Posted by Mike Field on July 08, 2000 at 16:46:59 from 203.18.21.200:
In Reply to: Re: Semaphore posted by andy bolgerabolger@dircon.co.uk on July 06, 2000 at 22:18:45:
As a by-the-way, Andy, it's now about thirty-five years since Oz converted to decimal currency, but a lot of us still think and speak in terms of quids, tanners, and bobs even though we're starting to get used to Merkin Money.
But the Americans are dead right to have stuck to Imperial units for everything else. Metric Madness goes too far altogether when we're supposed to change the twelve-foot Swallow to 3.658m.
I don't know about you, but I can readily visualise a pound weight and a square inch (having been brought up with them,) and so a pressure of so many pounds a square inch is readily-pictured too. If I had to convert the pounds and inches to kilograms and centimetres (a laborious exercise, but just within my mental capacity,) then so many kg/sqcm would be reasonably easy to get a feel for, too. But that Fanatical French Fad won't let us call it anything as straightforward as that--we have to call it something arbitary and meaningless like Kilopascals or Megahertz or Giganewtons. (We've even managed to metricate something that doesn't have a dimension--that good old unit for gas concentration, parts per million, is now milligrams per cubic decimetre, or something. Work that one out.)
Do you happen to know whether Alpha Centauri is still four-and-a-third light years away, or is it now 1978274918547606983272656475896923847623562345346556723.1 (repeating) Angstrom Units?