View Single Post
  #12  
Old May 2nd 04, 09:51 PM
Heinrich Zinndorf-Linker (zili@home)
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

Am Sun, 02 May 2004 11:42:43 -0500 schrieb "Herb Schaltegger":

For a normal person it is almost impossible to understand all these
interesting topics when it is full of gallons, feets and psi's instead of
litres, meters and Pascals


"Normal person", huh? You mean, some sort of "units snob?"

Well, since a good part of these "interesting topics" all use Imperial
measurements (the American part, of course), wouldn't it behoove you to
learn a few simple conversions so you can understand the discussion?
After all, a good many of us did so and can work fairly easily in either
system.


No, the problem with MANY (if not most) non-metric units is, that
there are often several localized versions of them - If you say (for
example) mile, pound or gallon, you can _never_ be absolutely, 100%
sure, which particular type of mile, pound or gallon is actually meant
- especially for people that are grown up in regions, where the
reflective use of these units has not been teached. Strict use of
metric (SI) units avoids ESPECIALLY THAT problem.

And there is the second problem of many redundant units - there is
absolutely no real need for a hundred or more different units for
mass, force, temperature, length (area/volume) and so on, for each of
are needed conversion factors that are _not_ simply powers of ten. In
SI there are only a very small couple of them.



cu, ZiLi aka HKZL (Heinrich Zinndorf-Linker)
--
/"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign
\ /
http://zili.de X No HTML in
/ \ email & news