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I explained to the chairman that DMA product specifications were set by the users and that we could not tell the Navy and Air Force to fly their altitudes in meters and speeds in kilometers per hour (Army charts were already metricated). Also that we were bound by NATO agreements. And finally that nautical miles (and knots) have been international standards since the 1920's. That was in the late 1980's and I don't know how much progress (if any) has been made in setting the timetable. Aircraft around the world (except in Russia and Argentina) still fly altitudes in feet and U.S. Navy ships still measure depth in fathoms. And the Metric Program at the National Institute of Standards is currently staffed by -- two people (as a collateral duty). I am not against metrication. Metric units have definite advantages. Scientists and mathematicians have happily been using the system ever since it was invented by the French over 200 years ago. The medical arts switched a long time ago. And the automotive industry has been switching steadily over the past two decades (as assembly lines are modernized and mechanized) with no pain whatsoever. However, 90% of today's enterprises in the U.S. still have not even begun the transition, assuming they even intend to. My point is that the switch should be made when and where it makes sense. It it should be voluntary, or market-driven, not mandated. And the decision should not be made by a group of bureaucrats for no other reason than a personal preference for the tidy decimal system. Some elites interpret the reluctance to switch as a sign of numerical illiteracy on the part of the general public. I read an article in Natural History magazine by a mathematician who sneered that oddsmakers were mathematically challenged because they expressed odds as "7 to 2 instead of 3.5". What this effete mathematician failed to observe was that the bettor knows exactly how much he stood to win on a two-dollar bet, so what difference does it make? In the 1970's during the Carter administration (Jimmy Carter was a metric enthusiast), I attended a baseball game in Cincinnati, and was surprised to see painted below the foot markers on the outfield walls the equivalent distance in meters, right down to the decimeter. And during a drive up to Columbus, the mileage signs on the interstate included the converted value in kilometers, to the tenth. This "Think Metric" program failed miserably, because it stressed simply conversion, with no practical application. It had the same effect of mandating a language change from English to Esperanto. The "Official" U.S. System of Weights and
Measures (Back to Top) A century and a half ago, when continental Europe formally adopted the French-designed metric system, scientists, bureaucrats, and academia had won a great victory. (Even in European "democracies", the intelligentsia generally have the advantage.) Their preferred system was now the Law. However, the merchants, carpenters, cooks, sportsmen, farmers, and most importantly, the manufacturers, were not consulted. The non-producers had dictated to the producers what tools to use in their crafts. The U.S. welcomed the European effort at standardization, but was not fond of the weird units that were adopted which appeared to be nothing more than an obsession to express everything in tens. So Congress adopted the metric system, but in the following sense: every standard U.S. inch-pound unit could now be officially defined in terms a precise conversion to metric. (Example: one foot equals exactly 0.3048 meters.) Done. Convenience and Practicality (Back to Top) Construction. The construction industry is based on feet and inches. If the inch is too long, there is the half inch. Smaller than that is the quarter-inch. Then the eighth, and so on, until the 64th inch, which is small enough for even the most meticulous craftsman. What does the metric system offer? Well, there's the meter, which is longer than a yard, so is too long in whole amounts, else there would be whole-meter standards somewhere. There are only centimeter (cm) standards, but centimeters are very small. The U.S. stud length is exactly eight feet and plywood dimensions are 4x4 feet or 8x8 feet. In Europe, the corresponding standards are 120cm and 240cm. This is simpler? The 16" stud spacing becomes 40cm. So the meter is too long and the centimeter too short. The next smallest unit is the millimeter. It's smaller than 1/16" and larger than 1/32". Not much flexibility here. But believe it or not, the construction industry is metricating (see the NIBS web site), but the trades (the guys and gals who actually do the work) are still inch-pound. Tho trade most affected is probably plumbing, which would have to convert all of its tools, pipes, fittings, and