@Bluemark
I tell people "I'm Canadian, so I'm bilingual."
The say: "You speak English and French?"
Me: "No, I speak metric and imperial."
I said that to a young American girl inline and she asks, "What's imperial?"
I say, "Yknow: feet, inches, pounds, miles, gallons. . . "
"Oh", she says, "we call that the standard system."
Only fucking country in the world that uses it and they call it the standard system.
Older measurement systems are based useful, realworld units: feet, fathoms and cubits, for example. A mile is a thousand paces of troops in the march. A furlong is the distance a horse can pull a plow before resting. The Farenheit scale was based in the idea of the hottest and coldest temperatures you would usually encounter in a temperate climate.
The two related measurements that simply refused to to base-10 attached to a rather abstract unit are time and angles. Multiples of 12 are easier to manipulate for normal people in normal settings because 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 are all factors. Then 60 is also divisible by 5, and then a year is roughly 360 days long.
Radians have supplanted degrees for some trig calculations but the world resisted calendars and watches going decimal.
I tell people "I'm Canadian, so I'm bilingual."
The say: "You speak English and French?"
Me: "No, I speak metric and imperial."
I said that to a young American girl inline and she asks, "What's imperial?"
I say, "Yknow: feet, inches, pounds, miles, gallons. . . "
"Oh", she says, "we call that the standard system."
Only fucking country in the world that uses it and they call it the standard system.
Older measurement systems are based useful, realworld units: feet, fathoms and cubits, for example. A mile is a thousand paces of troops in the march. A furlong is the distance a horse can pull a plow before resting. The Farenheit scale was based in the idea of the hottest and coldest temperatures you would usually encounter in a temperate climate.
The two related measurements that simply refused to to base-10 attached to a rather abstract unit are time and angles. Multiples of 12 are easier to manipulate for normal people in normal settings because 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 are all factors. Then 60 is also divisible by 5, and then a year is roughly 360 days long.
Radians have supplanted degrees for some trig calculations but the world resisted calendars and watches going decimal.