h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm familiar with that too...

works for me.

Lady Scott, I've been meaning to ask:
Since Amy P. is Paper Lady, does that
mean that you are Wood Lady?

Hope you don't mind the question.

The tree of life? or just a big pice of oak or aspin?

-- DoctorMO --

Lady Scott carries wood into her house,
and uses it to keep the wood stove going
all winter. That's what I meant.

And here it is, mid-April, and I'm *still* building fires!

35F here this morning

Oh come on, please, meteric units, I've been draged up in the 80's and 90's, you know how much the EU has pushed Meteric.

so thats er, -1.5C?

-- DoctorMO --

more like around 1 C..

And Lady Scott, Paul, and I (just a quick list of folks I know for sure have commented in this thread) are all Americans, and so are stuck in Standard instead of metric

Back in the 1980s, when the U.S. was supposed to be
getting ready for metric, I learned metric measurements.
Just for good measure, I learned some conversion methods.
Then nothing happened.

I use kilometers to measure distance in my swimming
workouts.

Of course, the big irony here is that Thomas Jefferson
was a big fan of metrics, and he pushed for the U.S. to
adopt it as the *official* system for the U.S. It still
is, apparently. But ewe don't use it, except for companies
that have to export.

We had to learn all those conversion equations when I was in school, and that was at least a decade before the big push to switch to metric.

There are a few things here that went metric - like 2 liter bottles of soft drinks. And pharmaceuticals are always sold metrically, as are vitamins and supplements. Strangely enough, our money system is actually metric.

But most products here simply list both the standard and metric equivalents for weight or volume.

> 'standard and metric'

you see to me meteric is standard, and your talking about imperial measurments, pints, feet, inches, pound, oz ect.

yes I did the conversion wrong, 35 - 31 / 1.8 or / 5 * 9 or somthing more like that...

Anyway, pritty cold, it was 14C here, with gusty winds,

-- DoctorMO --

I don't remember the conversions. I have a kitchen whiz calculator that converts recipes and such - it will do all teh conversions from metric to "imperial" (standard to us). Or I go to a website that converts it.

Best Idea I say,

-- DoctorMO --

For some reason, I do better with the
metric measures for distance than I do
with temperature measures. The meter and
the kilometer seem very handy. I can also
deal with centimeters up to a point.

Volume is a little trickier, though liters
don't throw me. I'm too used to gallons.

Then there's weight. A kilogram is about 2.2 pounds.
Why did they settle on that anyway? How natural
is it for an object to weigh that much?

For some reason, it was determined that time is
a metric system, even though the components
(seconds, minutes, hours, etc.) are not arranged
in groups of ten. Maybe they thought everyone would
be hopelessly confused if they tampered with
the measures that evreyone was used to.

I belive a killiogram is a meter cubed of water, but then, that dosn't should right, I'd exepect that to weigh much more, hmmm.

I measure all tempratures in C, I don't even know were to start with F, it just dosn't make sense, I like miles not kiliometers, I buy things in pounds not 100g. and I say a few feet not meters, and I'm metric, it's because everyone uses Imperial and if the people around you use it, you do.



-- DoctorMO --

That's understandable.

not very but you got what I meant...

-- DoctorMO --

I much prefer the Christopher Robin approach. His comment on Tigger was

"But whatever his weight in pounds, shillings and ounces, It always seems much greater because of his bounces"

Oops - scratch the "much"



Wot no stripes?

Finally got around to calling, to tell the company that the camera *still* hadn't arrived, and they said they'd send out a new one. We'll see...