Giant Greek Tomb Discovered 164
schwit1 writes Archaeologists have uncovered the largest tomb ever discovered in Greece and think it is linked to the reign of Alexander the Great. "The tomb, dating to around 300 BC, may have held the body of one of Alexander's generals or a member of his family. It was found beneath a huge burial mound near the ancient site of Amphipolis in northern Greece. Antonis Samaras, Greece's prime minister, visited the dig on Tuesday and described the discovery as 'clearly extremely significant'. A broad, five-yard wide road led up to the tomb, the entrance of which was flanked by two carved sphinxes. It was encircled by a 500 yard long marble outer wall. Experts believe a 16ft tall lion sculpture previously discovered nearby once stood on top of the tomb."
meh (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be a requrement for people to include all of the measurments in metrics so people shouldn't be requred to dechipher how many feetsies are there in a yard and how much that is in crows wings, car tyres, pencil lenghts, cat paws etc.
meh (Score:3, Insightful)
It should be a requirement for people leaving primary school to be able to convert units.
Re:meh (Score:2, Insightful)
For the useless endeavor of catering to 5% of the world population? No, thanks, we are quite happy using the SI and base 10 conversions. Also, it comes with the benefit of NOT needing to state the country issuing a specific measurement or whether is intended to use at sea or land (not to mention funny prefixes like gross).
I can understand if there were any clear benefit to use the old imperial units, but there is none (zero, zilch, nada, other than nationalistic pride) and lots of downsides, so is about time you guys enter the 20 century and make life simpler for everyone.
Re:meh (Score:3, Insightful)
It should be a requirement for people leaving primary school to be able to convert units.
It often is. I recall that we briefly mentioned imperial units in history class in primary school. A foot is 296.904mm but that wouldn't apply here since we are talking about Greek imperial units so we should probably use the Greek foot (pous) of 308.2 mm.
That is the thing with imperial units, every empire has their own. Once people started dealing with more than just the next nation and started to travel a little bit further the conversion became really complex. Metric would never have been adopted is imperial units had been usable.
The only thing that makes it possible to use imperial units at all today is that everyone except one group has been abandoned in favor of metric.
Re:meh (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want rough estimates, its simple. If its in feet, divide by 3 for meters. If its in yards, yards = meters. No, its not perfect, but its close enough, within 2% margin of error.
Its not going to change any time soon, and no amount of bitching is going to make it change any time soon, so get over it. I find it funny that the bitching usually comes from Europe, where language is about 'cultural identity' but you have to speak english to be functional in larger businesses. Using the same logic, we should eliminate Dutch, Italian, Greek, Finnish, Swedish, and so on because they're a minority method of communication.
Re:meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes and no (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a requirement leaving primary school to be able to do a division. it is not a requirement to know what feet or yard or stones or furlong are. When you have an international audience, it is polite to use the international measurement methods that about 95% of the world use maybe put it in parenthesis near the medieval unit. like say 500 yards (about 450 meters).
This has an ecological impact by the way, because if thousand of people google "500 yards to meter" the electricity and time lost, would have been better spent on something else. If one person the submitter does it it is maybe 5 second lost to him and no big deal. If say 10000 persons do it, guessestimate international audience slashdot, that's 50000 seconds lost, electricity, bandwidth usage and so forth. Not a lot but cumulated over the years ? And jsut because the submitter does not want to make 1 step, he forces those loss on everybody else
Re:meh (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand the frustration, hell, my first course in egineering, they devoted a big chunk to unit conversions. I just get aggrivated when year after year, story after story, someone starts complaining about units and we get a huge back-patting session where everyone congratulates each for not being from the US. It takes less time to press ctrl+t and type '5ft 6in to cm' in the top bar for a translation than it does to type out a whiny soap-box post like the type we commonly get.
There are two facts that need to be taken into acount when it comes to unit conversions. First, a story that targets a local demographic is usually going to be in the units that demographic relates to. This was a UK story, but even still, imperial units are commonly used even if they are 'officially' converted, hence the yards. A different matter could be made for asking the Slashdot editors to add them to summaries, but that's another tree to bark up. Also, partially in relation to the first point, a unit conversion of the US will probably not be fully implemented in our lifetime. Canada and the UK converted decades ago and the non-standard measures are still fairly common in everyday language and food.
I just get aggrivated when a story's comment section gets overrun with this crap. I find it obnoxious and off-topic. I don't ask for a conversion for perspective when people's heights or temperatures are posted in metric, I convert myself and expect others to not be lazy.