Wild thing
It's hard to find work as a doctor when using your real name will get you killed. So hard that when a reclusive billionaire offers Dr. Peter Brown, aka Pietro Brnwa, a job accompanying a sexy but self-destructive paleontologist on the world's worst field assignment, Brown has no real choice but to say yes. Even if it means that an army of murderers, mobsters, and international drug dealers-not to mention the occasional lake monster-are about to have a serious Pietro Brnwa problem. Facing new and old monsters alike, Dr. Brnwa's story continues in this darkly funny and lightning-paced follow up to Josh Bazell's bestselling debut.
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What Hacker News says
- Well, this calls for an excellent quote from "Wild Thing" by Josh Bazell: http://imgur.com/gallery/iDOzAa5
Also, Americans of XVIII century were like "We don't want your tea! We don't want your laws! We don't want your imperium! But the length of an arm of king Henry I should make a good base for measurement system." (Unfortunately I can't recall where I read it from.)
And to the article,
> [...] You can google conversions in seconds.
A counterargument to this point should be several failures (some by NASA) caused precisely by failing to do the conversion. I believe the author simply forgot to raise this one.
- I understand, that you know the metric system, and, judging by your reasoning for your love for the imperial system, I understand, that you know what you are talking about (better than me). So, please, do not understand my comment as wanting to advise you! It's just, that I found this (on the web, one day) to express so much the way I (having grown up with the metric system) feel about it:
"In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade -- which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to 'How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?' is 'Go fuck yourself', because you can't directly relate any of those quantities."
From: "Wild Thing" by [Josh Bazell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Bazell).
- “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie1 of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” Wild Thing by Josh Bazell.
- "In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to “How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?” is “Go fuck yourself,” because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities."
- Wild Thing, Josh Bazell
