20th February 2004, 11:17 PM
I gotta agree with ABF, I can't stand the heat. Can't really stand freezing temps either, but the difference is I can actually change my own temp for winter easily enough (even if I have to do it every single time I go out, well unless it's Oklahoma like it is, meaning that sometimes you can easily go outside in shorts and be perfectly comfortable in the middle of January, but later that day the temp will drop down really fast and it'll snow). I also like snow, but summer doesn't have any sort of thing like that does it? Sun flakes, gotta invent those... Sure, it'll probably kill us all, but in the mean time, golden sunmen!
Is it true people in england use "stone" as a measurement of weight? That's nuts! I heard someone say something on TV like "and it weighed about 2 and a half stones" and I was all like "what on Earth? How do you even decide what stone to use?".
Metric is just better if you ask me, all around. Personally I'd go with Kelvin if I had the choice. Nice to have something like the absolute lack of any heat energy at all to determine 0. Eh, but the main advantage is still the ease of conversion. I hate the whole concept of learning all those ridiculous and arbitrary numbers. Plus, you either have to learn a whole slew of conversion formulas or do multiple conversions from feet to miles to blah blah blah just to get what you want, rather than just a single conversion using a very simple formula. Honestly, America is the only country that seems to have a big problem with metric. We're behind, and we need to accept it. The rest of the world is almost completely metric, and they just ablige us because of how big a market we present to them. Really, what's holding us back? Is it the same thing preventing any REAL school reforms? Money won't be enough for sure, because I've seen what happens when a school gets more money. They buy TVs for every single classroom so that the announcements can be seen as well as heard, and they don't have to wheel in a TV from the media lab to watch the occasional movie (watching those movies was still just as rare afterwards) and meanwhile, the books are still outdated and the computer classes still just have programs for improving typing speed.
Is it true people in england use "stone" as a measurement of weight? That's nuts! I heard someone say something on TV like "and it weighed about 2 and a half stones" and I was all like "what on Earth? How do you even decide what stone to use?".
Metric is just better if you ask me, all around. Personally I'd go with Kelvin if I had the choice. Nice to have something like the absolute lack of any heat energy at all to determine 0. Eh, but the main advantage is still the ease of conversion. I hate the whole concept of learning all those ridiculous and arbitrary numbers. Plus, you either have to learn a whole slew of conversion formulas or do multiple conversions from feet to miles to blah blah blah just to get what you want, rather than just a single conversion using a very simple formula. Honestly, America is the only country that seems to have a big problem with metric. We're behind, and we need to accept it. The rest of the world is almost completely metric, and they just ablige us because of how big a market we present to them. Really, what's holding us back? Is it the same thing preventing any REAL school reforms? Money won't be enough for sure, because I've seen what happens when a school gets more money. They buy TVs for every single classroom so that the announcements can be seen as well as heard, and they don't have to wheel in a TV from the media lab to watch the occasional movie (watching those movies was still just as rare afterwards) and meanwhile, the books are still outdated and the computer classes still just have programs for improving typing speed.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)