Friday, April 20, 2012

I-Hate-Metric Week, Day Two

(Click on the cartoon to see the full image.)

(C)Copyright 2011, C. Burke. All rights reserved.
Being 1000 paces, it's actually more 'metric' than the meter is.


3 comments:

(x, why?) said...

The debate "rages" on ... Join in

http://www.facebook.com/pages/x-why-webcomic/147762655243917

NDE said...

Well, "mile" does look cognate with "millennium" etc. But the kilometer is not arbitrary: it's 1/10000 the distance from equator to pole. (Off by a fraction of a percent, but probably much closer than we could ever measure a Roman mile without access to living Roman soldiers.)

(x, why?) said...

Exactly! It's not even accurate. If it had been off by just a little more than 1 meter could have equaled 1 yard! Now that might've made the conversion easier.

An oldie-but-goldie:
"Burke's Law of Metric Conversion -- The USA will go metric when the NFL goes metric and not before."