Editor, Virginia Pilot Dear Editor, I have just read Kerry Dougherty's opinion column "Metric doesn't compute in the lives of most Americans", published May 5. I will have to fulfill Ms. Dougherty's prophecy and call her a Luddite. Luddites were people who opposed modernizing changes. At one time, columnists used facts to support their pontifications. The loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter was described by Ms. Dougherty as a Metric Mistake. In actuality, the entire program was designed, built, launched, and operated using metric units. It did this quite nicely, as have many other missions, until Lockheed-Martin fed data to the Jet Propulsion Lab data in non-metric units. So the error was allowing the participation of non-metric contractors (Luddites?) without providing sufficient safeguards. Don't take my opinion for it; read the opinions of the investigation boards and the inspector General at NASA. In my view, those who build careers in journalism are among the weakest Americans when it comes to mathematical things such as measurements and calculations. We have journalism majors on our campus but I see very few of them in my Introduction to Physics classes, although a multitude of students majoring in languages (including English), fine arts (music, sculpture, painting), and the social sciences take this general education core class. Over 95 % of the world uses metric units for "everything from supper on the table to satellites in space". It is the only measurement system they use in their daily lives and businesses. If a nomad on the Ethiopian desert can master the metric system, I believe that even Ms. Dougherty and her children can too. In fact, they have probably bought 2 L bottles of pop, run or read about 5 km and 10 km races, buy pencil leads dimensioned in millimeters for their automatic pencils, and insert 90 mm disks in their computers. (They really are not 3-1/2 inch disks, you know.) regards, James R. Frysinger -- James R. Frysinger University/College of Charleston 10 Captiva Row Dept. of Physics and Astronomy Charleston, SC 29407 66 George Street 843.225.0805 Charleston, SC 29424 http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cert. Adv. Metrication Specialist 843.953.7644
