Posted by John Birch on July 10, 2000 at 11:01:04 from gateway1.gsi.gov.uk:
In Reply to: Re: Semaphore & other important matters posted by Dave W on July 09, 2000 at 08:52:47:
"I seem to remember that at one time the standard UK school exercise writing book had some of this stuff printed on the inside of the front cover. "
No, sorry, I think you will find it was the back cover. Well, it was in Lancashire anyway...
It is very easy to have a go at the Imperial system as there are so many juicy targets. but in practice kets be honest - most of the Imperial oddities were really just useful subdivisions of more standard measures or sub-divisions special systems used by small specialist groups - ie. a rod was a quarter of a chain and therefore of value to people measureing in chains (ie. surveryors and maybe cricketers) but hardly had any use in the wider community than Newtons and Angstrom units.
Where the Imperial system did (does) have merit in that the standard measures that everyone used were of a human scale - ie. an ounce is a nice, easily-estimateable weight, where as a gramme is so small you can barely see it. Similar things can be said about feet/inches in comparison with metres/centimetres.
I wonder if in future editions the publishers will try to "translate" the imperial measures in S&A to metric.... and what the reaction of TARS will be if they did?