Harry Wyeth wrote on 2002-07-01 10:56 UTC: > He's right. All you have to do is walk into a building supply or hardware > store and see the thousands of items used in construction so realize that > there will be no real progress toward SI in the good old USA until the > federal government makes some real progress in mandating change.
The only way forward is a very high level decision in one of the major political parties to actually initiate metrication. This was supposed to have happened in the early 1970s and failed in the US. It is time to try it again at full scale. Making the metric system the only legally recognized system of measurement in the US is a decision that needs to be made by the president and congress leaders personally. Their personal interest in the matter has to be sparked, otherwise you will spend the next 50 years here discussing minor technicalities. All the rest are trivial technical details. You need to awaken the interest of your representatives with an endless flood of letters, faxes, telephone calls and visits. Tell them again and again that the current situation is unsatisfactory, that the United States is out of line and not fit for the 21st century without joining the rest of the world in using globally accepted conventions, for which the metric system and the standard paper formats are the two most urgent and also the most easy to tackle issues. How many of you here are a member of a political party? If you want to achieve a major political goal, you should join one right now and make your voice heard from inside the decision making system. Metrication is a political process. You have to study, understand, and use the political infrastructure to get it onto the agenda and adressed. Visit the web sites of the available political parties, choose one, and join today. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
