On Tuesday 24 October 2006 20:59, Gene Heskett wrote: > >I know that " means inch, but I have no idea what an inch is... > > Nominally its 2.5cm, Dotan. Our 'yard' of 36 inches is near your 'meter' > which is 39.xx inches to us. Yeah I bitch everytime I have to do > something in inches that makes a hell of a lot more sense to do in metric, > but 200 million old fogies like me yelled when they tried to start selling > gasolene by the litre. I was for it myself. And I still consider the US > as the odd man out in the measurement wars, fallout of my eletronics > experience I guess, we don't measure anything but wavelength in feet and > that takes tricky math. > Like Gene, my husband and I have a work background in metric, but most of our lives we have lived with Imperial. In England today officially we use metric, although 90%+ of the population have no understanding of it. We do sell petrol and diesel in litres, but beer and milk in pints. We still use gallons, but they are different from US gallons. Until very recently you had no chance of buying a sheet of plywood in metric - 8ft x 4 ft or 6 ft x ft was what you got. Metric is slowly creeping in, though. We have recently taken to keeping koi, and it seems that in the koi world ponds are always measured in gallons. We both find this extremely difficult to handle, after working in litres for so long, but if we quote the pond capacity in litres no-one understands what we are talking about. IOW, we are a very mixed up country ;-) Anne
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