2009-06-21
post/127591078
quote 17:29:49
“ ‘What’s with the imperial units?’ Malley asked, as we watched and listened to Andrea guiding us in to dock with the ice tanker.‘You’ll hear arguments about human scale and intuition and so forth,’ I explained, ‘but the older and coarser characters in space will sum it up in two words: fucking NASA. Most of the space settlements were built with ex-NASA stock or to NASA spec way back in the early days, and ever since then it’s been too much trouble to change. We’re locked into it.’
‘Yeah,’ said Andrea. ‘Which is why we are now two point five seven miles from a hundred thousand metric tons of ice. You’ve just got to love the consistency of it all.’ ”
The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod quoted on LibraryThing; an example of that sort of science fiction I was talking about. (Thanks to Tom for the link.)
