[gardeners] Metrication, was Manure and food safety
Kay Lancaster (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Thu, 21 Jan 1999 15:51:28 -0800 (PST)
On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, John Harman wrote:
> ...The hard part is biting the
> bullet and doing it. I think successive governments have probably put it
> in the 'too hard' basket.
I think that's the crux of the issue. That, and a sort of free-floating
paranoia that the metric system is some sort of a "communist plot" or
something. ;-) I've actually had people tell me that the metric system
is a sin because the bible mentions inches, not meters. (huh?)
> were going, couldn't covert the milages. :) I still convert centimetres to
> feet to get a mental 'feel' for length/height etc. It is a big move.
I don't convert from one system to another. It's too confusing. What
I found helped my students was to make them measure themselves against
a meter stick and find out where 0.5 m and 1 m "landed" on them. And
measure their hands, and find creases or such that were 1 mm, 5 mm, 1 cm,
5 cm and 10 cm apart. It's amazing how good a job they could do
estimating plant part sizes after doing that and getting a couple of days
of practice.
Kay Lancaster kay@fern.com
(who has a whole set of metric kitchen measuring cups, thanks to the wise
folks in Canada)