When my wife (Michele) and I visited Canada a couple summers ago, I
tried to purchase a metric-only tape measure in a store, but they only
had tape measures cluttered with dreaded inches. We only visited a few
places in British Columbia, which may not be representative of
everywhere in Canada.
David Pearl MetricPioneer.com 503-428-4917
----- Message from c...@traditio.com ---------
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:48:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: c...@traditio.com
Reply-To: Martin Morrison <c...@traditio.com>
Subject: [USMA:52705] Why the Inconsistency?
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <usma@colostate.edu>
The Science Channel, which is a part of the Discovery complex, ran a
"How It's Made Program" last night. From the credits at the end, at
least this episode was produced in Canada. I was curious to see how
it would run in the United States.
The program, in the segment on the mining of silver ore, always used
kilograms instead of pounds. There was a close-up of a scale, which
displayed a reading in "mg". But a distance was given in inches.
These persistent inconsistences (as Canada certainly uses
millimetres or centimetres) are quite perplexing. I could
understand an all-metric program or an all non-metric program,
dumbed down for the United States. Another program, on astronomy,
talked about astronomical distances in miles (where it hardly
mattered for the common perception), but shorter distances (such as
for the size of a meteor) in metres.
It has always perplexed me why these programs are so inconsisent.
In a curious way, it confirms my approach that the United States is
*not* a non-metric country. It is a country stuck in the middle of
conversion, not unlike England and even Canada.
Martin Morrison
Training and SI Columnist, "Metric Today"
----- End message from c...@traditio.com -----
