How many yards in a mile? How many chains in a furlong? How many inches in a furlong? How many chains to a mile? How many pounds in an ounce? How many ounces in a stone? How many pounds in a stone? How many pounds are there in a 100-weight? How many fluid ounces are there in a gallon? How many acres are there in a square mile?
This is knowledge that to me, seems way over our head. The imperial system is flawed, because I bet nobody, not even me, knows all of the answers in the above questions. So, what’s the alternative? And the answer is the metric system and the SI units (System Internationale [French for International System, because that was where it originated with Napoleon]). The SI system divides itself quite nicely into ten, hundred, thousand, 10,000, etc… I didn’t have to learn my 16 and 1760 times tables at school (16 pounds to an ounce and 1760 yards to a mile) and all I was taught was up to my 10-times tables. Why? Because the metric system is divided into ten, hundred, thousands, etc. There are 640 acres in a square mile, but the only reason I know this is because I’ve just looked it up!
The SI unit for mass: the kilogram. There are a thousand grams to a kilogram. 1,000 kilograms to a tonne (not the ton, that is imperial). The SI unit for distance is the metre. There are 1,000 metres to a kilometre, a thousand millimetres to a metre, a thousand nanometres in a millimetre or one million nanometres in a metre, because ‘kilo’ is latin for a thousand (103), ‘milli’ means a thousandth (10-3), ‘nano’ means a millionth (10-6) and pico means a billionth (10-9). The SI unit for weight is actaully the Newton, because Weight = mass times gravity (W=m.g) where gravity is one of those odd ones in the fact that it’s 9.81 metres per second, but most people round this up to 10). The SI unit for area is metres-squared, the SI unit for volume is metres cubed and the SI unit for pressure is Newtons per square metre (N/m2), and not ‘psi’, pounds per square inch. The SI unit for pressure actually has another name, Pascal. And, to top it off, there are a one hundred thousand Pascals in a bar, or 100 Netons per square metre in a millibar, and millibars are what meterologists use. There are actually very nearly 1 bar in standard atmospheres, the pressure of the air we breath. Technically, it’s 1.01325, because Napoleon didn’t have sophisticvated-enough equipment to define these, and so he made some errors in his calculations… So, when your weather monitor in your house reads 10132 mbar, that is one standard atmosphere, and it is the median avareage of the atmosphere around the world, because actually, the atmosphere changes pressure in response to heating and cooling of air, because pressure increases as it is heated, and that leads to winds that we see today, because air pressure always wants to be in equillibrium, and the wind is in responmse to an area of high pressure going to an area of low pressure… But it doesn’t go there stright: that’s the Coreoulous effect, which is the same reason the water in our plugholes appears to go anticlockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern hemisphere… Interesting facts!
Still: what I’m saying is EVERYTHING is simple, and the reason why we need to conform to Europe is because Napoleon was better than our imperial system, and we have to admit that there was someone else that was better than us, in order for us to grow as a nation and continually become more civilised. One thing I also think we should do is drive on the right-hand side of the road, like the United States of America and the whole of the European continent, and measure in kilometres and not miles. This is because cars would be cheaper, people would feel more confident about driving on the continent, headlight beam deflectors would be a thing of the past; and, crucially, we wouldn’t have accidents around Calais and Dover where people were subcontiously driving on the wrong side of the road, and Harry Dunn would still be alive today if we drove on the right side of the road…
Yes, what wuld the cost be to change all of the signs and road markings? But the benefit would surely surpass this after 12 or 15 years, wouldn’t it?… Maybe it would take 20 years, in which case, most political parties would say “If it can’t make a profit in less than five years, we don’t bother,” and that’s the problem with politics, today. They are only interested in short-term gains….