Dears Carl, Carleton, Markus and all, I must respectfully disagree with your latest remarks concerning the time frame discussion. True, our main goal is metrication, BUT, there is absolutely no harm whatsoever in engaging in discussions for plans to improve upon the existing SI system.
Most of us here are also scientists, researchers, individuals who are seeking for improvements to our society's way of living through this issue of measurements. If we stop these activities we'd be no better than the old farts who keep saying that we should keep things as they have been for hundreds of years! Some here have been mentioning about other side issues like the euro, the economy and things like that. Well, I'm also sorry to say that I must acknowledge the relevance of many of these topics to our ultimate goal as these DO have significant impacts on this particular objective of ours, too. If we can't understand or analyze/evaluate the factors that influence our very mission than how can we be effective in achieving our lofty goal??? So, those of you who are not interested in this aspect of metrication (the improvement of the system itself who may significantly contribute to its adoption universally), just please hit the delete button and/or don't even bother reading those posts like I do with quite a few of them. But, please, do not be so upset about this. There is room for everybody and for different tastes for subjects to discuss. To conclude I'd just like to make a small remark on your particular comment below. On Tue, 23 Jul 2002 11:30:50 Markus Kuhn wrote: ... >I agree enthusiastically! This is the US Metric mailing list. If anyone >wants to reform calendars and civilian time notations, please set up a >calendar reform mailing list. You might find with a bit of research that >there are already several. This is in my opinion not the place to >discuss any new units of measurement or notations outside the scope of >existing ISO, IEC, BIPM, ANSI, IEEE, NIST, etc. standards and >guidelines. It takes already enough effort to get people interested in >date/time notation reforms as mild and obviously sensible as ISO 8601 >(see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html). > As much as I'd rather talk more about helping bringing the US to the metric fold, again, there is room for discussion of other topics, too. Besides, we have discussed some of these specific aspects to achieve that nearly to death, but when it comes to real action, let's face it, it's all been mostly "talk". Therefore, I see no harm in also discussing other things that, like it or not, ARE related to the SI system. >Please let's cut down on distractions and focus on the use and >proliferation in daily life of existing international standards. The >calendar reform stuff might be intellectually very interesting, but it >is completely unrelated to the scope of this mailing list, since it >would be a new standard, not the introduction of an already widely used >existing one. I honestly don't think so, so we clearly have a difference of opinion here. We all know that there are a lot of flaws in the current SI system, the time framework being one of them. True, so what if we may not have a chance to see this aspect of the SI system fixed in our lifetime? However, who knows or who can *absolutely guarantee* that it can't even happen? Great solutions, ideas, etc are things that require time, thought, dedication, discussion, perseverence, so... Let's please not forget our origins, folks. We may well be contributing towards making history! A history I humbly hope will be for the better and that will dawn upon us not too far into the future!... ;-) > [Also, none of the proposers of calendar reforms I have >seen here recently seems to be aware of the dozens of reforms proposed >over the last 300 years. They should first do their homework, find or >compile a comprehensive bibliography on the subject and read and >categorize the already existing literature on the subject.] >... I hope this is not a "cheap accusation" towards any of us who have been discussing this subject of time frame. But, FWIW for your information, and as far as I'm concerned, I think I am quite familiar with many of such proposals, but it takes fora like this here to evaluate these several options to ultimately either choose one of them or come up with a proposal that ultimately can be supported by the majority later on. In any case, just please be patient (but in the meantime, just please hit the delete button...) and a little more tolerant for the time being if you will. Thanks. Marcus Is your boss reading your email? ....Probably Keep your messages private by using Lycos Mail. Sign up today at http://mail.lycos.com
