[OFB Cafe] lightening

[Derek Broughton]

On August 7, 2008 14:15:07 saki wrote:

> Yep, and in arguably the most impressive technical feat of the 20th
> century (putting men on the moon and bringing them back) was done in
> pounds and hundredweights and feet and inches IIRC!

OK ... and a Mars lander failed because some idiot did his calculations in 
feet when he meant metres.

> Imperial measures when taught and learned correctly give one an amazing
> versatility with numbers working in base 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20,
> 28, 36, 56 and so on and so on. Today most young people (at least in the 
> UK) can't do mental arithmetic in base 10, and have little understanding
> of the metric system.

I challenge you to provide the slightest proof of that.  I know of no evidence 
at all that learning imperial measure provides any such versatility.  My 
father, a physics teacher who occasionally taught maths, decried the teaching 
of other bases as "new math".  Today, though, kids in our country routinely 
learn to calculate in any base.  And our kids understand the metric system 
just fine - it's their dinosaur parents who won't learn.  Your kids would do 
a better job if there weren't so many people telling them they shouldn't go 
along with this "EU interference".

> 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 22 yards in a chain, 20 chains in
> a furlong, 4 furlongs in a mile!

You missed rods.  An acre is a rod by a chain (iirc).  The darn thing isn't 
even square!  Hang on - there's EIGHT furlongs in a mile!  You obviously 
don't hang out at racetracks.  And there's the problem with Imperial - nobody 
can ever actually remember all the different multipliers.
-- 
derek