Blast-off! Boat free launch at last. Orion heads for space NASA’s Mars-hopeful spacecraft Orion has successfully blasted off from Cape Canaveral on its first test flight, launching on time at 12.05pm GMT. Orion successfully launches on first test flight The agency’s first step towards reviving its manned space exploration programme went off without a hitch today, after a number of …
As I heard it, the american pint is actually the "wine" pint, or 1/8 of the old "wine gallon" which was a measurement used a few centuries ago. As the british standardized the pint after the revolution it makes sense that the US would stick with the older version.
"I thought one of their Mars probe failures was down to one team interpreting "m" as miles and another as metres leading to descent boosters being fired at the wrong time."
Are you sure you're not getting the Mars probe confused with Jimbo? :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimbo_and_the_Jet_Set
Are you seriously telling me that NASA still works in Fahrenheit these days?!
Welcome to the USA . The tea partly would never tolerate any of that sciency Celsius stuff . If Fahrenheit was good enough for my pappy and his pappy it's good enough for me. What are you some kind of commie ?
I can watch the launches from my back yard on a clear day (about 50km away) The best are the night launches because even at that distance it lights up the horizon like the sun coming up and you can follow the flame and see the boosters drop off with the naked eye.
The Americans don't have Europe to dictate what they can and can't do with their measurement systems. So they even use pounds and ounces. I still use feet and inches in preference - but at least we can still use miles. For now...
And anyway - I'm not the teensiest weeniest littlest bit jealous that you can see then from your back yard. No, really. Git!
The fight against metic has been going on since the seventies at least. Some money was spent on road signs in MPH and KMH. Huge reluctance to switch. The Union people ( absolutely not members of the Tea Party) are just as adamant against it. I was installing some equipment years ago and the Union Rigger asked me what height the feet needed to be set at. I said 50mm and he got his tools and left.
As a practical matter just think of the cost to change everything in the NASA data bases. It is just not cost effective. I am sure at some point it will have to be done but that is a long way off and it will be a huge and expensive project.
Don't have your snark radar on today do we? Go pound sand . Regardless of how long 'mericans have been fighting metric , the Tea party and the Republicans are vehemently anti science ...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/most-anti-science-lawmakers-running-office
and other "english" measurements because we were not stupid enough to fall for your "metric" ruse. The take up of metric is a conspiracy foisted on the rest of the world to gain a competitive advantage by forcing US manufacturers to change all their tooling. This would have cost the US trillions, and had no other benefit besides "similarity" of units.
Quite right. Its cost us a fortune here in Blighty too.
And the trouble is, to satisfy political correctness or whatever none of the kids at school get to learn anything about imperial units, let alone that a very substantial part of the world still uses them.
Including an awful lot of stuff here in the uk.
Still, working in tens is much easier. Or so I'm told. But don't tell the kids that. They still think they can add up (in tens) but usually can't. As for eights and sixteenths....
...RANT... splutter....
Anyways, you Merkins are heretics as well, with your mertic dollar. Years ago, when I was a lad, we had REAL money, pounds shillings and pence, but things like furniture, fridges and cars were sold in guineas. Used to confuse you lot no end.
Great post - my first (and only dog) cost 21 guineas - and race horses today are still sold using them.
Reminds me of that old quiz thing in the '70s that had questions relating to old money that added up to a total... i.e. pluto, neptune and saturn = 3 farthings etc.
PNGuinn, the reason we became monetarily heretical was because by the time the Treaty of Paris was signed, we had five different £sd systems in place among the states — as with regional measurement systems in many European countries, it was easier to adopt a new system than to reconcile all of the old ones. There were still $-to-£sd tables published into the 1850s, as people even then still tended to reckon in their state’s particular £sd system, and new states often adopted the system where their earliest anglophone colonists came from; Texas was the newest state that I’d seen with a $-to-£sd conversion rate (it followed the system of Virginia and New England).
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