"PosterBoy" Wrote:

"Regnirps" wrote in message
Oh, crap! The table uses that French system with the km/hour I can never
make
sense of!

-- Charlie Springer

I think you mean that nearly universal system with the km/hour. Try: anip

My 1952 Unabridged Dictionairy calls it "The French System" as it was for the
previous 100 years, and as a physicist I find it convenient for mental
calculations, but for every day hunam scale use it sucks. It was
developed for scientific ellites. I'm sure you know that the units larger than
one use Latin prefixes and those smaller use Greek, something easily noticed by
a classically educated scientist of the 1880's. But for Mr. Goodwrench today?
An 8 mm bolt in grade 8.8 comes in three standard thread pitches and you say
"point seven oh" or "8mm with one point two five mm pitch" instead of "one
quarter twenty four". Fooey. Have you ever tried to shout French measurements
to someone in a noisy constructiuon environment? You can wind up with a doorway
three inches high.

It was officialy adopted by the US more than a hundred years ago. Do you think
it hasn't caught on because people are stuborn or because it has usability
problems (like similar sounding names for various units)? Would you try to make
everybody drive cars they don't like for 150 years? A km is what, the distance
from pole to equator divided by 15,000? What's a nautical mile?

-- Charlie Springer