What is a kil'ometer?

[Howard Clark]

Ah, but that is an even different issue. The 1/16th pound avoirdupois ounce is 28 grams, but the troy ounce for the gold is 31.1 grams, and is only 1/12 of a troy pound.

I'd like to see us all go metric and be done with it. I doubt it will happen in the USA in my lifetime. Oh well, maybe our kids can sort it out ?

[Carolina Kiltman]

Then there's the nautical mile, 6076.10 feet, and the knot which is one nautical mile/hr. Sometimes you hear a landlubber refer to "knots per hour" which is acceleration. I seem to remember that the nm is one minuet of longitude at the Equator. (It's been many migrations of the carabou since I was in the Navy) Interestingly aircraft speed, and and wind speed is listed in knots. The weather forecasters then usually convert it to miles/hour.

Ocean depth used to be listed in fathoms (on some charts I have seen, still is).

[Standard]

I'm sure you wold appreciate this story. (true btw)

I was in college, and over spring break (Only about a month and a half into the quarter) my mapping teacher up and died. (a mere 2 months from retirement) One thing he required was the engineering ruler, with the tenths side on it. He died before we got into how to use it....

(I miss using .3 pencils)

That is quite a story. I sure miss getting out the pens and ink too. Nothing quite like the satisfaction of completing a plat and cleaning up the pens afterward, the CADD program just isn't quite the same.

[sathor]

That is quite a story. I sure miss getting out the pens and ink too. Nothing quite like the satisfaction of completing a plat and cleaning up the pens afterward, the CADD program just isn't quite the same.

when people 'borrowed' my .3's, I always got them back, usually since the other person couldn't write with it. Very hard to find around here though.

[Barry]

I'd like to see us all go metric and be done with it. I doubt it will happen in the USA in my lifetime. Oh well, maybe our kids can sort it out ?

We in Britain are supposed to have gone metric, but our road signs are still in miles and our beer is still in pints ( No-one, but no-one dares to mess with our pint of beer). Also, many other items only pay lip service to the metric system e.g. I go the the supermarket and buy 454g of prepacked meat which turns out to be exactly 1ib. I buy a fence panel at 1.83m wide, which turns out to be 6ft and so on. The craziest one I saw was a sign at a car park which announced "Warning: clearance 3.048 metres". Obviously some chap with a calculator had converted 10ft to metric and had not rounded off. I can't imagine the borough surveyor measuring clearance to the last millimetre.

The polititians may have taken us into Europe, but in our hearts we are still British!

Our attitude may be best summed up by the newspaper headline that appeared many years ago "Fog in Channel - Continent cut off"

Time for a wee dram...

[JelicoCat]

I'm surprised no one mentioned pony, shot, jigger, dram, etc. I thought kilts and scotch/whisky went hand in hand.

[thescot]

This is the greatest thread we've had in a long time. Sathor (et al), you will enjoy another true story about engineering rules. (It's a rule, not a ruler! Rulers wear crowns; rules are used in carpentry for measurement. Go to the hardware store, find a folding rule, and see what's written on the package.)

Back to the story.

My dad was a building superintendant on a heavy construction project where the drawings often came from the home office in Houston with engineering measures, i.e., in 1/10s of a foot rather than in inches. (Obviously, engineers like using 1/10s as well as do the metric folks for obvious reasons.) Dad always kept an engineering rule in his back pocket for easy conversion.

On a engineering rule, one side is in inches and the other is in 1/10s of a foot. Dad loaned a carpenter his rule one day to lay out a form for a concrete footing, but the poor fellow had never even heard of engineering rules, much less seen one.

When my dad returned to the form, the carpenter was staring at the rule laying on top of the lumber, and Dad asked what he was doing. The fellow said, "Boss, I may be crazy as h&##, but there are only 10 inches per foot on this *&^%$# rule."

I think Dad suggested he try a treatment facility and played it a while before showing him the other side.

[thescot]

BTW, back to F and C temps.

I taught my math class about temperature conversions one day. It's a fairly simple formula which one can derive on one's own if you know that 0 C = 32 F, and 100 C= 212 F.

C = (5/9) (F-32) or F = (9/5) C + 32

That evening, I went to a local pub where they had a running trivia tournament going. My wife and I were strictly dilitantes at it, but we loved to go and rag a couple of guys who took it all way too seriously.

As luck would have it (but not often for me), the final bonus question was, "If the temperature is 25 degrees C, what is it in F?"

Ole Jimbo blew 'em away with that one and moon walked out the door singing, "We will, we will rock you." (Not exactly a gracious win, but those other guys were real pricks.)

[An t-Ileach]

We in Britain are supposed to have gone metric, but our road signs are still in miles and our beer is still in pints ( No-one, but no-one dares to mess with our pint of beer). Also, many other items only pay lip service to the metric system e.g. I go the the supermarket and buy 454g of prepacked meat which turns out to be exactly 1ib. I buy a fence panel at 1.83m wide, which turns out to be 6ft and so on. The craziest one I saw was a sign at a car park which announced "Warning: clearance 3.048 metres". Obviously some chap with a calculator had converted 10ft to metric and had not rounded off. I can't imagine the borough surveyor measuring clearance to the last millimetre.

The polititians may have taken us into Europe, but in our hearts we are still British!

Our attitude may be best summed up by the newspaper headline that appeared many years ago "Fog in Channel - Continent cut off"

Time for a wee dram...

I remember when I was in the Army being told by the Range Supervisor at one shooting range (I think it was Sennybridge) that when the butts were converted from Imperial to metric all they did was to change the signs, so that the 600 yard point suddenly overnight became 600 metres!

And that reminds me of the training manual that had the measurement "approximately 12.7mm" in it - i.e. half an inch.

And when I did the Cordwainers' saddlery and harness-making course the Europeans were trying (so far still unsuccessfully) to get everything metricised (?) metricated (?).

Most measurements in saddlery are based on natural things - thumb width (inch), thumb length (two and half inches), span (nine inches), hand (four inches) - and these look peculiar in metric: 25.4mm, 63.5mm, 228.6mm, 101.6mm. But to comply with the EU, the Society of Master Saddlers/City and Guilds Skills Tests questions are set in metric, but the work is done in Imperial, so everyone equips themselves with a handy set of conversion tables which are taped in front of them on the bench.

Weird.

[An t-Ileach]

Oh, and I came across the phenomenon of the "Dutch pound" when shopping in The Hague - 500gms. Evidently the pound (avoirdupois) is just such a handy quantity/weight that even metric Holland uses it.