Virtually Home

Australians are fond of dunking on Americans for not using the metric system, but the conversion to metric happened in 1970 and obviously hasn't been complete. Speech here is filled with Imperial units -- inches, gallons, miles -- even among younger people who were born after the adoption of the metric system. People routinely give their heights in feet and inches and the weights of their new infants in pounds and ounces. Temperature is the only thing I would say is truly always measured in the metric system. I'm gaining an intuitive grasp of the temperature in Celsius degrees, and getting better at expressing speeds and distances using kilometers. But I miss having a unit to describe a length of about a foot. It seems like a good length to have shorthand for. My biggest problem with metric, though, is that its biggest claim to usefulness is the easy conversion among units. It turns out this is not all that easy for people practicing it. Publications are riddled with conversio...

I feel comfortable saying Australia is obsessed with America. Our news is all over their tv stations, our television shows are streaming in their living rooms, and iconography about America is everywhere. Every trip to the beach turns up a swimsuit or towel bedecked with the American flag. Maybe one of the most conspicuous things is that about one in three people seem to own a Los Angeles Dodgers hat, and maybe one in five seem to own a New York Yankees hat. I am increasingly sure those two teams are almost entirely funded by sales of their merch in Australia.  This is particularly mysterious because baseball is (emphatically) not a thing  in Australia. Cricket is the thing played in back yards, at parks, and on beaches. It's the thing people listen to on the radio and watch on tv in the bars. The baseball caps are popular because the interlocking LA is taken to just mean, well, Los Angeles, California -- and the interlocking NY on the Yankees hat has come to symbolize New Yor...