On Friday 21 December 2001 13:55, Per Jessen wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Dec 2001 11:43:40 -0600, Bob Glamm wrote:
> >On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 03:48:22PM +0000, Mike Jagdis wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
[snip]
> looked back. AFAIK (please correct me), the US never went metric. Don't
> they still use Fahrenheit and all that weird stuff ?
> Oh, and btw - those non-metric units are not "English units", but "Imperial
> units", if you want to picky :-)
As concerns the use of Traditional Units being weird, I would say that the
motivation made a lot of since. The units were based on commonly
available natural units of measure, eg.
one inch = 1 thumb = 1 pouce
one foot = size of a foot = 1 pied
Also, as is very appropriate to this discussion, the English Units
made use of powers of two and three. Eg.
1 inch, 1/2 inch, 1/4 inch, 1/8 inch
3 feet equals a yard.
So, the English units were more attuned to nature. The only thing
natural about base ten is that the majority of us have 10 fingers and
10 toes.
Finally, Farhenheit units are smaller so that they make more convenient
divisions: Eg.
10-20 is downright frigid
20-30 degrees is Freezing!
30-40 is very cold
40-50 is cold
50-60 is blustery
60-70 is brisk
70-80 is confortable
80-90 is warm
90-100 is very hot
100+ is Texas in summertime, WAY too hot !!! ;-)
Finally, for those in Switzerland:
1. Why is it CH when only 30% speak French
2. The French think that "octante" for 80 and "nanante" for 90
is downright goofy.
-- timothy.covell@ashavan.org. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 23 2001 - 21:00:26 EST