Gregory J. Neumann wrote:
Well, that's what democracy is about. Except that in this case, the public was actually showing a fair amount of common sense,
No they're not. They are just sticking to what they already know. If the decision turns out to be right, it will be not thanks to common sense, but entirely by accident.
The meter is directly descended from a bad estimate of the distance from Paris to the north pole
What's wrong with that? Is any particular length much better than any other as long as we all agree on the same one?
Why this makes SI a "better" system is beyond me.
Let me explain it to you. In the SI system, also known as the metric system, we divide all units by multiples of ten, using standard prefixes. For example, a kilometre is one thousand metres, and a kilogram is one thousand grams. A millimetre is one thousands of a metre and a milligram is one thousands of a gram. This makes it easy to arbitrarily scale the units up and down for whatever you wish to measure, and it makes it easy to do accurate unit conversions.
In addition, the metric system derives some units from more basic ones. A second is the period of a pendulum that is one metre long. A litre is one cubic decimetre. A kilogram is one lire of water.
Guess I'm just an USian after all! ;-)
USians will come around at some point. Canada used to have the imperial system and now it's metric. The UK is in a transition period. When the current adult generation is dead, the UK will be entirely metric.
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