by Philip Yaffe

Growing up in the United States in the 1950s, I was used to such things as inches, feet, yards; ounces (liquid and solid), pints, pounds, etc. Then I entered my first physics class and was bowled over by the metric system.

“My God, this is so much better! Why don’t we use this?” I exclaimed.

After all; remembering that a kilometer is 1,000 meters is so much easier than remember that a mile is 5,280 feet and that a foot in turn is 12 inches. Remembering that a kilogram is 1,000 grams is so much easier than remembering that a pound is 16 solid ounces. Remembering that a liter is 1,000 milliliters is so much easier than remembering that a pint is 16 fluid ounces, that two pints (32 ounces) is a quart, and four quarts (128 ounces) is a gallon.

The Celsius system also seemed much easier than the Fahrenheit system. After all, water freezes at 0° C and boils at 100° C, which appeared considerably more logical than water freezing at 32° F and boiling at 212° F.

So why did the United States, Great Britain, and a number of other countries use these weird systems?

I got the answer the moment I stepped outside of the physics classroom. Although I mathematically understood metric units, I had no feel for them. If I went into a restaurant, I knew exactly what I was getting if I ordered an 8, 10 or 12 ounce steak. But if the menu had shown a 230, 280 or 340 gram steak, I would have been completely lost. Likewise, if I had to drive 60 miles, I understood that this meant about an hour on the road. But if I had to drive 95 kilometers, I would have had no idea of what this meant — other than it seemed to be considerably farther.

Every change is one’s basic routine is difficult, even if it is clearly an improvement. So it will still be some time before Liberia, Myanmar (Burma) and the United States, the only three countries that have not yet adopted the metric system, finally make the change. But it does seem to be inevitable.

France adopted the metric system in 1799, one of the consequences of the French Revolution. Japan made it official in 1868 and Russia in 1917. Even Great Britain, which initially spread inches, feet, miles, ounces, pounds, etc., around the world, joined the club in 1965.

Now that the world has gone so massively metric (and the holdouts are likely to do so in the foreseeable future), the question is: Why not complete the job? The fact is, even metric countries still use a number of old-fashioned, non-metric units that are largely irrational and mathematically cumbersome.

For example, why is an hour 60 minutes, and a minute 60 seconds, when an hour could be 100 minutes and a minute 100 seconds? For that matter, why is a day 24 hours rather than 10 hours, each hour made up of 100 minutes and each minute made up of 100 seconds? And why stop there? Why is the year made up of 12 months rather than 10?

If you think about it, the year used to be made up of ten months until Julius Caesar (July) and Caesar Augustus (August) stuck their vanity into it. Vestiges of the old ten-month calendar can still be seen in the names of the last four months of the year: September (septum = seven), October (octo = eight), November (novum = nine), and December (decem = ten). These should have been updated centuries ago.

Another apparently bizarre unit is the 360 degrees of a circle, with each degree being divided into 60 minutes, and each minute divided into 60 seconds. Couldn’t the circle be 100 degrees, divided into 100 minutes, divided into 100 seconds?

Well, yes it could.

Some mathematicians might argue that a system based on 60 has certain advantages for calculations over the metric system based on 10. For specialty applications, they could retain the 360 degree system, but there is no reason why the rest of us should suffer with it. In fact, for certain applications the 360 degree circle has been abandoned in favor of the two radian circle, based on the formula for circumference C = 2 π r (circumference = two times pi times radius)..

It is possible to cite many other measures that could be decimalized. However, we must be careful to make a distinction between conventional measures and natural ones.

It is a convention to have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. For whatever reason, we chose these units. However, it is not a convention that the year has 365 days because this is the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. This is a natural unit dictated by nature. It would make no sense to divide the year into 100 days just to make calculations easier.

Such non-sense is not beyond human ignorance. At the end of the 19^th century, an American state came very close to passing a law fixing pi at an even 3 in the belief that using it at its true value (3. 3.14159265 . . .) was just too cumbersome!

When considering possible changes, we should be aware that the definitions of fundamental units can change over time, often due to developments in science.

