John Chambers wrote: >Phil Taylor writes: >| John Chambers wrote: >| >An interesting example: Sears is still one of the biggest seller of >| >tools in the US, and they still sells tools labelled "Standard" and >| >"Metric". You folks in the rest of the world may find yourself >| >bewildered by this, but yes, they actually get away with it. >| >| Well, they can't exactly call the system of measurement based on the >| inch, pound and gallon "Imperial" can they? Or maybe they can... > >Well, they could, and you do still see this in the US. But "English" >is the more common term used by people who understand that such >measures are no longer the standard anywhere.
Not even in England - well you can still buy milk and beer in pints, and the road signs are still in miles, but I think those are the only exceptions. Kids are only taught S.I. units in school now. When I was in primary school there were zillions of obscure units of measurement to be remembered - 22 yards = 1 chain, 10 chains = 1 furlong and 5 feet = 1 rod, pole or perch. I never figured out what rods/poles /perches were used to measure, but I still remember what they are. It was pre-decimal currency too, so 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. 1/3 of a pound was 6/8d (no, it's not a fraction, it's an exact number of pennies). Now it's an irrational number. At least by the time you got taught about base systems you'd already been doing mental arithmetic in multiple bases for years, so it was no big deal. I wonder if that makes me better at hex arithmetic than my kids are? >The legal situation in the US is more complex than you might imagine. >There was a rather funny NRP article in the late 80's about the >non-celebration of the 100th anniversary of the US "going metric". >They explained what they meant by this, of course, and in the process >explained a lot about the peculiar understanding of the term >"standard" in this country. It seems that, since the late 1880s, the >legal US definition of the inch is 2.54 cm. That's exact, because it >actually is the definition of "inch". Similarly, "pound" is defined >as so many grams, and so on with other measurements. > >I have this vision of a "standard American" music notation. It would >look much like the European notation. But a quarter note would be >0.27 times the length of a whole note, and an eighth note would be >1/3 the length of a quarter note. Rests would be 1.5 times the length >of the corresponding notes. And we'd call these "standard" note >lengths. We'd think the "metric" note lengths are very difficult to >learn, because they are all such strange multiples of the "standard" >lengths. And we'd expend a huge effort in our printing industry to >constantly convert between the two systems. Ho Ho! Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html