Posted on 07/09/2004 9:02:23 AM PDT by Tribune7
"That's fine but does it carry through? How many ozs in a qt? How many ozs in an avoirdupois lb? Our system is unduly confusing."
32 ozs in a US quart, 40 in an English quart, but the ounces are slightly different sizes, d'oh!
I think that changing over to metric is fine when you are still a kid in school. It is a lot harder for an adult who is used to dealing in inches and feet ect. I'm Canadian, and after all of these years I still find myself converting everything back into feet, inches, lbs ect. I never did adjust to the metric system. We finally went out and bought a conversion calculator. All that millameter, gram, centimeter crap still drives me nuts.
I can think either way but anything that moves us closer to the Eurosocialists I would have to oppose.
As an architect, I'd have to say yes. Construction of buildings using numbers like 3/16" is pretty stupid. Using ridiculous fractions leaves more room for error than moving decimal points.
I started school in Canada before the big S.I./metric push, so I got some education in the imperial system. I don't feel the need to convert everything everytime, but somethings just don't mean anything to me in metric units. Like heights - if they say someone is 1.6 m tall, I'm not sure how tall that is. Or temperatures - temperatures below freezing in metric make sense to me, more so than in Farenheit, but for warm temperatures it's a lot more meaningful to say that it's 90 degrees F out, rather than 32 C, although living in southern Ontario I've gotten used to hearing high temps reported in Celsius, so I know temps in the high 20s are pretty warm and temps in the 30s are stinkin' hot!
Conversion factors I keep in my head for cubic inches/litres, inches/millimeters, inches/meters, pounds/kg.
Reminds me of my grandmother who saw the metric system as a "tool for Satan" and "if God wanted metric, there would have been 10 Apostles." In a way it is better, but just to stick it to the French who developed it, let's keep the English system.
Gallons, quarts, pints, cups.........etc., etc., etc.
How mant teasppons in a gallon?
How many oranges in an apple?
SWITCH!
cu/gal
Good ones, thanks.
OK, it's a headache.
Actually one reason for metric is that inventors of the system (frogs) only have ten fingers and can't do fractions.
231cubic inches in a gallon, 61.6 ci in 1 litre.
Did you know that off the top of your head? If so, you are an engineer.
A pound of gold weighs less (and costs less) than a pound of spotted owl feathers.
You speak the Troyth.
Have some peas.
And people have been complaining about the French roots of the metric system. ;-)
Did you know that off the top of your head? If so, you are an engineer.
Not necessarily. 6.23 gallons (Imperial) in a cu.ft. 4.546 litres in a gallon. (And what are these "cubic inches"? This is a strange and unknown thing)
Oh, and a Gallon of (fresh) water weights 10 pounds.
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