[lug] Fwd: Pi Day is coming

[Davide Del Vento]

> I've always preferred the US system of linear measurement over the metric
> system. You can divde 10 by 1,2,5,and10. You can divide 12 by
> 1,2,3,4,6,and12. Also "1/3" is more accurate than "0.333...". I always found
> it easy to think of a section of land, 640 acres to be 1 square mile.

Ok so you like 640 better than 1000. You must have been involved with
the design of those PC's and their weird 640kB of memory (just trying
not to be too much off-topic :-)

But how about these: How many square inches are in a acre? How many
cubic inches are in a gallon? How many cubic inches in a fluid ounce?
How much does a fluid ounce of water weight? I could go on forever and
it get worse when you have compound units such as PSI and the likes.
The equivalent questions in the metric systems are *all*
straightforward and all power of ten. I would be ok if all the
imperial units would have been consistent among themselves say with
*all* power or 2 or *all* power of 60 (like we do with time for the
very reason you mention), or whatever. Instead no, sometimes is power
of two, sometimes is 60, sometimes is 12 or whatnots. There is so much
to remember and so much to get wrong.

In fact I learned all the metric equivalences in third grade and loved
these homeworks since then: they were super easy. And with a few
additional tricks they taught me in college with Physics 101, I could
do *any* metric computation without calculator nor paper nor pencil,
from astrophysics to particles. Impossible to do that with Imperial
units (and in fact Physicists in the USA use metric system too).

> Just some idle thought,
Ditto :-)

Have a nice weekend (I'll test all the suggestions about feed readers
and email program)
Davide