On Fri, 12 Sep 2003 10:09:24 -0400, Daniel Serpell wrote:

> El Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 09:51:12AM +0100, Howard Winter escribio:
> >
> > There's nothing "natural" about the metric system (see my other post) - the metre was supposed to be a
> > millionth of the distance from Paris to the North Pole, but I believe they got it wrong anyway.  A year is
>
> No, it isn't, it's the 10000ave part of the distance from the equator to
> the poles. And was selected that way to be about the size of the former
> French unit of measure.

OK, I misremembered the actual measurement (surely it must be a million metres, 10,000km?) but I knew it was
devised by the French.

> Personaly, the metric system has much more sense than the imperial
> units. A cup is 1/4 liter, a long step is a meter, the mass of a liter
> of water is a kilogram, also here (in Chile, as many places in South
> America), the difference in numbers of adresses is in meters (so, my
> work is at 2247, my departament is at 924, so there is 1300 meters
> in between), the streets are separated by 100 meters (on average),
> etc.

Sorry, I have to disagree here.  I just meausured cups in my house and they vary from 200 to 400ml, and by
your own logic, a cup could be said to be half a pint...  I don't know *anyone* who's pace is a metre - pace
is usually about the same as inside-leg measurement so they'd have to be pretty darned tall (certainly much
taller than Napoloen, who I believe was responsible for it)!  And an Imperial Gallon is 10lbs of water,
although that's not widely known.  Here in England we number houses serially, with no distance involved, and
certainly no consistent distance between them, or between streets.  (Incidentally, if your streets are 100m
apart, does that imply that where you are each property is 50m deep?).  I find that metric measurements
(especially of weight) are too "big".  Food here is old in grams, and I find that most prepacked foodstuffs
are in odd amounts, a quick check in the kitchen reveals weights of 200, 300, 310, 320, 410, 420, 600g.
Nothing is 250 or 500g, let alone 1kg!

> And here, half a liter of beer (or two glasses of 1/4 liter) is the
> right quantity!

A pint is better, IMHO - it's more than half a litre - you're being sold short!  ;-)

Cheers,

Howard Winter
St.Albans, England

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