The subject was passenger trains, and at the end of a post he wrote:
For US readers other than Carleton, 170 km/h is about 105 mph.
And I replied:
Thank you ... it's a long and hard battle down here.
cm
And he wrote back (note comment in bold if you can see that):
I guess one of the lesser disappointments of the current US president
is that if Gore had won, there might have been some chance of nudging
the US back toward modern measures.
Actually the dirty truth is that I am still struggling to make myself
think metric in everyday life. I have no objection whatever to the units
(I studied physics for a while before I got sucked into systems programming,
so I certainly ought to know what a meter is); but I am so accustomed to
thinking in inches and feet and miles when looking at the real world that
it is hard to adapt. I would probably do better if English units had
died out entirely up here; I am reasonably accustomed to thinking about
the weather in Celsius now, for example, and it helped a lot that forecasts
up here just don't use Fahrenheit any more. But a couple of nights ago
when I had supper at the Royal York with [a fellow from the UK], and he asked me
how far away I lived, I had to do an explicit conversion in my head:
about an hour's walk is about four miles is about six kilometers.
A couple of years ago I hoped my bicycle would help: my old cycle `computer'
(digital speedometer/odometer/clock) died, and the one I bought to replace
it has the notion that 24-hour clocks and metric distance are tied firmly
together. Since I insist on using 24-hour time, obviously I had no choice
but to go metric for distances, and given the fait accomplit it was obviously
correct anyway. Alas, I haven't cycled as much since then, so although
I can tell you that it's about 115km from Essex Junction VT to Rutland by
the route I used on my only recent long-distance tour, I still think of it
as about 5 miles to the credit union and about 11 miles to York University
and so on. The cure for that is obvious, but will take time to sink in.
--------
.. the real world of real peole out there.
Carleton
