There is also the kilopond, which is defined as the weight of a kilogramme. In the same way that the pound-force is defined as the weight of a pound (which in turn is defined as precisely 0.45359237 kilogrammes).

True, but misses the point. The point is that the word "weight" refers to a type of force in physics and to mass in trade and law.

It is not true that the pound is nominally a unit of force, at least not in the way that you apparently meant. The pound has been defined as a precise multiple of the kilogramme, hence as a mass, for ages. Before that it was defined as the "weight" of a certain artifact, without specifying a location. In colloquial and legal contexts the term "weight" is ambiguous, but usually refers to mass, not weight. In this case mass was intended, as is clear from the fact that when standard pound artifacts were moved from one place to another for comparison, they never made corrections for the variation of gravity depending on location.

There is a tradition among engineers, and maybe also educators, in the English-speaking world that the pound is a unit of force. I guess this is due to several factors: In some branches of engineering, especially civil engineering, the pound-force is considered more useful than the official pound. The usage in physics, where based on etymology the word "weight" became used for force rather than mass when the two notions split, diverged from the usage in law and trade - a fact that is easy to miss because it's rarely mentioned. And considering the pound to be a unit of force can serve as a shibboleth for groups that are closer to engineering than to trade.

Yup. I was thinking in German and had forgotten that the translation isn't so straightforward in this case. I also completely agree with your parenthetical remark.

(Btw, I just learned from Wikipedia that the league was originally defined as the distance that a man can travel in an hour, and so was subject to considerable variation and different standardisations in various places.)

I realise that the headline is meant as a joke anyway, but I think it can reinforce a misconception that may be to blame for much of the resistance against metrication: Contrary to what many people think, you don't have to suddenly change the way you speak. Nobody wants to do that.

The really extreme style of metrication where 7-mile-boots would become 11-kilometre-boots was tried during the French revolution. It went so badly that they had to revert to a complicated system of customary units that was a compromise between metric and the old units. Only decades after that were metric units accepted by the population.

Here is how metrication has been done everywhere ever since the French realised that even a revolutionary terror regime couldn't make people switch units directly: For the most important units you introduce informal customary units of roughly the same size but with a nice factor. Say one (metric) inch = 2.5 centimetres = 1/4 decimetre, 1 yard = 1 metre, 1 mile = 1.5 kilometres, 1 gallon = 4 litres (a compromise between US and imperial, closer to the US gallon), 1 pint = 1/2 litre (a similar compromise between US and imperial pints, very close to the US pint), 1 pound = 1/2 kilogramme (close enough for everyday life, and equal to the informal pound of Belgium, Netherlands, Germany etc.). Of course even those units which are not treated this way remain in common parlance in expressions such as "miles and miles". In Germany, hardly anybody knows how much a Meile is or was, but it doesn't matter when we still say "meilenweit" to indicate a long distance.

Your observation is not stupid at all. Socket drive sizes are in inches everywhere in the world because those are the standard sizes. Such an international standard makes even more sense than using inches for screen sizes everywhere. As an inch is legally defined to be precisely 2.54 centimetres (even in the US), there really is no problem. The metric system doesn't come with an obligation to only use nice multiples of metric units.

By the way, for most purposes it's sufficient to think of the inch as a customary unit worth 2.5 centimetres. People in metricated countries typically have many such customary units. E.g. in Germany and many other European countries we informally have the pound of 1/2 kilogramme. My mother still buys half a pound of butter, not 250 grammes (1/4 kilogramme). Smaller distances on British motorways are measured in metres, but the metres are referred to as yards, ignoring the conversion factor because it is close to 1.

As another German I can confirm this. In the year when the Euro was introduced (2002), there was an exceptionally poor harvest in Europe due to exceptional rainfall. As a result, foor prices increased significantly. Of course people blaimed the Euro for that.

As to the immediate changes: End prices are arbitrary to a large extent. 1 Euro = 1.96 DM, so most prices were simply divided by 2 and for compensation a few things were made significantly more expensive. Of course most people noticed these, while ignoring the much larger number of things that got a little cheaper.

