When I was a kid we learned about inches and feet and miles and pounds and cups and gallons.
Then, a few years later, the teachers told us that we needed to learn a new system that was accepted worldwide and would soon replace the measurements that we had come to know and love.
That new system - The Metric System
As a child, the metric system was new, different, and totally unworkable. It was based on powers of 10.The inch is based on the length of some king's thumb, the meter is 1/40,000,000th of the polar circumference of the Earth.
We had to learn what all the stupid metric prefixes meant. We had to learn how to change our system to metric sytem and how to change metric system back to our system.
What a waste of time.
Of course our teachers were wrong and the metric system did not catch on. Today's schools rightly reject the idiotic french invention that is the metric system.
Today's kids got it easy because they don't have top learn the metric system.
I have long ago put my ruler with metric on one side and inches on the other side, away. Maybe someday it will be worth money, like a bottle of "New Coke"
2 comments:
I would not say that kids have it easy because they don't have to learn those things anymore today, IN THE US (they do in some other countries, you should know)! Actually I find it a loss for them, because the more one has to challenge the mind, the better it develops... so not too sure I agree with u on one.
But today Kids (and adults) do have it easy, because should they not know how to convert from one to the other, the internet has numerous sites that do it for free and there is no more need to have agenda's full of conversion tables at hand .....
Personally I don't have any problem with the metric system, I been brought up with it. But then again the non-metric system isn't that hard to use either and when looking at prices of petrol per gallon in the US... I for sure know you guys have the better deal ;-)
And ... doesn't your computer use the kilo, mega, giga and if you are one of the lucky ones, tera bytes for the space it provides you? So may be you ARE using the metric system too? ...
May be it wasn't all that of a waste of time? At least now you know how much space you have left for posting on yr blog ... :-))
If you ever have to precisely and correctly measure something you're cutting or trying to fit in a defined space, it's infinitely easier to use centimeters and millimeters than inches and eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds, etc. Who can add and subtract all that fractional crap?
Don't be so worried about the New World Order and get with the program.
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