"Dinsdale Pirana" <Dinsdale@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
> On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:22:48 +1000, Trish Brown
> <pmcbrown@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in aus.gardens:
>
>>
>>Hm. I was born in 1955 and, believe it or not, still think in the
>>imperial measures I learned at school. In fact, I still use 'two bob'
>>instead of '20c'!
>>
>>You can have no conception of what it was like, trying to do sums in
>>imperial weights and measures *and worse*, doing sums in £, s and d! Not
>>only that, but we also had guineas and sovereigns to deal with!
>>Urrrggghhh! Betty and Jim (the proprietors of my primary school maths
>>book) taught me how many rods, poles or perches there were in a mile.
>>How many yards in a furlong. How many chains in a cricket pitch (ie
>>one). How many pennyweight in an ounce. I could go on.
>>
>>So please don't tell us elder persons to forget or change that which was
>>learned at *great cost* in our childhoods! Mumblemumble... one thousand
>>seven hundred and sixty yards, one mile... grumble... sixteen fluid
>>ounces, one pint... crumble... twenty one ****llings in a guinea... and
>>that bloody-well baker and his dozen!!! Aaaarrrggghhh!!!!
>
>
> Ha I had to laugh, as one born in the first half of the last century I
> hated the idea of going metric. I mean 12 is such a handy number
> divides by 2, 3, 4, 6 etc etc and if you know the cost of a dozen eggs
> then the cost of one is easy in LSD money (?). There is a measurement
> for everything, all different units and all incompatable!
>
> BUT Australia went metric and did it brilliantly, I am so glad that
> they did. and while I still totally confuse my kids by saying things
> like, "Push it toward me a couple of inches" Metric is such a grand
> system.
I agree.
In fact I was rather amused at Trish's comments as I'm older than her and
her comments about how hard it was getting a handle on metric didn't cause
a
quaver of recognition at all for me.
I love metric, and being a keen cook, I can automatically convert between
metric, Imperial and American measures. Iused to have problems though if
a
recipe called for a "stick of butter". I used to guess based on the
recipe
but finally had to ask on a US dominated ng to find out that it is 4 oz of
butter.
For woodwork, metric has got to be the best system out. Dunno how anyone
can do fine woodworking using inches etc. but I can cut a dovetail to a
half
mm without any probs :-))
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