Wesreidau

I disagree good sir.

The water system in a large part of the United States, and I would imagine most areas away from steep elevation changes, is electrically-driven. Water is pumped from the aquifer or lake through whatever treatment measures are in place, then elevated into a water tower. That tower then provides constant pressure for the lines out of it. If you take away electrical power, the system will fail when the tower empties. In case of a zombie apocalypse I'm getting my gun, putting the wife and kids in the SUV, and taking country roads until I'm in Hoosier National Forest. It would be like a vacation. Good luck, flatlanders.

Because you're anti-education, obviously. The OP describes the sort of loaded question I used to get when I was in school. The correct answer is to launch into a tremendous, scathing satirical essay about how access to cheap electrical power will corrupt all the poor subsistence farmers living on foreign aid and half-starved goat's milk by making them materialistic consumers. Throw in that the women will be less likely to die of cancer and lung disease as electric hot plates replace their traditional chimney-less wood-and-dried-manure cooking fires that plague them with smoke inhalation as they build fires in the pre-dawn light. Of course this is bad, because without a pit of smoking goat dung to slave over, women might be corrupted into such unfeminine tasks as seeking employment outside the home. Then they might have a say in where their money gets spent instead of being economically chained to their husbands. And don't forget that with air conditioning their infants won't die from heat waves, and that just means they'll grow up to breed more corrupted humans in otherwise pristine African savannas that only foreign eco-tourists should trod on with our petroleum-derived water-resistant synthetic fiber Birkenstocks. Also be prepared to fail the class in a blaze of glory. Oh, college humanities classes. You were enjoyed.

Putting a Westerner-operated spaceport within range of the budding young minds at "Hezbollah Amateur Model Aerospace Society" and they'll enthusiastically launch celebratory rocket fire (all home-made from hospital parts!) every time they hear a Western rocket is being prepped. We better abandon this idea and line of thought before it goes to hell. Back to mountains. I believe tracked launches running up the sides of mountains were considered extensively as a cheap LEO launch system. In fact there are quite a few novel concepts in that category, a few of which resemble ski resort skylifts...

I had a hell of a sinus infection and possibly acute bronchitis and got through it with two weeks of maintaining a buzz off tea with lemon wheels, cinnamon, brown sugar and sweet, sweet Sailor Jerry. It was the only thing that kept my caffeine headaches, sinus pressure and sore throat simultaneously suppressed. So take that, Western medicine!

More mundane; how much cosmic background radiation will this probe be going through across how many million years, and will that force fluctuate over time. Think of it as tracing back an envelope. Sure, you could get every fingerprint and fiber of everything that touched it and back-track throughout the postal service. You could also read the return address. Perhaps more importantly, adding a map indicates an interest in establishing contact. If I throw a brick across the street that says "Hello! Here's a picture of my family!" it is a little creepy. "Hello! Here is a picture of my family and we live just across the street from you!" its still creepy by way of a bad analogy, but its at least implied we'd like a brick thrown back with alien family vacation photos.

That's not a number. Furthermore, try using an abacus with Roman numerals. Just try it. It is shockingly intuitive. They had the equivalent of bronze pocket calculators as tiny bronze pocket abacuses. They still teach math using the (arguably Roman) abacus in Japan, and if you watch the high-scoring math students they'll flip around imaginary beads using their fingertips, visualizing the entire process and ticking it out in muscle memory. But nooo. Lets just have ten trillion errors in our math because 100000 and 10000 look so similar when you're writing in a hurry. Nobody ever screwed up for .

So 1111101000 meters in a kilometer? That's intuitive...

And everything comes out chewy because compressed flour creates more gluten bonds. You measure before you sift, we sift before we measure. Neither method is better. Fun thought experiment: create a system of measurement that naturally follows binary data storage. Metric is so pre-digital-age.

Flour sifter, which you should do anyway. It greatly improves the texture. I assume when you weigh 400 grams of brown sugar you made sure it wasn't wet.

... Anecdotes are not data? I dunno, I quit.

I always thought as much, which makes it all the more amazing I've had several Europeans absolutely convinced Americans grab a drinking glass from the cabinet to measure with. You'd think an unscrupulous car dealer in American posts inflated horsepower ratings by using Shetlands. Anyway, I'm thoroughly distracted from reality by this thread. Tchau.