For example, since 1898 the kilogram, the basic unit of mass, has been defined in terms of the of the international prototype kilogram (IPK). This is a specifically constructed block of metal alloys maintained under minutely specified environmental conditions at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, France. However, since the IPK is subject to mass drift (changes in mass over time), serious discussions are now going on to redefine the kilogram in terms of a fixed number of carbon-12 atoms, silicon atoms, or other fundamental, reproducible physical properties.

The fact is, the IPK is the only SI unit (International System of Units) still defined in terms of a carefully conserved reference model. All others have been converted to physical properties reproducible anywhere in the world. For example, the meter used to be defined by a platinum-iridium rod. However, today it is defined as 1/299,792,458 of the distance travelled by light in 1 second (the “light-meter”), the denominator of the fraction being the speed of light in a vacuum

So when will the circle, the clock, and the calendar go metric? Probably not in the near future, but for psychological reasons rather than scientific ones.

Although few people use the 360 degree circle in their daily lives, this is how they learned (and suffered through) geometry in school, so they would likely oppose changing it simply because it would be inconvenient to do so. Also, certain aspects of the 360 degree circle have become common currency in many languages, where the equivalent of an “about-face” is often described as a “180 degree turn”.

Everyone uses the clock and the calendar constantly; they are integral to the fabric of daily life. Any attempt to decimalize them is almost certain to engender extremely stiff opposition. For the vast majority of people, such a change would not be just an inconvenience, but a major upheaval.

For millennia, the prospect of “squaring the circle” remained a mathematical challenge. In 1882 it was shown to be impossible because of the transcendental nature of pi. Making the circle “less round” (going from 360 degrees to 100 degrees) is not impossible, but chances are it will seem that way for a very long time to come.

Philip Yaffe is a former reporter/feature writer with The Wall Street Journal and a marketing communication consultant. He currently teaches a course in good writing and good speaking in Brussels, Belgium. His recently published book In the “I” of the Storm: the Simple Secrets of Writing & Speaking (Almost) like a Professional is available from Story Publishers in Ghent, Belgium (storypublishers.be) and Amazon (amazon.com).

For further information, contact:

Philip Yaffe
Brussels, Belgium
Tel: +32 (0)2 660 0405
phil.yaffe@yahoo.com, phil.yaffe@gmail.com

This Italian mountain

The Cathedral is a Church of pink sandstone consecrated to winegrowing and grape-harvest. It has involved construction spanning the Early Christian, Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic periods. The campanile, built in the 16C and modernised with the addition of Gothic windows, reaches 62 m. On the right side you will see the small Wine portal, which is decorated in imagery associated with winegrowing and grape-harvest. The church used to have exclusive rights to sell wine in front of this door.

In the Dominican Church (I Dominicani), you’ll see Frescoes by Friedric Pacher and by the Giotto school. This Church was Built in a Gothic style. It was than modified and then damaged during the secularisation of 1785. You must see Saint Giovanni Chapel (after the Rood Screen) for its frescoes by the Giotto school and its cloister, decorated in Frescoes by Friedrich Pacher.

At the Franciscan Church (I Francescani), admire a sculpted wood altar and a retable by Hans Klocker. This church burned down in 1291 and was then rebuilt in the 14C and the original arches put back a century later. The interior is marked by an Altar of the nativity in sculptured wood, decorated with a retable by Hans Klocker. The charming little cloister has elegant arches decorated in frescoes from the Giotto school.

From the day we are all born, we age everyday. As a young person, we don’t think about the later years in our life. We live in a very fast pace world today and it causes a lot of stress in our lives and as time goes on, the stress will affect us increasingly.

Everyone young and old, we all need to take care of our bodies and minds. By taking care of ourselves, it keeps us thinking, moving and helps prevent major illnesses such and cancer and many other diseases. We all have to work at keeping ourselves healthy and there is no better time than right now. The younger you start taking care of yourself the better it is; by starting early your catching things before they have time to progress.

So right now, start of by eating healthy. Keep an eye on that diet and make sure your not overeating, but eat enough to get vitamins you need to have. A good multivitamin is a good way to start adding supplements to what you don’t get in your food.

