| 2009 Week 4 |
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| Friday, 30 January 2009 16:59 | |||
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A quiet week by my usual standards... probably mainly because I haven't really been out much this week so no road signs and no shopping. Instead I've had a chance to spend some time relaxing with a book. The book in itself is quite interesting, it's one I picked up at the NASA shop in Orlando Airport in December while waiting for a delayed flight entitled "Failure is not an option". It's the autobiography of Gene Kranz, the flight controller for the Apollo 13 mission (amongst others). Subject matter aside it's interesting to note the way measurements are used; Gene obviously speaks to his audience (the American public) in units that they understand when speaking of the height, weight, thrust and speeds of various pieces of space hardware but it's interesting to note that often a measurement in metres will creep in and what surprised me the most was that when speaking of the distances of splashdown from US Navy recovery craft is given primarilly in metres (or, perhaps I should say, "meters")! On the one hand it gives one great comfort that somebody who was in his mid 30's in the 1960's is happy to use the metric system... on the other it sends shivers down your spine when you once again realise that we've been doing battle between two measurement systems for so long that very few of us will remember a time when measurements were only imperial!
Which brings me back down to earth, and once again our good friends at the BBC who don't seem to be able to make up their mind. Some days I wonder if their style sheet has been updated to insist that writers use metric and put imperial in brackets as many news stories on their website are now being published in that manner... but then the occasional story creeps in such as one about talking to cows and how it can improve milk production (BBC News: Cows find milky way to happyness) which reports that yeilds go up by "up to 500 pints per year". Granted, this is how it's shown in the original press release on the subject (Newcastle University: Names give cows a lotta bottle) but nowhere is it mentioned that the actual figure given further down is actually 258 litres! All I can say really say is a big "shame on you" to Newcastle University for even mentioning pints in the press release... although I suppose their thought was "how do the public buy their milk?" At the same time as all of this is going on, the BBC has articles on a new warship and the piracy in the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Africa and both have maps and diagrams showing only metric! What really made me cringe though was watching an interview with Harry Hill (an ex doctor) on the BBC breakfast programme this morning where he was talking about his work with peanut farmers and when asked if he liked peanuts he responded (and I'm paraphrasing here as I can't remember his exact words) "Sure, I could easilly eat a couple of hundred weight of them". To be honest I can't remember the last time I heard the term "hundred weight" and many even of my generation would probably struggle to know what one was. I do recall selling an old Haynes Ford Escort workshop manual last year which described one of the models as "xxx CWT" but that was an early 1970's model and have to admit that it was only recently that I even knew what "CWT" meant! This wasn't the end of it though since one of my last acts of the week was to email a quote for repairs to my living room ceiling to the insurance company. The guy who came to give me the quote didn't measure the room so I didn't look on the quote for measurements... until I wondered if he'd happened to take account of the amount of materials he's likely to use. What do I find? Apparently he's estimated the size at " 16' x 12' ". I do happen to know that the room is exactly 5m x 4m - 20m², his estimate (according to my calculator) when converted back to metric is only 17.8m². Given the estimate includes repainting the walls too he's going to have severely underestimated the materials needed. Well, it's not my problem if it costs him more... so far as I'm concerned the transaction here is between him and my insurance company. It would have been nice to have known beforehand that he wasn't going to be using metric though, although I can bet that ALL of the materials he will be using to do the work will be sold in metric quantities! As usual I have no doubt that, unless government acts to make the use of metric mandatory, we'll still be in this mess in another 10, 20 or even 30 years!
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