It's all too hard if one doesn't have a sense of proportion.


My diesel car goes 1000km on a tankful. So it's producing 150 tons of soot per tankful; soot, being solid, is made mainly of carbon which can't all come from the 55 litres of diesel, can it? So the rest must come out of the air. Can I claim carbon credits for sequestering 150 tons of carbon; i.e. 44/12*150 => 450 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere? ;-)

Euro-5 (and Euro-6) limits for diesel particulates are 0.005 g/km for cars. Five milligrams per kilometre or 5 kilograms per gigametre; more than the distance the car is likely to drive.



What sort of miles are you talking about? The one that's exactly 1609.344 metres?



They are imbeciles regardless of the units of measurement because they lack a sense of proportion. The dimensions/units are only words to them. Sounds. Utterances. They lack the ability to make a physical connection between the language and what the units represent. They have no inherent understanding of what those words mean.

And it is quite often observed, that they also fail to make those connections in other aspects of their talk/writing. What they do is closer to mimicry than attempting to put words to individual thoughts. In the natural world, mimicry is often used as a survival strategy; e.g. to fade into the background or to appear to be "bigger" and thereby evade being eaten.

Edited by user 05 February 2013 04:30:35(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Of course people have trouble with metric. Being of French origin, it is completely conceptual and bears no relation to the real world. Where as the Imperial measurement system is based entirely on the world around us, and is hence far superior. Even a dim sub-editor would have clocked that 6800 or so yards was not on.

Ban metric. Reinstate Imperial and use it to teach kids maths. Poles. Perchs. Chains. Furlongs. You know it makes sense.

Metric notation encourages these bloopers by routinely ending with ".0" which both implies an inappropriate level of precision, and invites an accidental dropping of the ".". Punctuation nightmare, that sentence.

On the related subject of temperature, I have only recently found out why fahrenheit was a useful system. At school they were so busy with the Systeme Internationale that they did not bother to tell me, so I had to wait for the arrival of internet to get educated. It is based on having fixed points that can be accurately replicated by early scientists with minimal equipment. Freezing point of brine and scientist's own body temperature. You need to use a search engine if you want to know why 100 became 98.4...

I hate the degree of faux precision associated with the metric system. You see 8 foot lengths of wood sold as 2400 mill, since when did carpentry have to be accurate to the millimetre?

Sub-editor corrects it to "Yesturday I wanted to bee a jernilst. Taday I is one."


Without getting too pedantic or needlessly "precise", shallow grave would have covered it. (It did for centuries.)

And, FWIW: Probably dug to waist-depth, dropped corpse in the bottom and filled with dirt. That's about the size of it.

Tell a journalist that it was obviously done in a hurry and/or by amateurs. Professional grave-diggers start at the bottom so that they don't have to throw the dirt up so far from a deep hole.