Kliban by B. Kliban for June 10, 2020

Are those pedometers?

back to the school

I guess sometimes you have to toe the line to make the system work?

Must be morgue humor.

Some people … you give them a foot and they take a meter …

Not a whole lot more peculiar than current events.

Someone has to trip up on the measurements…

Been livin’ in Europe more than 35 years, now. Can’t even think in inches and feet any more. So logical, metrics.

But…Isn’t it easier converting your yard to meters?

My yard has 3 meters in it – the gas meter, the water meter, and the electric meter!

Since we’ve segued into the metric system, I’ll just say that I, too, prefer metric units for most measurements. However, I still favor Fahrenheit over Centigrade temperature. The reason is, being a native Minnesotan, when it’s +100F here in the summer, that’s only +40C, so that number seems way too low for how I feel. Then when it’s +32F here on a balmy winter day, 0C seems like it should feel much colder than it is. All this just because I grew up here with the Fahrenheit scale, so that’s my conditioning. Europeans would probably feel just they opposite it they had to convert to Fahrenheit.

There is a cartoon that shows Mr. Fahrenheit and Mr. Celsius as college roommates (Speed Bump, Dave Coverly). Caption: “I’m freezing! What is it, 20 degrees in here?! Yes! And it’s perfect! I let you near the thermometer and I bake!” I’ll leave it to you to figure out who is whom in this dialog.

The United States does not officially use the metric system. Neither do the economic powerhouses of Liberia and Myanmar (Burma). And that’s about it. The US military does and just about every manufacturer selling, or trying to sell, on the world market.

I still can’t keep it straight and I have two science degrees: How many elephants to a parsec?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider#Refueling