Food doesn’t always have the amount of vitamins anymore like they use to, and that starts at the farmer’s level. Don’t blame the farmer for this because they are just doing their jobs the same way we all go to ours everyday. The farmer has to add fertilizer, chemicals and even water to their crops to make them grow bigger, faster and for beauty too. Adding all these chemicals eat up all the natural vitamins that you need. Water has chemicals in it too; one reason why your water needs to be tested at least once a year especially if you have well water. Once the food is grown and ready to be shipped it is polished, coated to keep it nice and fresh looking during shipment, which is why this will take away some of the vitamins as well. Try to eat as much, homegrown food as you can and not processed foods. Fresh homegrown food is the best, since you get natural vitamins.

A good multivitamin isn’t going to hurt anyone. It is known that people who take a multivitamin everyday is in better health than someone who doesn’t. Sometimes your doctor may want you to take extra vitamin, as we grow older because our bodies change and sometimes require more of something. In addition, as we grow older our eating habits change and we don’t eat as much or we want to lose weight and don’t eat the right foods. Nevertheless, remember you can lose weight and still eat right.

As we grow older our bodies and mind change. All the stress we had growing up and continue through out our lives. Relieve that stress as much as possible because it can do a lot of harm to us. Stress is known to be a major factor for poor heart conditions, strokes, and it will lower our immune system, as we grow older.

A regular exercise program is good for all ages and helps relieve stress at the early ages as well. If only families took time out maybe as a family with their children and made it a part of their lives that would help relieve it during the younger years.

A person who learns and enjoys exercising on a daily basis will keep during it, as they grow older as well.

Exercising will help the older person to keep those bones more flexible so they don’t get stiff and weak. The heart gets benefit from exercising too. Exercise will cause the heart to produce naturally, by working it harder to keep it highly flavored. Exercising helps to keep our bodies toned up and helps us to lose weight, or at most keeping the weight maintained.

Remember starting early can help later in years to make your life healthier and more contented.

What needs to be well recognized, however, is the fact that Italy’s inventions were not limited in any way to merely material things. There are many inventions which represent shortcuts of various kinds for the accomplishment of mental processes and in facilities of this kind the practical genius of the Italians has been particularly fruitful. It was they who invented the various processes in arithmetic that have so simplified calculations. It is to them also that we owe as is made clear in the chapters on Mathematics and Astronomy the algebraic solutions of equations of various kinds that had seemed impossible or could be done only by long time taking guess-work before the Italian mind ordered them.

Some idea of Italian practical genius in printing may be obtained from the fact that they invented paragraphing in print as we now have it, introduced pagination, invented capital letters, first arranged punctuation and added all those features which make the modern printed book so much more easy to understand than the old manuscripts or even the first books that were printed. To them too we owe the title page with the information that it now conveys at a glance and many other features that are real discoveries.

Italy has a lot more history to discover on location, and one of best ways to do it is touring with your own private driver-guide.

Italy must yield to Germany’s claim for priority in the invention of printing, but while the Germans invented, no nation did so much as Italy for the diffusion of printing, for the development of the art, it very soon became in their hands and for the encouragement of every detail of fine bookmaking that came with it. Above all Italy was the fruitful mother of inventions that made the printing art of immensely greater value to mankind than it was as it came from the hands of the original German inventors. Henry Louis Bullen, the curator of a museum of typography, said in 1914:

“From 1465 to 1501 thirty-five years printing was established in seventy-three Italian cities. Each printer had to make his own presses and types and cases and other appliances; there were no manufacturers or merchants making or selling these necessaries. Sixteen hundred and eighty (1,680) distinct type-faces have been identified as the product of the Italian printers in that brief period, including the most beautiful Roman and Text types ever used, and the first Italic. Was ever a greater boon in the printing industry? Was ever an art more eagerly adopted? Printers outside of Germany have been influenced more by the early Italian workmanship than by the German. Every printer or typefounder among us is the debtor of the earlier Italian printers, none the less so if unconscious of the obligation and ignorant of the benefactors.”

