On Tuesday 24 October 2006 14:08, 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. > > 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 You're keeping Koi? good thing you don't have Raccoons in England ;-)
