[LAU] thunderstorm

[nescivi]

On Tuesday 23 June 2009 12:59:49 Bob van der Poel wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 6:30 AM, Fons Adriaensen 
<fons at kokkinizita.net>wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 08:11:30AM -0500, TheOther wrote:
> > > Let's see, there's 640 acres to a section, and a section of
> > > land is 1 mile by 1 mile, or a 1 mile square.
> >
> > Incredible, those units !
> >
> > So a square piece of one acre would have a size of
> > 1 mile / sqrt(640). That square root is not an integer.
> >
> > Is this the definition of 1 acre ?
>
> In old days (long before you and me) an acre was the amount of land a man
> and an ox could plow in a day :)  One day in the distant future the USA
> will adopt metric.

I still find it astonishing that with all their ideas of freedom, they insist 
on keeping this imperial system :)

> Or not. Mind you, we did here in Canada 20+ (30?) years
> ago and we still talk about miles, acres, pounds and inches. Instead of a
> metric or imperial system we have a bit of both.

Mostly for practical reasons, as I understand... with a lot of products coming 
from our southern neighbours...
But yes, Canada is a bit confused about which measurement system to use. It 
gets even more confusing in the french part here ;)

sincerely,
Marije