It's an omen!

No, they learn how many feet in a mile, how many feet in a yard, and a little arithmetic (very little, these days).

Who cares?

Yes, some people still do for body weight, nothing else really. Like someone else said, just waiting for the old folk to die.

I always used kg myself (and I am not exactly young).

-Lasse

It is good that they have to learn arithmetic in bases other than 10. As a kid I had to learn base 2, 3, 4, 6,

I'd already learned octal and hexadecimal arithmetic, albeit without being able to write "0xDEADBEEF".

I priced my train set components just before decimalisation arrived in '71, and was /immensely/ relieved that I didn't have to use base 12 and 20 arithmetic.

Who ever learned how many yards in a mile? 5280/3=1760 Know how to get the answer rather than memorize stuff, that's what I was taught.

I wish scientists would use SI exclusively, but that's unfortunately far from true. We have gals, bars, lightyears, electronvolts, parsecs, ergs, Gs, etc, etc, etc. Every corner of science seems to have its own weird units, usually justified by trivial 'convenience', but really just by petrified tradition and congealed habit.

Cosmologists are a particularly bad lot: They'll mix different units with the same dimension in a single value. Take the Hubble constant for example: Its dimension is 1/time, but look at the weird mixture of units: km/s/Mparsec. This particular one contains a second sin: Multiple multiplier prefixes in one unit. Another, from rocketry: Specific impulse in units of time, when in fact it really is force times time over mass. Shame! Horror!

Jeroen --SI everywhere-- Belleman

Then this hectare stuff I see all the time... Just learned it's actually 100 ares...

When Australia metricated, milk producers expressed the same concern. It was easily addressed; quarts and pints converted to 2 litre and 600ml; swings and roundabouts. 1 litre bottles came later.

I think it's more correct to say "1 bar was redefined as 0.1MPa". It had a different earlier definition that was a bit higher.

I think is was just that Bar and Atm was used interchangeable

-Lasse

And I learned that it is easy to remember things like 1760 yards per Mile and 86,400 seconds in a day. Then you can concentrate on whatever you are figuring instead of calculating the value of constants.

Dan

In fifth and sixth grades we learned how to do arithmetic in all bases up to 32 (ran out of characters) and, of course, convert between them (directly). It was one of the more useful concepts taught in "new math". Set theory got *really* boring (over, and over, and over...),

;-)

Different strokes. I never bothered memorizing what can easily be deduced.

Well I said it was very close! :)

(I was mixed up with 1 standard atmosphere pressure - it is this that is very close to 1 bar / 0.1MPa)

Yeah, well, fairly close to you. If they did it above ground you might hear it.

Ahem, "KSI" = kPSI

Which are in the same magnitude as GPa so it doesn't matter anyway.

Tim

I glanced down one day, and saw my '79 Malibu's odometer turning over to 200,000 miles. It was about 10 years old, and a former Sheriff's cruiser. I paid $500 for it, with 123,000 miles on it, and sold it for $200, with 209,000 miles on it. It still ran great, but the front end was shot and I had found a pickup I liked, so I sold it to a kid's dad for his first project car.