Friends,
after reading this thread for days now, I must say I finally got
a laugh when reading John Macartney telling us about a lost Brit
in the vast wilderness of rural Sweden...
Did the guy bother to ask any one around? I can promise that any-
one he'd cared to ask would have been only too keen to help him
understand the Language of the Gods [the Viking era Nordic Gods
that is; Thor, Odin etc... ;-) ].
This since some 80-90% of the population understand and [sort of]
speak the English language...
And since all of us in EUrope use the ISO system for measurements
the only obstacles now is the different currencies [and hopefully
the EURO will soon take care of that] and the frog eating resistance
from certain populations to adopt English as the common border-
crossing language. But give us a couple of hundred years and we'll
be speaking EUropean, all of us. Just as the Americans after two
hundred years speak American, all of them... JMHO! YMMV!
On another note related to this thread:
I always use my sliding calliper ruler - it's graded in both metric
and imperial units. Centimetres and Millimetres [and tenths of
millimetres] on one side
and Inches, 1/2 inches, 1/4 inches, 1/8 inches and 1/16 inches
on the other side. Converting between them is as easy as using
a good old slide ruler [anyone remember them? ;-) ]. Not one bit
of calculation needed!
Regards
/Odd
PS
Reading some of the commentary from redneck Americans taking part
in this thread regarding the universally accepted ISO standard I
must say I'm not surprised You lost the Mars probes...
Pity it wasn't the US military who sent those - they've converted
to ISO standards all around. And would not have stumbled over a
simple conversion table... Some of You seems hell bent on the NIH
[not invented here] Syndrome and I can only quote what a Canadian
friend of mine once said:
"The Yanks seems to think civilization started in 1776..."
Well, I'll let You in on a little secret the rest of the global
population already know: It did not! It's much, much older...
Grow up, and join the next millennium TOGETHER with the rest of
the globe. Not in OPPOSITION to it...
--
Odd Hedberg
Sweden E-mail: odd.hedberg@bigfoot.com
Geographical Position: N 60deg 15min E 18deg 23min
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