Quote:
Originally Posted by horseback
You may not appreciate how hard it is to make the conversion to metric measures for the Brits and us Americans (who have the double penalty of our crappy basic educational system). I'm sure it was just as hard for your ancestors converting to metric a century or two ago, but it's hard to grow up in one system of weights, volume and measures and then convert to a new one, no matter how logical it is.
Y'know, I've been doing the math in my head ever since the late 1960s when I was swimming competitively in pools measured by yards for my high school team and then swimming in pools measured in meters for my AAU team during the summers, but metric isn't really 'real' to me. I just never got the same feeling of accomplishment from doing a 500m Freestyle in under 5:30 that I got from doing a quarter mile Free in under 4:15...
I can look at a piece of lumber and know instantly that it's an inch thick and about 6 feet long by about 15 inches wide, but I have to do the math in my head to get the metric equivalents--and even then, if I don't write them down, I'll have to do it all over again later. When I'm trying to do an acceleration comparison and noting the altitude variations between 10kph intervals, a climb or a drop of 30 m doesn't sound like much until I realize that hey, that's as high as a building at least eight stories high (no wonder I lost a second or two compared to the more level intervals in other runs)!
Have a little compassion for us ignoramuses.
cheers
horseback
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Don't worry about it. At least we have units of time in common.
Well, until someone decides that 24 hours per day makes no sense and we should introduce new hour unit which will be 10 new hours per day, 100 new minutes per new hour and 100 new seconds per new minute.
Of course, working hours will still be 8 new hours per day. So people can more easily adjust to new time measuring units.