Maybe you do…
We could name the months Ace through King, and the weeks
Here in the USA, we were going down the path of metric in the 70s, I think. We even had mileage markers on the highways with both miles and km.
That was probably when Carter was in office. Repubs in the form of Ronnie came in in 1980 and, along with all the solar panels on the white house, tore all that stuff out. They really should be called the Regressive Party. We go backwards with them, such as, Hello Mr Crow, how are you?.
Supposedly, Willie Nelson smoked weed on the White House roof during the Carter administration. I hope that really happened, and that Willie didn’t bump his head on the solar panels.
The Dozenalists are all over that one -
Considering how they were clearly already using Pythagorean triples and had some functional trigonometry, I wonder how the sub-divisibility of their system interacts with their practical problem solving.
Say, your main unit of measure isn’t good for breaking down the field and calculating it cleanly, but if you can break down your unit of measure into something more usable, perhaps you can use your 1/12 of a measure as your base unit, or size more simply, you can scale up and back to find something that is calculable. Reminds me of representing different problems in different base numerals to better reflect their logical underpinnings, instead of sticking to decimal.
Which is why the little 6" rulers are called “Peter Meters” by the women in the office.
But then you don’t get the benefits of a common base. Derived units become difficult for example, since your number system doesn’t keep track of the units properly.
That’s an odd statement. Canada and Norway just decided to do it and did it because it was a reasonable thing to do. That’s off the top of my head, but only 7 countries are not metric, and I don’t recall hundreds of revolutions to get all the rest. I highly doubt we were the only ones. I wonder what else that book is lying to you about.
The US basically did it in 1975 as well, but at the last second they chickened out and nerfed the bill to be “optional”. They had started converting road signs in some places and such even. So close.
The UK nerfed metric too.
We have stuff like a pint is legally defined as 568ml, and a mile is legally 1609 metres. Technically we are metric, but nothing actually changes.
We did have the Metric Martyrs about 20 years ago, shopkeepers who got fined because they wouldn’t follow a new law that said that they had to display the metric weight alongside the imperial weight.
That’s demonstrably false. The only countries still using imperial measurements are U.S., Liberia and Myanmar Most countries moved to metric (if they weren’t already using it) because it’s easier.
The United States do not use Imperial units (which were first defined in the British Weights and Measures Act 1824 and replaced the Winchester Standards, which were in effect from 1588 to 1825).
The United States have their own system - Freedom Uni… sorry, USCS:
TIL a metric shit ton actually is a bit more than the US shit ton. It’s less than the English shit ton though which is why the usage confused me.
When I was about 9 or 10, in what we call junior school in UK, my class was subject to an experimental new maths course for one term, which involved ‘playing’ with blocks of wood of different colours (think: like 3D bar chart bars) and of different lengths of a fixed multiple (a ‘1’ block was a small cube about 1/4 inch on a side, a ‘10’ block was, say, 1/4" x/1/4" x 2.5"). The point of these was that the course gave us a wide range of puzzles and challenges to solve, which were effectively training us to use these blocks to count in different bases. It helped that the blocks were colour-coded so each colour nominally represented a different base and in each base’s colour the longest rod was only as long as that base’s equivalent of ‘10’.
As a result I have always been comfortable with the concept of counting in a different base, and with the need to be able to convert between different measuring systems.
TIL: that an apothecary had only three scruples! No wonder they fell out of favour and were replaced by pharmacists.
(See the ‘Weight and Mass’ section of that second link.)
People got fed up to the gills with that nonsense. It just went against the grain.
As did the fact that apothecaries were always shilling the mark. That’s why they got the sack.
And then they did nothing but whine about it. Bunch of dram queens.