Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 14, 2013

sad to show what you got when you got nothin

Oh, well – NASA once got miles and kilometers mixed up. Bye-bye Mars lander. Could happen to anyone.

We’re TRENDSETTERS – ahead of the times.

For goodness sake..

We DO use metric or SI wnenever we wish along with English whenever we wish. We’re smart enough to make conversions back and forth if we wanna.FREEDOM

Years ago, columnist Bob Greene wrote that he was starting an organization called WAM, for We Ain’t Metric.

That idea doesn’t make a centigram of sense. I mean, give some people a millimeter and they’ll take a kilometer, like a girl I once knew who was 907 kilograms of fun to be with but didn’t have 28.34952312 grams of common sense. She would rush around at 160 km/hr all the time and it would make her feel 3.048 meters tall even though she didn’t like the song by the Who called; "I can see for 1.609344 kilometers and 1.609344 kilometers.Well, that’s how it goes sometimes, right?

“Why is the USA not using metric like theENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD?~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Good question! Especially since our money is based on the metric system, and people have no problem with that.

Officially we are metric over here. In practice it hasn’t really completely taken hold, and we are a bit in limbo. We still measure distance in miles, and the overwhelming majority of people would give you their height in feet and inches and their weight in stones and pounds (1 stone – 14 lbs).In the shops, prepackaged goods do now tend to be in 500g rather than 454g (1 lb) packs, but while there was a battle going on ten years ago about imperial or metric measurements for loose food, we sort of gave up on both, and we tend to buy vegetables by the pack or by number. It will have the metric weight on it, but a high percentage particularly of older people who were not taught in metric don’t instinctively think in it. You will tend to hear a lot of people, particulalry those under 40 who were taught mostly or entirely in metric, say “about ten metres” rather than “about ten yards” these days, but more rarely “about a kilo” rather than “about two pounds”.We buy gas (petrol) by the litre, and know its price these days by the litre, but still measure car efficiency by miles per (imperial) gallon; very few people could tell you how much a gallon of gas costs. Rugby dropouts are taken from the 22 metre line, not the 25 yard line as they used to be, but we still talk about the 18 yard penalty box in soccer when it is actually 16.5 metres. A cricket pitch, however, is and always will be, 22 yards (one chain) long and 10 feet wide.

Sorry, N-G, not buyin’ it:Per NASA:The focusing defect was due to spherical aberration, an optical distortion caused by an incorrectly shaped mirror. The mirror was too flat near the edge by about 1/50th the width of a human hair. Instead of being focused into a sharp point, light collected by the mirror was spread over a larger area in a fuzzy halo. Second, nothing blew up,because it was shipped aboard the space shuttle.

No, they haven’t.

Some of their scientists have, but that’s only to make their work comprehensible to scientists outside the US and Britain.

The only people in the US to use metric are scientists and drug dealers.

Well, THANKS! Because of you we are talking about the metric system instead of making fun of Roland’s ….

Not a problem for me; my favorite Who song is “Baba O’Riley.”

I never heard of a “bulge shot” and I hope I never do again.

Tomorrow there will be new material on Alpha House at Amazon Instant Video. Can’t wait!

You have the FREEDOM to think metric, English or even not at all.

“Or, what would Jesus do?”.He would still advise you to go the second mile (Roman miles being 5,000 feet long)

Remember metric and decimal are not the same even though metric IS decimal. You can buy tapes measuring feet and decimal feet, rulers measuring in inches and decimal inches. I can and usually do think in metric (or SI, the official internationally recognized system) but that doesn’t mean everybody has to be like me..It is a narrow mind which thinks every other mind has to think like it.