For these reasons we need statistics rather than gut feeling, and these say that life did not get more expensive overall.

True for Ryanair. But it's not legal, they have just been getting away with it for rather long.

Re train tickets: Sounds as if you bought a ticket for local trains and a reservation for an express train. Depending on how you bought them, this could be either your own fault or the fault of whoever sold them to you.

I am not at all convinced by this argument. Assuming the technical details that you are describing are correct, the situation is no different from, say, an eight-digit phone number in Munich such as 40123456 and a six-digit (legacy) phone number such as 123456 in Hamburg, which has the prefix (0)40. Both would be represented by precisely the same number and distinguished only by the TON field, so a TON = national number that just starts with 911 can't be a problem either.

Or are you saying that it is the case, and technically necessary, that if I dial 0112 in Germany, resulting in 112 with TON = national, I get the same result as when I dial 112?

Germany has been completely metricated for so long that several pre-metrication generations are no longer alive. Yet some Germans are still using customary units. And that's fine because they are simple multiples of metric units and are the same everywhere in Europe. For example a pound - to the extent that it's still in use - is nowadays exactly 1/2 kg except on those islands in the North West.

What most people are really attached to is words, not the precise size of a unit. What they don't understand is that with metrication they don't have to give up these words. They can call 1/2 kg a pound, they can call 1/2 litre a pint, they can call 1 metre a yard (this is already in use for distances on British motorways), they can call 1.5 km a mile. Years ago my mother sometimes asked me to bring half a pound (= 1/4 kg = 250 g) of butter from the supermarket. You can go down to the pub for a metric pint of 0.5 litres. Sure it's a bit less than an imperial pint, but you will get over it. Maybe see it this way: It will be a bit easier to have two. Or even three. This will be similar to what happened in Bavaria. A "Maß" of beer (e.g. at Oktoberfest) was once 1.069 litres. Nowadays it is precisely 1 litre.

Incidentally, every German child still knows some of the units as they still occur in fairy tales and other old texts, e.g. "7-mile-boots". They just don't know how much these old units are precisely, and as these formerly were different in different parts of the country, there isn't a simple answer anyway.

That's not relevant because for a call to Nürnberg you have to dial either 0911... from within Germany or +49911... for an international call. Neither starts with 911.

What is a problem, though (as someone already pointed out above and I verified independently), is that a huge number of phone numbers in Madrid is of the form 911xxxxxx and has to be dialed like that from everywhere in Spain. They would all have to be changed.

The MPAA's original paper: http://de.scribd.com/doc/115644694/NOT-Motion-Picture-Association-of-America-Final

They brag about how much money they are making and speak in passing about the "massive" impact of closing down Megaupload. The one thing that seems to be conspicuously missing is any estimate of how much more money they made due to the reduction in "piracy".

Yes, there are some suspicious elements. It may be part of a big push to get funding for NASA to do a manned Mars mission. And to encourage the Chinese to continue pursuing their plans. I would consider that a good thing.

On the other hand, it wouldn't be reasonable for them to design a transport ship on their own anyway. Apparently they are going to cooperate with DragonX, who apparently said in principle the technology is already there.

See http://mars-one.com/en/about-mars-one/advisers

"On what conditions would states allow a private company to send humans to another planet? What kind of requirements should a Mars settlement comply with in terms of planetary protection? What legal regime will govern life on another planet? Until now, these questions used to sound very 'far off', but if Mars One lives up to its promise, space lawyers have work to do, and I am excited to be a part of that!"

Tanja Masson-Zwaan, Deputy Director of the International Institute of Air and Space Law at Leiden University

Interesting idea, but I would hope that anyone going there from Earth would know precisely where the bodies came from, and when and why. And that anyone coming from elsewhere would be sufficiently advanced to realise that those guys can't have been endemic, what with containing lots of elements that are totally rare on Mars.