Just one more Cultural Revolution post, although this one's a bit of a mystery, at any rate to me.

Oxford University in Britain wants to make their teaching of science less Eurocentric. In particular they want to "decolonize" the old imperial system of measurements: pounds and ounces, feet and inches, gallons and pints, etc.

I've read the news stories on this, and I can't for the life of me figure out what Oxford is trying to do. The science departments in British universities already teach exclusively in metric units, and have been doing so since the 1960s. Metric units are anyway just as Eurocentric as imperial units: they were invented in France. In fact, they are just as imperial: It was the France of the First Empire, Napoleon's France, that introduced them.

Whatever. I included this one mainly because it gives me the chance to air once again the speed of light as expressed in traditional British units: one point eight billion furlongs per fortnight.