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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (19027)	8/29/2010 7:59:10 PM
From: Alastair McIntosh	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

..the Canadian gallon has 4 liters. 1 U.S. Gallon = 0.83267 Canadian (Imperial) Gallons 1 Canadian Gallon = 1.201 U.S. Gallons 1 U.S. Gallon = 3.785 Liters 1 Can Gallon = 4.546 Liters

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (19027)	8/30/2010 7:32:46 AM
From: dybdahl	Respond to of 42652

In the good old days, everybody defined their own inches, miles etc. for trade purposes. A british mile is 1.6km, a nautical mile is 1.8km, a Danish mile is 7.5km and a Swedish mile is 10km. Each Swiss city had it's own unit sizes, making it a hell to walk from one city to the next to sell stuff, and nobody cared about the British units when the metric system was introduced. The Danes adopted the Prussian inch, because of a large amount of trade, but as a result of the metric system introduced in the early 1900s, it was rounded to 2.62cm in Norway and Denmark. I was amazed to find out that somebody was still using it... but all their font size measurement devices and equipment was based on it. Most other units have slowly adapted to the metric systems using rounded. In the 1970s there were still people talking old units like pounds and pægl, but for easiness, these were rounded to 1pound=500g and pægl=250g, 1kande=2liter. One funny one is the size of wood and nails. They are still often bought in inch-sizes because it is practical to compare the size using your own thumbs. However, because they are made using the metric system, you get a 10cm length when you order 4 inches, so for most practical and unprecise purposes, in Europe 1 inch = 2.5cm (unlike the U.S. inch of 2.54cm). The inch is seen as an unprecise method of measurement, if you want something precise, specify it using the metric system. The metric system also gets abused in many ways - for instance, it has become totally accepted to specify force using kg, assuming a conversion factor of approximately 10m/s^2, and energy in the electricity system is specified using kWh instead of Joule, very annoying because it makes it very hard to people to realize the proportions of energy usage with different choices. If they only realized how efficient cars actually are, they might realize how great an invention it is, and that the problem is not the car, but the long distances that people travel. Today, we use British inches in many contexts, like the distance between pins on a chip, because USA has set the standard on that. We also have the mixup of tools because a lot of stuff is made using U.S. standards. However, we would never invent a standard based on inches. For instance, the Dutch/Japanese CD (Compact Disc) standard is metric. As for my own application for the printing shops, I managed to convince them to recalculate font sizes, and made it possible to specify font sizes using fractions, and instructed them on how to recalculate font sizes for U.S./British points. That was close enough. Not all fonts have the same size at the same point size anyway, so the main problem was actually about line spacing and how to measure that using existing physical tools. And maybe it was about being afraid of new technology.