What is this "snow day" you speak of? We in Montana have never heard of such a thing. Snow happens all winter, most of the spring and fall, and hell sometimes in summer.

I don't care one way or another about this holy war. That said, you named one calculation that is much easier in metric. There are simple calculations in imperial. How about home heating?

The reciprocal of the R value of your insulation by the square footage of the outside of your home by the difference of the temperature inside to outside in fahrenheit. The difference should be based on the lowest temp you expect.

(1/R * Sqr foot)* delta T With that you can size a home furnace/boiler in btu's with a few minutes and a tape measure. You may have different R-values for roof, wall, floor, etc.. but I'm sure most slashdoters can handle it. Air conditioning uses the same calculation and units. Though with air conditioning you are also dealing with radiant energy from the sun so the calculations become more dynamic and complicated. But air conditioners are still sized in BTU's

Want to size a water heater? No problem. One pound of water one degree fahrenheit is one btu. A pint is a pound. Pretty easy to come up with a formula from that. And, yes, I understand that there are different standards as to what a pint is. But not in water-heaters.

There are other simplifications that aren't based on calculations. Like the mile. Ever wonder why a mile is 5280 feet? A grown man's stride is is just about 5.28' long. Counting one thousand strides will get you pretty damned close to a mile. Pretty handy thing if you don't have GPS or a transit. My boss, a civil/structural engineer, tells me that back in the day surveyors often used this for a rough idea. You *could* work that out in metric but wouldn't simple or useful.

A gallon is pretty handy too. With four equal one gallon containers you can derive at every measurement below a gallon. Take a gallon of liquid and pour it evenly between two of the containers and then again between two of the other containers and you have a quart. If you pour back into the original container you can keep doing this. Again that could be done with liters but it wouldn't be as simple or elegant.

There was a study done by ASHRAE years ago, I read it in one of their news letters, that we subconsciously check air temperatures every time enter a room, enter or leave a building, or our cars. It's an evolutionary defense mechanism. For thousands of years (millions maybe?) life and death depended on shelter and what clothes we wore. You will subconsciously check air temperature 50-100 times on a typical day. Why not have a scale that starts at the lowest air temperature you would normally expect and ends at the highest? That would be handy for something we will do 50-100 today. It doesn't matter what the inventor of such scale was trying to do when he created it. It's handy regardless.

Imperial scales were a matter of evolution and not creation. I don't care one way or another but dismissing them out of hand is intellectual dishonesty

My 12 yo son and all of his friends have facebook accounts. The only exploitation that I can see is my wife's farmville looks like a plantation with a bunch of 12yo slaves.

Worked pretty well at night too.

Parson Russel, rat and other terriers are far superior to a cat at extinguishing rodents and other vermin. The advantage of a cat is that if you have warehouse grain storage, you can put a male cat and a female cat on the property and they will go feral and control the vermin automatically. After the cat population is large enough, little or no effort or resources will be needed to control vermin. When the population is large enough, they will also kill all of the songbirds, squirrels, gophers etc like they do in many modern cities, if you're a Mesopotamian warehouseman this is of little consequence.

I did the same exact thing. Remember that first flyby with all the setting set to max?

No it was because the cache ran at the speed of the proc on the celerons. On the PII it ran at twice the proc speed and didn't overclock well. Good times, good times.

He was probably bi-polar and died a virgin. I'll stick with my half-empty life.

Doesnt "No va" in spanish mean "no go"? Or did I miss some one else posting this?