threads. Cooking. Cooks measure ingredients by weight and volume. For weight, our system of pounds and ounces has a long history and has been adapted over this history to the convenient system we have today, based on halves, quarters, eighths, and sixteenths. The metric system requires us to use kilograms or grams, units which are again either too large or too small to use in convenient standards. The same goes for volume measurements. How many milliliters is a pint of cream? How many grams is a quarter-pound stick of butter? How many grams in a teaspoon or deciliters in a cup? I'm not saying we should memorize the conversions, but why replace perfectly good teaspoons, tablespoons, cups and ounces with grams and milliliters? Most cans, bottles, and jars sold in stores contain less than a liter, so what good is it in markets? In Europe, cooks still use cups and spoons to measure ingredients, but usually without any idea of the metric units they are supposed to represent. Or if they do know that a cup is either 240ml or 250ml (depending on which standard you use), they still think of it as -- a cup. The same goes for tablespoons and teaspoons. Sports. A football field is 91.4 meters long. It's 27.4 meters from home to first base, and 18.3m from the mound to the plate. One lap around a collegiate track (440 yards) is 402.336 meters, and a 10,000 meter run is 24.85 laps. Randy Johnson's pitches reach 160 kilometers per hour (or should we say 575 meters per second?). Mark McGuire can hit a home run 150 meters. I can go on, but you get the idea. Transportation. If a Lexus fuel economy is listed at 7.1 liters per hundred kilometers (the metric standard), can it go from Cincinnati to Chicago without refueling? In aviation, the standard altitude separation between aircraft in controlled airspace is 2000 feet. They're considering changing it to 1000 ft. What will the metric standard be? 600 meters and 300 meters respectively? Navigation. It's ironic that the meter was originally devised for navigation, but navigation is the one area where the SI will not metricate. (Even time and geometric units have not been decimalized - yet.) The meter was originally supposed to be one ten-millionth of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole. But their measurements were off by a bit so they are stuck with an arbitrary standard which has been widely rejected for navigation.While foot-soldiers and artillerymen can work with meters in their smaller battlespace, big-space navigators must still use latitude and longitude, and with that the nautical mile. Recognizing this reality (for the time being anyhow), the SI bureaucrats simply adopted the nautical mile into their system, and set its length at exactly 1,852 meters (not quite a decimal number, is it?). It would have made more sense to define the nautical mile as 2,048 yards (2048 is the eleventh power of two). Computers. Decimal numbers and computers are like water in chocolate. They are incompatible. Did you know that "mega" in computers is 220 (1,048,576), and not 109 (1,000,000)? And that the world's largest chip maker manufactures its chips to inch standards? For more about numbers and computers, see below. Decimals vs. Fractions (Back to Top) The entire objective of metrication is decimalization, not the units themselves. Decimalization is the replacement of fractions and ratios with decimal numbers. This makes the job easier for scientists, but does it help us in our everyday lives? The bureaucrats aren't asking that question, as they should have when the SEC told the U.S. stock market to convert from fractions to decimal in 2000 (metrication doesn't allow the use of those pesky fractions). Sure, bankers and accountants prefer the decimal system, because nobody enters 12 and 17/32 of a dollar in their ledgers nowadays. (Fine, but neither do they enter 12.53125, and the rounded value, $12.53 is not the same amount. Who gets to keep the 0.00125, or 1/800th of a cent?) In their rush to eliminate fractions, which "nobody understands" (really?), they thought they were adopting a more "rational" system. But were they? In the Information Age, where almost all calculations are performed by machines ("computers" to laymen), decimal accuracy should be no problem, and calculation precision is easier to attain. Well, that's not how it turns out. Digital computers are binary machines. This means they function internally with the Base Two number system. So all numbers are represented internally as a power of two rather than ten. Computers and calculators are programmed to translate the numbers to human-readable (Base Ten) form. (People who studied computer science in my time could actually read, count, and calculate in binary, octal, and hexadecimal -- the last two are just notation variants of binary -- but today they're learning OOP and animation