Y'see, Songie, that's eggzactly what I was on about -- the two sets of meas urements. I cited the awful, expensive, humiliating debacle of the Mars sh ot as an example of potential -- in the case of the Mars weather shot -- AC TUAL damage when 2 sets of measurements try to exist side by side.
Always on the search for a conspiracy I thought of the wonderful Latin saying -- one of the half-dozen I remember -- "cui bono" = who profits? Who DOES profit by retaining the anachronistic English measurement (a yard is the distance from King John's nose to his outstretched hand) ?
USA traditional measure is not even the same as English, your volume measures are not the same as Imperial. But all measures are to some extent arbitrary, the yard may have been the distance from nose to finger but the metre was the distance between two lines scratched on a platinum bar that were supposed to be a fraction of the distance from Paris to the north pole but wasn't. Neither are specified that way today. It isn't the old standards that are the problem, the key difference is that the divisions and multiples in traditional measure are neither consistent nor decimal.
I doubt that anybody profits directly but there are political considerations. The issue is whether the national government will spend politial capital making it happen. Clearly no recent President or Congress has thought it worth their while in the context of a citizenry who distrust their leaders and in some cases do not want an effective central government at all.
I can see the Tea Party rousing the Right to resist such an unwarranted incursion upon personal freedom... "how dare they try to tell us how to measure stuff by some weird European way.....". The fact that traditional measures are the weird ones and that other than one or two small backwaters the USA is the only country to resist metrification has escaped their notice.
25 F is below the freezing point of water (=32 deg F).
For the USA-ans: 0 C = freezing point of water
10 C = chilly
20 C = pleasant room temperature
30 C = on the warm side
40 C = too damn hot ("normal" body temperature is ~37 C)
50 C = hellishly hot (I've only experienced it in an environmental chamber)
100 C = boiling point of water
I remember reading a story once where the a boy visiting the US from France (?) was sure he was going to die soon when the family he was staying with measured his temperature as 99 degrees. (They were speaking F and he was thinking C.)
Yes, pretty good.
As half-hardy perennials, they will struggle on through some pretty cold weather before giving up the ghost. In my area some *might* survive a much warmer than average winter. (Same goes for one of my favorite bedding plants, Salvia farinacea 'Victoria')
Y'see, Songie, that's eggzactly what I was on about -- the two sets of measurements. I cited the awful, expensive, humiliating debacle of the Mars shot as an example of potential -- in the case of the Mars weather shot -- ACTUAL damage when 2 sets of measurements try to exist side by side.
Always on the search for a conspiracy I thought of the wonderful Latin saying -- one of the half-dozen I remember -- "cui bono" = who profits? Who DOES profit by retaining the anachronistic English measurement (a yard is the distance from King John's nose to his outstretched hand) ?
------------------------------------------ But Higgs, the US doesn't even stick consistently to 'English' (which is really called 'Imperial') meausres.
It does stick with those measures for ft and inches (but then why would anyone have changed that? mewonders) but not with fluids.
US pints are short by 4 ounces because an Imperial Pint is 20 ounces. I once had an argument with an American woman online who kept insisting that 'a pints a pint the world around'. For some reason she would neither believe me when I stated that 20 ounces was more the norm for a pint outside the US and nor would the silly woman use google. That's usenet though........
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