Is this the New Winston Churchill?

[SG1_Lud]

I used to not understand the reasons for using the Imperial Metric System, until someone explained me that indeed, it was more natural for the human scale than the somewhat artificial and difficult to understand concept of the meter.

That's why things like doors, have whole numbers if measured in feets, instead of meters for example.


And about fractionay units, daily we use to divide things in two, three, four parts... a foot is 12 inches, half a foot is 6 inches, a third is 4 inches and a quarter is 3 inches. Half a metre is 50 centimetres, a third is 33.3333333333 cms and a quarter is 25 centimetres....

And about the base 10 thing, we have the time (1 hour = 60 minutes each, 1 minute 60 seconds ) and no one seems to have a problem with that.

So pick your poison...

[5./JG27.Farber]

Metric TIME!

10 Hours to a day. 10 Mins to an hour. 10 seconds to a min...

Of course they wont be the seconds we know now. One second would actually be 2.4 minutes!

Imagine when someone says just give me a second and they take allot longer, when they say give me a second under the new Metric time they would be right if they were with you with 2mins!

[SG1_Lud]

And patches 4.8 weeks be sure

[Sternjaeger II]

Originally Posted by SG1_Lud

I used to not understand the reasons for using the Imperial Metric System, until someone explained me that indeed, it was more natural for the human scale than the somewhat artificial and difficult to understand concept of the meter.

That's why things like doors, have whole numbers if measured in feets, instead of meters for example.


And about fractionay units, daily we use to divide things in two, three, four parts... a foot is 12 inches, half a foot is 6 inches, a third is 4 inches and a quarter is 3 inches. Half a metre is 50 centimetres, a third is 33.3333333333 cms and a quarter is 25 centimetres....

And about the base 10 thing, we have the time (1 hour = 60 minutes each, 1 minute 60 seconds ) and no one seems to have a problem with that.

So pick your poison...

I don't know how you call inches in Spanish, but in Italian is "pollice" (thumb), because one inch is indeed the average width of a male thumb. That's the beauty of the imperial system, it's based on body proportions

[SG1_Lud]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

I don't know how you call inches in Spanish, but in Italian is "pollice" (thumb), because one inch is indeed the average width of a male thumb. That's the beauty of the imperial system, it's based on body proportions

We call it pulgadas, that comes from "pulgar" which is the word for "thumb"

[SG1_Lud]

I think we also tried to use another measures based in body proportions, but no agreement was reached on what was "average" LOL

[Sternjaeger II]

Originally Posted by SG1_Lud

I think we also tried to use another measures based in body proportions, but no agreement was reached on what was "average" LOL

HAHAHAHA!!!

[5./JG27.Farber]

It is indeed based on body maths. 1 yard is the distance from your finger tip of an arm streched out to one side to the tip of your nose.

[nearmiss]

Daniel Hannan...

You can't ignore Hannan. He gets to the point, and doesn't confuse with big words... and long speeches

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WObI5m5CXVQ&feature=fvst

[Kupsised]

Originally Posted by nearmiss

Daniel Hannan...

You can't ignore Hannan. He gets to the point, and doesn't confuse with big words... and long speeches

Very to the point, perhaps a bit unecessarily over-dramatic though.

That aside, he's not doing his job. As a member of the European Parliament he's supposed to represent the EU, not the UK. That's the job of the people in the Council and the European Council. It's complicated, but members of the European Parliament don't have constituencies like in Westminster, instead they're supposed to represent people based on ideology (so a UK MEP could be repsenting people in France, Greece, Romania or whatever). Anyway, the point is, him standing up and making that speech (along with a lot of other speeches he's made) would be rather like an MP in Westminster standing up and saying 'Hey, this whole government thing isn't working, we should give it up.' That's not how it's supposed to work and people like him are just hindering things unecessarily.

EDIT: Just to be clear, it's perfectly fine if that's his opnion, but he should voice it in the Council, not the Parliament, because that is what the Council is for. It always concerns me that EU citizens don't really know what MEPs are supposed to do (i.e. represent the Union, not their member states), although that's probably largely the fault of the Union for not explaining it to anyone, but it's even more concerning if even he doesn't know what his own job is supposed to be.