Thank you, Mike Francis, for your Editorial Sketchbook in Sunday's edition, which inspired this piece for submission consideration ("Embassy with unwelcome embellishments," Nov. 1. I love my job. As a ...

The United States is one of just three countries that "prefers" imperial measurements over the international metric standard. The motivation why has less to do with official policy than you might ...

Mathematician and author, the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) was an aristocrat who nevertheless embraced the early stage of the French Revolution. Even as the Jacobins hunted him down during the ...

An oft-repeated "weird fact" is the claim that, if not for the scourge of Caribbean piracy, the United States would have adopted the metric system in the 1790s, making it the country's standard system ...