On Thu, 2003-08-07 at 20:57, Jacob Albretsen wrote: > Much like Linux is far superior to Windows, the Metric systems is far far far > superior to that blasted "standard" system.
What really bothers me, having grown up in metric, is that in the US, physics tends to be a mix of imperial and metric. What a mess. Let's just stick to one (metric) for science. Another reason why metric will be a long time coming in the US is that the whole country is surveyed in imperial units (sections, townships, ranges, etc). For many things, the imperial units just work better simply because they fit the existing framework. For example, I'm from Canada originally, and everything is in metric (kilometres, etc), but ask any Canadian (particularly a farmer) what a hectare is and he'll be hard pressed to tell you. The obscurity of some basic units have let to "soft metric" where we calculate herbicides in millilitres per acre. Also, the tools I learned growing up where always imperial. I can pretty much judge a 9/16" bolt, or a 3/4" bolt, but I'm hard pressed to tell you if it's a 14 mm or 15mm bolt. The fractions in imperial are nice. On an amusing note, growing up, I thought it an amazing coincidence that water boils at exactly 100 degrees and freezes at exactly zero. Wasn't until years later I learned that that is where they got celsius from. Then I found out that in farhenheit that water froze at 32. What a wacked out system. :) Michael > > *jake runs from flames* -- Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