in C++.) Whole numbers are not a problem, but many decimal fractions must be approximated! Using dollars as an example, 0.03, 0.07, 0.09, 0.11, 0.13, etc. cannot be expressed rationally in binary. So they use large registers to reduce the effect of the error and hope everything balances out in the end. There is an entire theoretical field associated with this problem which I won't go into, but suffice to say that it is a problem we live with, and cannot be solved unless we humans switch from Base 10 to Base 8 (octal) or Base 16 (hexadecimal). This would make computer scientists happy, but not many others. "Sir, your total comes to $2A.EC." So rather than solve a problem by eliminating stock trading in fractions based on repeated halving, the SEC mandated a Ten-Friendly system, thereby introducing inherent errors that weren't there before. Ten-Friendly (Back
to Top) (a) Only primitive peoples counted with their fingers. More advanced societies used abaci, beads, writing, and other counting devices. Today all of our important counting (and calculation) is done with binary machines. (b) The hand really has only four fingers -- the other digits are actually thumbs -- so we really have two thumbs and eight fingers, a numerically more interesting combination lost on the myopic French who saw only ten fingers. (c) The number ten does not occur anywhere in nature, but the numbers two and three are everywhere. Two is the number of symmetry, and three is the number of balance and stability. An entire mathematic discipline is based on the triangle. Moreover, 32 gives us 9, a fascinating and powerful number. And products of two and three synergistically yield the even more elegant and everyday numbers such as 6, 12, 24, 36, 48, etc., numbers very useful and powerful for measuring time and space. In contrast, the prime numbers 5, 7, 11, and 13 are awkward and cumbersome -- and 10 is simply 2 times 5. A very unfortunate choice for a numbering system. Repeated Halving (Back to Top) The brain easily accommodates repeated halving (and doubling), which is another way of saying "powers of two", but powers of ten are anything but natural. The advantage of moving the decimal point one way or the other only works when multiplying or dividing the number by ten, and thus is strictly notational, not quantitative or qualitative. Notational advantages are not the same as practical advantages. That's why our rulers are graticuled in repeated halving units. What's Taking So Long? (Back to Top) Eventually, however, the UK went along with the European continent presumably to comply with Common Market (predecessor to the EU) regulations. (However, many Brits still use the now-illegal Imperial system.) Australia, Canada, and New Zealand followed along, although Canada uses a hybrid during her transition. (How many kilometers per imperial gallon does yer Toyota get, eh?) The U.S. is the last industrialized country to convert, and it's taking much longer than anyone anticipated. An obvious reason is cost. Our manufacturing infrastructure is huge, and it was logically decided to perform the conversion concurrent with normal equipment replacement and modernization, not overnight. (If we were Afghanistan, we could probably convert in a few hours.) Everyone thought the conversion could take place in not much more than ten years, but definitely less than 20. But 23 years have gone by since the Act was passed, and we can still buy a pound of butter at the supermarket and 2x4 studs at the home center. And Carmel is still 26 miles from Big Sur. Another obstacle is the attempt to fix something that isn't broken. When Europe adopted the metric system, her manufacturing base was smaller than that of San Diego county. Bringing the U.S. in line with Europe now amounts to taking the mountain to Mohammed. This in the name of international commerce and trade. But the U.S. is its own largest trading partner. (It would be interesting to know the dollar value of commerce between California and the other 49 states.) Second is Canada (which may explain why her abandonment of inch-pounds took so long). In industries where exports are important (medical equipment comes to mind, but there are plenty of other examples), you find that the manufacturer uses whatever units the customer wants. So what's the problem? How does this affect the thickness of a bassoon reed? But the real obstacle is the American people. We are ruled by our own consent. We don't take kindly to bureaucrats and diplomats telling us how to live or work. We tolerate less intrusion in our daily lives than our European or Canadian cousins. So metrication must achieve popular consensus, and will not happen by decree. See George Orwell's opinion of metrication in his As I Please column. A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come (Back to Top) |
