> Liquid volume: pints for fresh milk but litres for evaporated-pints for beer > but millilitres/mills for spirits
No more nipperkins or brown bulls? Alas. > Distance/length: miles/yards/feet for distance but metres/centimetres for > building materials (and drawings) Back when I took drafting courses, everything was in millimeters. Or millimetres. > Ask someone how long a cable you need they will answer in feet but we buy it > per metre Apparently jute cord is still sold by weight here. Which rather boggles me. > We say a car is 10ft long but measure its boot capacity in litres, engine > capacity in litres but still talk of horsepower I see engine capacity measured in kilowatts, but torque in pound-feet. > People talk of 1/4 of a %! (That to me is the 'best' one, combining fractions > with metrics) My favourite mixed one is tyres - for example, P225/60R17. That's a 225 millimeter wide tyre for a 17 inch wheel, with a 60% aspect ratio. That's just nuts. > No wonder we can be a mixed up lot, we will drag ourselves into the 20th > century kicking and screaming (Might get to the 21st someday too) Agreed! As I got into electronics at an early age, I was already familiar with the prefixes (pico, micro, milli, kilo, mega, and so forth). For some reason, "nano" seemed to get left out for a while (as "pico" did, back in the days when a 200pf capacitor would be referred to as a "200mmf condenser"). > Anyway if you want Fahrenheit just remember Tf = (9/5)*Tc+32, simples ;) I figure people who prefer Fahrenheit probably aren't terribly particular about accuracy, so I approximate Tf = 2⋅Tc. Then again, I like to give my age in hexadecimal. - John -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/neonixie-l?hl=en-GB.
