The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost in 1999 because navigation units were mixed between English and metric. That’s American English of course where their ton is short and their mile is long. In these times it would seem eminently sensible for the world to use one standard measuring system, and we do it’s just that they don’t. But not all is rosy in the metric world either.

We have a hole to fill. As a gap it isn’t very big, just the area an old garden shed occupied. That was removed last week by Chris and Ron “No job too small” who charged us a hundred quid to dump the old building. Then another two hundred to dig up the reinforced concrete base it stood on. Sam picked it all up in his ancient pick-up that is part Ford, part rust. All four of them are of undefinable age, probably older than us, the Ford excepted.

After three hundred quid were are left with a flattened area that is apparently made of lumps of the Berlin Wall covered in a thin layer of dust. We dug a trench across it, the width and depth of a spade. Then spent the rest of the day taking the bricks to the local tip. Plainly we need some younger muscle with transport for the rubble. More to the point, with what do we fill the hole? Assuming it’s not full of old Trabants.

How big is space, anyway?
We ran into the same problem as NASA as we searched the ‘Net for a lump of garden to fill the void. Exactly how large is space? Elementary maths told us it is width x length x depth which in this case is 14′ x 8′ x 1′ or 112 cubic feet or 12.4 cubic yards or 3.1 cubic meters. My Mac’s calculator even worked that out as 3171.5 litres but how much soil is that, an old Ford pickup full, a dumpy bag or several lorry loads?

No help was found from the web sites we visited. Most have calculators to work out the amount of soil required but they varied from £50 to nearly £1000. Even accounting for quality this is a ridiculous spread, plus they mixed metric and imperial as well as delivery sizes. Some are going to bring a tonne or a ton, others cubic meters, while the remainder prefer litres.

So we have a hole to fill in the garden which we are looking into.

Or should I say: Assim nós temos um furo para preencher o jardim em que nós estamos olhando.

Which roughly equals: Così abbiamo un foro per riempire il giardino cui stiamo esaminando.