As an American, I have always been a bit ambivalent when it comes to units of measurement. I learned units like inches, pints, and pounds first, but all through elementary and secondary school, the metric system (or S.I., Système International) was taught, along with dire warnings that we’d better get used to the new measurements because the U.S. was going to be giving up Imperial units Real Soon Now. That would have been fine with me, because I’m fluent in meters, liters, and grams too, and they all make more sense to me than their Imperial counterparts. (Temperature, strangely, is the exception: I can’t seem to switch my brain out of Fahrenheit.) The entire world—excluding us wacky Americans—has come to the sane conclusion that units of measurement based on outdated and arbitrary standards should be abandoned, and that everything should be based on easy-to-calculate units of ten.
Everything, that is, except time, the measurement...
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