Father Beccaria was the first to invent a series of electrical instruments that demonstrated how well the energy might be applied. Priestley, the English discoverer of oxygen, in his History of Electricity has praised Beccaria’s ingenuity and has described some of these rather striking instruments. Galvani demonstrated Galvanism and opened up a whole new vista in science. Volta invented the Voltaic pile, the first continuous source of electricity that men ever had and for that reason some times spoken of as a greater invention than the steam engine. In the light of modern developments in electricity in the mechanical world, this expression now seems to have much more truth than when it was originally uttered. Volta also invented the gold leaf electroscope and a number of very ingenious instruments for the demonstration of certain physical phenomena. Nobili invented the thermopile and the thermo-electroscope, while at the end of the nineteenth century the Italian Marconi had the practical inventive genius to bring together a series of discoveries that had been made by others and combine them in such a way as to make wireless telegraphy with its wonders possible.

A lady doctor from Arizona has blown the lid off the best-kept secret in weight loss ever discovered — and this has the whole diet food and drug industries turned upside down and in nothing less than a torrential uproar.

Her name is Dr Suzanne Gudakunst, and she’s marching to the beat of a different drum.

And no, nothing about her “secret” is difficult — nor does it require that you do something completely out of the ordinary or anything unnatural.

Instead, the Arizonian boasts proudly “…this is something that I caught onto just before 2002 when there was so much research and exploration going around concerning the human colon and digestive system working in harmony with nutritional absorption, and I started doing independent studies just to test things at first … but which I later expanded on after seeing some fantastic results.”

This same woman medical practitioner went on to accurately determine a definitive correlation between harmful plague and parasitic infestations of the human bowel tract, and people suffering chronic obesity — and who despite intense diet and exercise appeared to be unable to lose any weight whatsoever.

Over the course of six years the Arizona doctor developed a number of natural treatments for the removal of these same harmful, even life-threatening plaques and rapidly reproducing digestive parasites — and when applied to even worse-case patients suffering extreme obesity (98% of which were in immediate danger of dying) she saw a 100% effectiveness and success rate.

She then borrowed from her research on the severely obese, and applied the same strategies on milder cases of overweight persons — only to find the same effectiveness and quality results as described above (although the individual weight loss per subject wasn’t nearly as much as those obese patients 100 lbs to 200 lbs or more overweight).

So powerful is her secret that she’s able to reverse diabetes, rid illness altogether in people suffering from cancer (linked directly to poor diet and overweight factors), as well as an elimination of an entire spectrum of serious and otherwise life-threatening diseases.

Nearly 100% of all her case subjects were told in the alternative by “conventional doctors” that they either had just months or years to live, or they would never live a life anything resembling remotely a “normal” existence — yet after applying Dr Suzanne’s treatments saw a complete contradiction to others doctors’ prognoses.

Again, nothing about her secret is unnatural or requires someone to do any major action or modification in their lives.

In fact, her entire treatment is based completely on built-into-nature ‘protection agents’ scattered throughout the world in the form of select herbs, extracts, and organic constituents, and which can be found in a variety of plants — but when combined in specific combinations and carefully chosen amounts make for a solution to what is perhaps the world’s worst ever plague: OBESITY (and the illnesses and diseases resulting from it — or at least severely aggravated or exacerbated by it).

Now to everyone else’s great gain, whether suffering from just a few extra pounds and inches, to those extremely fat and overweight, this brave, bold lady doctor is releasing to the general public her secret for forever destroying the tight unrelenting closed-fist of obesity’s stronghold over the now more than 40% of Americans labeled obese, and others worldwide.

But she’s not promising any of us for how long.

Some experts and sociologists suggest that in the bigger scheme of things, the world will never tolerate a discovery of such magnitude, any more than it would be realistic to expect a car that runs on water (even if very real) to ever become commercially available to the general public for day-to-day use.

One well-respected and famous diet & wellness author wrote years ago that if anyone ever “truly unlocked the keys to permanent fat loss, they may actually suffer the same fate as JFK.”

It is currently available at:

=> Your access to the secret

…so you may want to head on over there now and get it and before someone or “something” gets it forever yanked out of ever getting in YOUR hand at least.

It’s in a very easily readable format and is quickly and readily understood and mastered by anyone with even a 4th grade reading level.

While you’re there, why not scroll down and review for yourself the huge successes others are now having with this incredible breakthrough in rapid, massive weight loss and extremely improved and enhanced health, now made freely available to the rest of us?

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