Americanized them anyway. They are way ahead of the metric system anyway, haven't you noticed that
they're binary. (Whereas the meter is actually based on an old French yard, which was then justified by a
manufactured relationship to the circumference of the Earth. They got that wrong as well and fudged the
results).
Luigi de Guzman wrote:
On Tuesday 21 December 2004 18:15, mike wilson wrote:
. As with most imperial measurements and their applications it was designed by engineers based on practical experience, not the mutterings of a committee based on the wavelength of a particular colour of light.
mike
so that would include the inch, which was fixed at three barleycorns' lengths, or the yard, fixed at the distance between Henry II's nose to his right thumb?
Even living as I do in the USA, I'll take metric over imperial measures any day. Perhaps someday even this country will go to a hard metric system--the journey of a ten thousand li* begins with a single step, after all...
=-Luigi
*li= Chinese measurement of distance, equivalent to 644.7 metres, or about 436 Roman paces (under half a Roman mile)
--
I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners - two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.
--P.J. O'Rourke
