Before he became an outlaw, Song was a small official in a local court, and his biggest ambition was to serve the imperial system.

FORBES: Blind Activist's Blind Faith Reveals Chinese Attitude toward Authority

Weary of making bureaucratic appointments solely on the basis of letters of recommendation, Yang set aside a number of posts for applicants who performed well on a new system of imperial examinations.

FORBES: A Case of Bad Management: The New York Mets and the U.S. Government

Was Hirohito a mere figurehead atop a powerful system of authoritarian rule, an imperial puppet manipulated by a military elite?

ECONOMIST: A god dethroned

Investigators have attributed the failed 1999 Climate Orbiter mission to human error: The flight software used metric units while the ground system that wrote the code used Imperial measures.

MSN: History littered with failed Mars probes

Never having known the wonders of imperial measures, they would probably prefer the easier-to-learn metric system that is standard in the rest of Europe.

ECONOMIST: Double standards

One, Mars Climate Orbiter, had a particularly humiliating crash, because the fault lay with a group of engineers who, in defiance of common sense, had continued to use imperial units of measurement in their calculations when all around had adopted the metric system.

ECONOMIST: Exploring Mars