Happy Millennium!
According to the Ethiopian calendar, today is the last day of 1999, and the year 2000 begins tomorrow, so we should all be out in the streets celebrating.
Unfortunately, very little seems to be happening in Glasgow – not like in Addis Ababa.
Happy New Year! All the best wishes for the new millennium to all readers of this blog!
Madness for longer
And so it came to pass that the EU decided to allow the UK to retain the pint and the mile.
Madness!
Pupils in British schools have been learning metric exclusively for decades, so anybody younger than at least 40 have never learnt how to do calculation with imperial measures. That is, the situation is not at all comparable to the US where metric isn’t used anywhere.
I really think life would be much easier if the UK government would just bite the bullet and go fully metric so that kids could use the same system within and outwith school.
But will it happen now that the politicians can’t blame the EU for making them do the right thing?
The situation post Belgium
Many newspapers have been following up on this blog’s speculations about the end of Belgium (e.g., The Economist and The Independent).
The most interesting angle I’ve seen so far, however, was in The Brussels Journal that points out that Wallonia might itself fall apart if Belgium goes. There’s also a useful map.