If the American or Imperial measuring tapes are that much more suited to human needs than metric ones, then I do not understand what I saw some years ago. In a museum at the university the manager was working at some exhibit. He had a dual measuring tape (why these should exist in the Netherlands is beyond me. Let market forces do away with them). I saw him seemingly measuring with the American/Imperial side. But he was confused and when he saw what he was looking at, he turned it around to the metric side which his inferior to the ifp one, at least that is what Mr. Owen is trying to tell us.
He could just as well plead for the use of 086 to 486 computers and MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 because they work so well! What about old green or brown computer screens? Punched cards or music tapes? They are splendid storage tools! And they work well! I would agree, that crazy stuff in American building works, but metric does as well, and after having *become familiar and hard metric standardized*, it would work much better. The American proof system for alcohol content works, but I vastly prefer the system of alcohol in % which we use. And what about crazy clothing and shoe sizes, etc? They all work but they are trash. This is probably a sleazy anti-metric book, pointing at supposed errors when the original measurements were made, and examples like this one here. These errors were those that will always happen in measurement and those that come out when the measurements are made again with newer technology. Until he died Mechain tried to correct the error he had found. Han ----- Original Message ----- From: "kilopascal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, 2002-10-13 6:45 Subject: [USMA:22661] carpentry 2002-10-13 An excerpt from the review of a MEASURE FOR MEASURE by DAVID OWEN In fairness, throwing out the clock is a priority for just a lunatic few. But the same urge for consistency at any cost is often evident among wholly rational metric advocates, who seldom acknowledge that there could be situations in which coldly logical metric units work less well than quirkier alternatives. An example is carpentry. The units in which American building materials are measured are idiosyncratic in the extreme-they include gauges, penny sizes, nominal dimensions, and a host of other anachronistic absurdities-but the over-all system works well, in part because it arose organically from human activity instead of being imposed from above by theoreticians. The standard metric measuring tape was clearly not designed by anyone who regularly worked with wood: a millimetre is smaller than the tip of a builder's pencil and narrower than the blade of a saw, and the closely packed, uniform gradations on the tape are hard to make out at a glance except in bundles of five. In contrast, a customary American tape-with its easily distinguishable divisions of sixteenths, eighths, quarters, halves, inches, feet, and sixteen-inch framing intervals-is harmoniously suited to the way in which it is used. The American building industry will probably adopt the metric system someday, but American carpenters are not idiots or Luddites for continuing to use a system that works. <snip>