It takes up less space because the whole set nests inside itself. Furthermore two cups are a pint, two pints are a quart, four quarts are a gallon, and 42 gallons are a barrel of oil as traded on the world commodity markets. Its really not hard. And let me be clear, nobody cooks with pinches.

Nobody does it anyway, although strictly speaking, your hand doesn't change size from day to day. Since cooking is almost always a ratio and the recipe can be adjusted to taste, it follows that a woman making biscuits every morning in a log cabin can get pretty consistently good at it. Just saying.

This widely-held misconception that Americans just grab a lowball or a wine glass out of the cabinet and shove it in a bin of flour defies critical examination. Measuring cups are standard things. And yeah. I'm in a large family that cooks a lot, and for all the grandparents, aunts etc I've watched cook in a dozen kitchens, I've never seen a kitchen scale in my life. I'm seeing reviews for .01 gram precision kitchen scales "for coffee lovers" and wonder how you keep dry goods from falling off everywhere without hassling over bowls and tare weights. - - - Updated - - -

Proposal in the form of a question with absolutely no details. Solicitation for discussion. (These things bug me. Am I the only one? I'd think it was against the rules to write a paragraph in the OP.)

Cooking in metric requires a scale? I've never been in a kitchen with scales. They don't fit in a drawer the way a set of measuring cups do. One cup of butter is always one cup of butter as well. If all you have is weird offcuts or Crisco, you just squish it into a measuring cup. Do all European households have a little electric food scales? Oh God, Google is flooded with .uk images of food scales. You do. That's unreal. I've only seen food scales in grocery store produce sections. This whole conversation reminds me of the MST3K skit where the bots were arguing IBM versus Mac. They're both perfectly good systems and its really just down to user preference. It also reeks of "why doesn't America do X" threads from dark, painful forums past full of echo-chamber logic. So I'm done here.

People keep referring to Imperial units of measure I've never heard of or that don't exist. For example, we do not measure butter in "sticks". A half-cup of butter just happens to come in a stick-shaped form factor standardized across all the manufacturers, with a foil wrapper that has gradients marked for 1 tablespoon/eight cup/quarter cup marks. I really don't know how else you'd measure butter, unless you mean to tell me you crazy Uropeeuns mash it into a measuring spoon to get 50 milliliters of the stuff. That would just be silly and slow compared to knifing off a quarter-inch from a stick. And that's another thing. I don't like cooking with units filled with zeroes. Every Uropeeun recipe on Youtube has some posh-sounding British woman counting off one-thousand, five hundred and fifty milliliters of flour. You don't need a scale that granular and precise for making cookies. Just say two and a fourth cups of flour! Its so easy to double too. Four and a half. One and an eight. Ultimately I don't like metric because everything is shoehorned into the same units for the sake of standardization. Its fine if you like it. Use it all you want. Just celebrate diversity. Oh, and everyone stop pretending the Mars Polar Lander was lost due to metric/Imperial. It was a software error in the landing engine shutdown logic. The "Lockheed Used Imperial" story is a bogus lie propagated by the big-government media hacks at CNN to further the adoption of Metric in the US as part of a Fabian attempt to covert the world to UN-standardized laws. Disclaimer: At some point the preceding statement becomes self-parody.

Yes, but it was coded with rope memory, which of course uses knots. Edit: I killed the thread, which in this case means Mission Accomplished. USA! USA!

The USA is already legally metric. We just prefer to send our astronauts to the Moon with non-Metric spaceships so you can't copy how awesome we are.

Little if anything would change. A mere 90-100 bar of pressure being relieved from the surface makes no significant difference when one considers the pressures involved in volcanism and geology as a whole.

A fourth-generation nuclear weapon is still a nuclear weapon. Since you are loading mass onto your ship, one may as well make that mass as potent as possible. And I can't tell you the range of the plasma jet. I see "two thousand kilometers" thrown around, and fractions of a radian. The program was never declassified after fifty years.

I swear this is 9/10ths of my thought process in this forum.

If we were attacking a Dwarven Necromancer we would need to also avoid any wool clothing, as it could be raised as undead hair-monsters and push us to death.

A kinetic-kill weapon can also be nuclear. Perfectly effective.