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From: Hibou <vpaereru-unmonitored@yahoo.com.invalid>
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english
Subject: Re: OT: Converting miles/km
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2024 09:43:15 +0100
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Le 20/09/2024 à 09:00, Peter Moylan a écrit :
> On 20/09/24 15:22, Hibou wrote:
>>
>> I'm afraid I don't see the problem. Just assign 1.609344 to a memory
>>  cell. That's what I do. A shortened version is fine for mental
>> arithmetic - better than ln(5) - and if one has forgotten 1.6... but
>> has a calculator, what's wrong with tapping 2.54 x 12 x 5,280 /
>> 100,000?
> 
> That's all very well if you can remember that there are 5280 yards in a
> mile.

<Cough>

> I'm afraid that my school days are far behind me, and Ancient
> History was one of my weakest subjects.
> 
> I'm still just hanging on to the fact that an inch is about 25 mm, but
> that's probably the magic number that's next to fade from my memory.
> 
> I still remember that a mile is about 8/5 km, but it's unlikely that
> I'll ever again visit a country that uses miles, so that too will soon
> fall into the bin for useless facts.

SI is all very well for science, and BTUs and the like give me the 
heebies, I admit; but Imperial units - ounces, pounds, inches, feet, 
miles, are often well adapted to everyday life, and live on in a largish 
chunk of the world. The whole world (as far as I know) uses knots and 
nautical miles in the air, and on and under the sea. So, quite recent 
history, then.

Where Britain has gone wrong is in metricating half-heartedly. We drive 
for miles, and then fill up in litres - yet milk mostly comes in pints 
and quarts. Tables of clothing sizes are sometimes in inches and 
sometimes in centimetres (and probably inaccurate anyway). And so on.

We should be champions in mental arithmetic - though the evidence is 
that we're not.