Seriously, I hope this is just a bad joke. Students should be learning two
things:*To think*Material that will be useful in the profession the course
relates to.
It is bad enough students need to convert between metric and the Customary
units still prevalent in some professions in the US. Teaching (and examining
them) on units too obscure to even be defined in Rowlett's Units of Measure,
moreless actually used in the US is torture, not teaching. As a potential
employer, students who have wasted class time learning nonsense like this would
be less useful to me than students who have learned more useful material.
I think this needs to be rethought.
While being pedantic, I need to point out that the kilogram is a unit of mass,
not force (the concept of kilogram-force being entirely deprecated in the SI)
so kg/bc² can not be a unit of pressure. You need to multiply by local gravity
(as the building likely is designed to stay put) and use N/bc². Also, we use
Customary, derived from more obsolete British units, not Imperial. We were
independent when Imperial was conceived and adopted none of its changes. Only
units which did not change in 1824 are common.
I have to ask. In Texas, is a cigarette the length of the tobacco product or
the boat?
On Sunday, May 10, 2020, 4:46:41 PM EDT, John Nichols <[email protected]>
wrote:
It is very easy to demonstrate to a class of Freshman the stupidity of the
Imperial System used in the USA.
- Teach then about a cigarette – a legal length in Texas
- Tell them about stones once in class and the use it in the exam
- Use barley corns
- A llath is a great UK unit – it is legal in the UK so I tell me students
it is acceptable here
- Do all board work in feet and change to inches in the exam --
Then set a math problem –
A building weighs 4000000 stone, what is the ground pressure if the building
is 2/3 of a cigarette by 200 llaths in kg/ squared bc.
Who said you cannot fix stupid.
John Nichols
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