Quote:
Originally Posted by MATHA531
Not only that, but Canada has gone you guys one better and gone metric on distances too...
While we in the USA, years behind the times in so many things, have continued to use the old fashioned absurd Farenheit scale (even God doesn't believe in Farenheit as normal body temperature is a nice round 37 degrees C while it's 98.6 degrees F  )... |
The story isn't that simple
:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Fahrenheit
"Finally, he defined the human body temperature as 96 °F.
Later, with the aid of a mercury thermometer that could measure higher temperatures, Fahrenheit adjusted his scale[3] so the high end was the boiling point of water, which he put at 212 °F. With the adjustment, normal human body temperature moved to the now familiar 98 °F"
BTW, as you can see, the guy was a German who was born in Poland, traveled to Russia, later lived and died in the Netherlands and was a member of The Royal Society of London. It's irony of history that none of the countries he was connected with by the place of living or the ethnic origin doesn't use his fancy temperature scale. The exception is UK where he was just a member of a scientific society
.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MATHA531
Yup we still make our kids learn there are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 1840 yards (or 5,280 feet) in a mile and schools in the early grades actually give tests asking kids to make these conversions instead of teaching them 1000 meters in a kilometer (or in other words to convert 5000 meters to kilometers, just move the decimal three places left..try seeing how many of our kids or adults can convert 5000 yards to miles...
|
But why should anyone learn all this stuff nowadays? Electronics is so cheap now that everyone could carry a pocket converter (a separate one or built in a calculator, a cellphone or a palmtop
.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MATHA531
Just another indication, of course, of the technological inferiority of the USA! (BTW as you can see from the flag, I'm from the USA)
|
Don't exaggerate - any measure system in use is just a kind of social agreement. If Uncle Sam ever loses the #1 importance in the world, it won't happen because of not using the metric system, I think. The bolsheviks introduced the metric system soon after the revolution, however, the Soviet Union lost the rivalry with the USA
.
After all, what inferiority? In the US, you have most cars with automatic transmission. As a "manual transmission challenged" European I do appreciate this
.