I found this wake-up call on the USMA site, "Published articles on metric" under "Metric system information (provided by the USMA)".
Year 2000, no. 70 http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opletters.jsp?id=ns22406 When I loaded it, the number ns22406 at the end of the URL was changed into another number and I got a different item. On that page, just change the wrong number nsXXXXX in the URL to ns22406 and you will get the letter. Han Historian of Dutch Metrication, Nijmegen, The Netherlands First published in New Scientist print edition, subscribe and stay informed every week. That's about the size of it WITH the US's total dominance of global economic activities, we may soon see a beautiful system disappear in favour of an archaic one: the metric system of standards, in use in all countries except the US (and a few microscopic islands), is under threat. The metric system was devised to make computations easy, and it has been highly successful. In the European Union, producers must offer their wares in metric measures, preferably in round numbers. So I was astonished when I recently found that adverts for monitors in a French computer magazine gave their sizes in inches only. The same regrettable trend may be noticed in paper sizes. The European standard is based on divisions of a sheet that has sides in a ratio of square root of 2 and a surface area of 1 square metre: 1:(check)2 is the only ratio that allows you to cut a sheet into two and end up with pieces that have the same aspect ratio as the original--quite handy when you reduce or enlarge. Cut an A0 sheet in two and you get two pieces of A1. Cut one of these, and you get two sheets of A2 and so on. A4 is the size we all know from writing pads. Most magazines, including this one, were printed on A4. But now New Scientist is back to US sizes. Nature changed recently, too. So did the CERN Courier. And, horror of horrors, EuroScience, the club which endeavours to rival the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publishes EuroScience News on American format paper. Very annoying when you want to file these things together with standard A4 papers. Needless to say, not a single computer or printer allows you to use metric, because all hardware pitches are in fractions of an inch, not in whole numbers of millimetres. Truly, the Americans are coming. Robert Cailliau CERN Geneva
