On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 22:08 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote: > 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. > It has been a long time since I looked that those conversions, but IIRC an imperial gallon is about 4 litres. > 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. > A US gallon is slightly less than an imperial gallon, or about 3.84 litres. I can easily understand the confusion, what with Imperial Gallons, US Gallons, Litres, etc., But in relation to something as inexact as the size of a koi pond you could just use the factor of 4 to do the conversions between litres and gallons and it would be close enough for 99.9% of people. (10 US gallons would actually be approximately 38.4 litres vs. 40 litres for 10 Imperial gallons, but that can be considered a tiny difference in an inexact world.) > IOW, we are a very mixed up country ;-) > The US is just as mixed up as we attempt to convert from SAE measurements to metric. Miles vs Kilometers, Litres vs Quarts, Millimeters vs Inches, are just a few of the things we are struggling with. We do not have the Imperial measurements in the mix, but we do have way too much stuff here. > Anne > -- > fedora-list mailing list > fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx > To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
