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this
says it all, especially the last sentence !!
***
It's
fun, but too easy, to deride the metric system and the measures used
by
5.719 billion people -- 95.4% of the world's population -- every day,
for
everything they do. The rest of us buy cola in liters, video tape and
film
in millimeters, aspirin in milligrams, and light bulbs in watts
(electrical
measures, and everything in science, have always been
metric-based). Our
largest trading partners and closest neighbors, Canada
and Mexico, are
metric countries. Major U.S. industries, such as auto,
machine tool,
electronics, soft drink, liquor, pharmaceutical and health
care, are
primarily or completely metricated. The metric system is
decimal-based, easy
to use and coherent; the inch-pound system is not. It
is said that on the
day India converted, illiterate street vendors adapted
in a few hours. Even
Journal readers seem to have taken to decimal-based
stock trading without
serious trauma. Let's let the English stew over their
archaic measures while
we get on with it.
William Brenner
Chevy
Chase, Md.
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