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If anyone is familiar with Swedish schools...

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Zelos:
why is it so hard? PY? a mile is 1,6km. man I hate imperial units so much, I hate them almost as bad as I hate roy, hes a classmate and his hated by everyone in the class.

PurpleYouko:
Did I say I couldn't convert them?

All I said was I can' visualize kms or celcius unless I convert them first.

If I were to tell you that a point A is 375,000 Sqibblies from point B Could you visualize the distance?
What if I tell you that the temperature here yesterday was 6197 degrees on the Spufendicular scale?

What if I tell you that a Squibbly is equal to 3.0475 miles. Does that help? or do you need to convert to km first before it means anything to you?

How about if one degree on the Spufendicular scale is equal to 320 degrees Farenheit and that zero on the Spufendicular scale is the equivalent of 62.63438 degrees F

If you had grown up thinking in Squibblies and Spufendiculars then these units would make sense to you. They are perfectly valid units. Do you think such a person would have an instinctive feel for the distance represented by some unit called a kilometer or a temperature of 35 degrees C.

To me a kilometer means absolutely nothing and celcius is just something I use to calculate stuff in a lab, just like I use Angstrom units to calculate the size of an atom or Barns units to measure the thermal cross section of a nuclear reaction. (I can't visualize them either. can you?)

Zelos:
didnt you say you were from england?

PurpleYouko:
Yup.

England where nothing even remotely looking like metric had ever been heard of till the mid 70's

I grew up with Pounds, shillings and pennies as the local currency.

12 pennies to a shilling and 12 shillings to a pound.
Decimal? What the F*&^% is decimal supposed to mean? That's what most of the population thought when they converted to the new monetary system. (somewhere around 1970. Can't remember the exact year as I was about 6)

Overnight, prices trippled, quadrupled in some cases.

A chocolate bar that used to cost Threpence (3 pennies) in the old system suddenly cost 5p in the new system.

5p is the equivalent of a shilling in the old system and as a shilling = 12 pennies, this is a four fold increase.

It was way too complicated for many people to convert easily so the unscrupulous ones who could simply ripped everybody off.

This process severely f*&^ed up my childhood and the economy of England took years to recover.

Incidentally, England still uses miles and although the official unit of weight is the kilogram, you would be hard pushed to find a single marhet trader who doesn't sell meat, fish and veg by the pound. I don't believe this will ever change because the English are stubborn bastards.

Zelos:
yeah then it might be a problem, england where for a long time one of the stupidiest countries in europe untile they changed to SI units. But still its superior, if it werent why would science else use it? much much better

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