First: I expected this cancellation of the directive to happen, with the planned free-trade agreement with the USA. Too bad and too good for the air conditioning industry which is attempting to force the BTU/h down our throats. I read the item in The Scotsman and one of the reactions there is from an Australian. He claims that literally all industrial measurements in Australia are in fact converted Imperial measurements, in other word, they are all soft metric. I find it impossible to believe. Here it is with the spelling errors left as they are. Paul O, Australia
#1: No, you don't want to go back to Pounds/shillings/ pence, that really is the 'horses arse' of monetary caluclating. BUT: All Australian industrial measurements are in mm but they are just metric conversions of imperial inches. I have worked in the metal/manufacturing and printing industries and our standard coil widths for sheet metal or paper is 915mm, which is exactly 36 inches. All our timber, electronic, cabling, masonary, motor vehicles, industrial machinery and building dimensions are just metric equivilants of imperial inches. We're not really a 'metric society', we're just a metric approximation of imperial inches. I was always quite happy to work in 'inches' and decimal fractions of the inch. I never found any difficulty adding decimal inches(42.5 + 7.5 = 50) or decimal miles (5.2+4.3=9.5), the old monetry system was the real pain in the arse!
