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| Thread ID: 53435 | 2005-01-17 12:35:00 | Ireland - welcome to the 21st century | Greg (193) | PC World Chat |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 315109 | 2005-01-17 23:26:00 | Did you read that they were planning to change to the European standard of driving on the right? Probably afraid of hitting people who drive on the right when they go over the border into Germany,thats the Irish :D |
Cicero (40) | ||
| 315110 | 2005-01-18 01:51:00 | Forgot to say, it was Napoleon of course that was responsible for the metric system. Are you certain of that? I was convinced it was the Germans. Another interesting set of measurements that Germany did come up with in their wisdom, was the "A" sizes of sheets of paper - pure ingenuity how they came up with that, based on the metric system. In their wisdom they took one square meter of paper, and to obtain the length:width ratio (841 × 1189) they used the square root of two (1.4142). |
Greg (193) | ||
| 315111 | 2005-01-18 02:30:00 | Thomas Jefferson thought that metric measures would be good for the US in 1790. The French revolutionary metric law of 1795 was suspended by Napoloeon in 1812, so he wasn't initially an enthusiast. ;) It was restored only in 1840. Here's some of the history of the Metric System (lamar.colostate.edu). |
Graham L (2) | ||
| 315112 | 2005-01-18 06:01:00 | The imperial system is a most romantic one, but it for accuracy of measurement its metric all the way . Example: An ounce is an ounce is an ounce . --unless you get sprung with it, then hope you were ripped off and it was only 20 grams! A tall person is 6', unless we need to get accurate . We buy "road miles" for the truck in 1000 Km lots I really like the unix time concept, it makes all this 60x60x24=day rubbish seem so redundant! :D |
personthingy (1670) | ||
| 315113 | 2005-01-19 03:24:00 | And US kids are probably still taught in school: A pint's a pound (16 ounces), the world around . Of course, the rest of the world (all the bits on the map that were coloured red in the days when the sun never set on the British Empire) had pints which were 20 ounces . So US gallons are short measure . What we call a 44 gallon drum is a 55 gallon in the US . |
Graham L (2) | ||
| 315114 | 2005-01-19 03:36:00 | Give some people an inch, and they'll take a mile :thumbs: | Terry Porritt (14) | ||
| 315115 | 2005-01-19 04:02:00 | Specify newtons, and get pounds. That cost NASA $125 million for a crashed Mars Orbiter. I'm sure Lockheed Martin still got paid. | Graham L (2) | ||
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