[lug] Fwd: Pi Day is coming

[Stephen Queen]

When my wife bakes a pie (ref back to pie day), she just eyeballs all of
the measurements anyhow. She never cooks or bakes the same thing twice. I
usually only estimate things too. When I went for a walk, it was about 2
miles. When I was in the service, the M16A1 rifle was about 39 inches long,
so when I think of a meter, I think about the length of that rifle I had to
carry. I can't really envision 1000 rifles lined up butt to barrel any more
than I can envision 5280 of my feet toe to heel.
I do enjoy asking someone raised outside of the US whether they think that
nut is 1/2" or 9/16". ( I can't usually tell either, but I've met people
who could see metric and US.)
Now if you want to talk about things that confuse me, lets talk about all
the different datams that my GPS allows me to select from. What is that all
about?




On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Davide Del Vento <
davide.del.vento at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 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
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