Metric vs Imperial poll

nd even more...

 

You would know when you know the metric system

 

I read here

Bloody hell, I didn't know the US had slow and fast areas. Which area are you from

 

Chuckle! Fanie wasn't drunk, he just mixed up m and km. Easy to do. I hardly ever mix up a yard and a mile. Mind you, if that's the kind of the liters he buys his wine in ...

I seem to have stirred the (pint) pot up!

 

Fanie at 9:09

That's the thing about the metric system, it does not take a lot of thinking. You just believe what they tell you and move the decimal points along.

This can be a dangerous way to work and your post above proves the point.

Which two lines of Latitude are 1 metre apart? I know that every minute of Latitude is 1 Nautical Mile, or 1852 mtrs. This means that a metre is 5.3995680345572354211663066954644e-4 minutes of Latitude. A second of Latitude is 30.86666666666666666666667 metres so that one does not fit either. Maybe the Metric world is 100 degrees from pole to equator Maybe there is a Metric degree

Moving on, a cube with sides of 1/10th km would be a very big litre, in fact it would be 1,000,000,000 litres, I think.

That's the beauty of the Imperial system, you have to think first.

 

From a nautical perspective, a better base unit would have been the nautical mile. A slight tweak of the fathom would make 1000 of those to a nm, and a 1/1000 f unit would be about 1.8 mm. The entire thing was arbitrary after all, why not choose something useful?

Why do we still have 60 seconds to the minute and so forth, couldn't that have been decimalized while they were about it? Do people have problems computing times because it isn't decimalized?

 

Fanie at 09:24

"Distance pole to equator (Earth): 10 000 km = 10 Mm", my convertor says it is 10000.8 km.

Everyone knows it's a lot simpler to step out distances in yards, well at least the Imperialists do

 

I have to contradict you here Terry. When you are used with the metric system, as I am, it is as impossible to mix up a meter and a kilometer as it is for you to mix up a inch and a mile.
BTW, not Fanie mixed it up, but the (US americans?) who produced the article on wiki!

 

I'm so sorry, I really have to apologise I only realised now that the facts that I posted is common knowledge and this thread is not really about who's right and who's wrong, it's there soly for argument's sake.

Lets face it. The statement that the inches system had no small measurements is not true. Again, as Murdomack indicated you had to think, and now that I think about it the inches system actually caters for a whole lot of different levels of society.

If you wanted to work more accurate than inces you would switch to the Angstrom. Most of you building boats and did a good job fitted parts with angstrom accuracy. Just to explain, this is when you saw the handle off your toothbrush to save weight and you can measure it on the boat's draft, ok.

If this however is a bit out of your league - and not everyone can be a boat builder - some have to fiddle on stock markets and trade gold bars - and if you heard of the fist moon landing then the Armstrong is your measure.

Again if this is over your head and find the above a bit confusing then Arm Strong like in serious muscles is something any one can grasp (I hope). Understandably you need strong arms to slap together a couple of planks you single handedly sawed out of a few trees one afternoon and you can sail off into the sunset happily ever after the same day.

No I know no one can argue with that. We cannot all be experts in everything although that is another debatable point. Some of us have to talk crap too you know

 

Have faith, they are coming around. I bet they are going to turn around afterwards and say yeah but remember it was us writing that article in the first place

 

Really, I like the Metric system, but I love the Imperial more

Let's see, You can sing in metre, but you can dance with your feet

 

Have you taken into acount the polar caps are melting so the distance pole to equator has been shortened. 10 000 km it is I suggest you switch your calculator from imperial mode to metric mode to calculate

 

I'm trying to inch my way out of this one !

 

How do I fathom out what you meant here?
.......do´nt pound me for my ignorance yeah?

 

Hey, this is interesting. The original minite of arc of latitude mile, which when you think about it is not a distance but a projection of an angle, is now called the sea mile according to the attached Wiki file. It varies quite a bit from the poles and the equator as the world is not a perfect sphere. What the Metric whizzes have done is they have hi-jacked the term "international nautical mile" and taken a nearest round figure to the mean size and ended up with 1852 mtr.

Why did they do this when this metric nautical mile X 90 X 60 = 10000.8 km? 800 mtrs off target in 5400 nautical miles, I hope the Trident missiles are not on this system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_mile