"Dinsdale Pirana" wrote in message
On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:22:48 +1000, Trish Brown
wrote in aus.gardens:


Hm. I was born in 1955 and, believe it or not, still think in the
imperial measures I learned at school. In fact, I still use 'two bob'
instead of '20c'!

You can have no conception of what it was like, trying to do sums in
imperial weights and measures *and worse*, doing sums in £, s and d! Not
only that, but we also had guineas and sovereigns to deal with!
Urrrggghhh! Betty and Jim (the proprietors of my primary school maths
book) taught me how many rods, poles or perches there were in a mile.
How many yards in a furlong. How many chains in a cricket pitch (ie
one). How many pennyweight in an ounce. I could go on.

So please don't tell us elder persons to forget or change that which was
learned at *great cost* in our childhoods! Mumblemumble... one thousand
seven hundred and sixty yards, one mile... grumble... sixteen fluid
ounces, one pint... crumble... twenty one shillings in a guinea... and
that bloody-well baker and his dozen!!! Aaaarrrggghhh!!!!


Ha I had to laugh, as one born in the first half of the last century I
hated the idea of going metric. I mean 12 is such a handy number
divides by 2, 3, 4, 6 etc etc and if you know the cost of a dozen eggs
then the cost of one is easy in LSD money (?). There is a measurement
for everything, all different units and all incompatable!

BUT Australia went metric and did it brilliantly, I am so glad that
they did. and while I still totally confuse my kids by saying things
like, "Push it toward me a couple of inches" Metric is such a grand
system.

I agree.

In fact I was rather amused at Trish's comments as I'm older than her and
her comments about how hard it was getting a handle on metric didn't cause a
quaver of recognition at all for me.

I love metric, and being a keen cook, I can automatically convert between
metric, Imperial and American measures. Iused to have problems though if a
recipe called for a "stick of butter". I used to guess based on the recipe
but finally had to ask on a US dominated ng to find out that it is 4 oz of
butter.

For woodwork, metric has got to be the best system out. Dunno how anyone
can do fine woodworking using inches etc. but I can cut a dovetail to a half
mm without any probs :-))