy ounce. Then a lot of Imperial is based on the binary system
and a large rest is based on loose factors. I wonder if you know how many
square yards an acre is. Can you make up invoices in ton-cwt-qr-lb? And you
want metric countries to adopt this garbage? NO WAY!!!
Practically, though not theoretically, 10 can be divided by 4. The result
2.5 is easy to handle. Before the 18th century 10 inch feet existed in
mainland Europe. They were just as easily divisible as the traditional 12
inch foot, for instance."
Han
----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: maandag 27 november 2000 23:33
Subject: [USMA:9391] (fwd) Metrication...Why?
I thought I'd forward a message I've just received. Your comments are
welcome!
As a 19 year old student, I am baffled by the ridiculous way in which the
country is being forced into metrication.
<snip>
