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"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis
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I started to post that earlier in the week but I didn't think it would be of much interest to anyone other than you and me. As usual, our measurement systems are a mess.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible - Arthur C. Clarke
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I find it interesting to the point I posted a thread here in the past on the standard that is the basis of the metric system, which I assume everyone will agree is more rational than the one we use in this country. Something as important as measurement should have as its basis that which is invariable such as the speed of light (metric) rather than a kernel of barley (imperial). First, I never knew a grain of barley lay at the foot, so to speak, of our measurement system. I can’t believe every grain of barley is exactly the same dimension. Am I wrong? Aren’t there different cultivars of barley? Doesn’t the growing condition reflect in the ultimate size? These are questions everyone should be asking.
Old thread —... But imperial measurements, while standard, were also arbitrarily derived. The yard, for instance, evolved from the idea that “foure graines of barley make a finger, foure fingers a hande, foure handes a foote,” Mr. Linklater noted. During the reign of Elizabeth I, those 16 fingers per foot became 12 inches and were tripled to make the yard that Mr. Troughton fashioned into a bar for America.
Even as the U.S. government shipped imperial standards across the country, the move to metric was gaining appeal in America and elsewhere, driven by a hunger for ever greater precision and easier replicability. Decimalized metric standards, which were being developed by French scientists at the urging of its National Assembly during the French Revolution, are based on scientific findings rather than folksy norms, and these days units increasingly relate to each other. The meter was originally based on one ten-millionth the distance from the geographic North Pole to the Equator; it is now derived from the speed of light. Volume and mass, in turn, are based on the meter...
http://www.crackerbarrelphilosophers...+metric+system
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“You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.” — Too fundamental to have an attribution
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