A few thoughts (I wrote the review of Alder's book in The New Yorker): 1. In a pretty interesting book called "A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals About the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and Universe," the author (a physicist at Penn named Gino Segre) quotes someone else explaining why a 2000 international conference on global warming ended "with bitterness on all sides": "When something like this is killed, it is killed by an alliance of those who want too much with those who don't want anything." There are more than a few members of this list server who should take that remark to heart -- if their goal is to speed up adoption of the metric system in the United States. In any American conversion to the metric system, there will be a very long period during which feet and pounds will be used, inconsistently, alongside metres and kilograms. Get over it, and focus on areas in which using metric units would generate tangible benefits for those who convert. (Companies that manufacture products sold outside the United States are far more likely to gain initially than ordinary American consumers, I would bet.) 2. There is a big difference between animosity toward the metric system and apathy about the metric system. I think there is much less animosity toward (or defensive "envy" of) the metric system in the United States than some USMA members seem to think. Most people simply don't care -- and they don't need to care, since most average Americans' lives would not be noticeably improved, even in the long run, if they stopped measuring things the way they measure them now. 3. The British pay a big price for driving on the left, but that doesn't mean that individual Britons are stupid for continuing to drive on the left, and it doesn't mean that Britain is stupid for not converting to the system used by the rest of the world. Converting would have a huge cost, too, including, undoubtedly, a cost in lives. Even though the UK might gain in the long run by joining the rest of the world, the country's leaders could perfectly rationally decide that the immediate cost of changing would be too great. 4. I am old enough to need reading glasses, and I find a millimeter scale very hard to read at arm's length. That's just a fact. It doesn't make me an idiot or a Luddite. Nor does it mean that I think millimeters aren't BETTER for measuring other things. To me, it makes perfect sense for scientists all over the world (for example) to use the metric system; but I also know that converting my home woodworking and carpentry to metric measurements would make my life worse, not better. It is entirely possible for me to hold those two ideas in my mind at the same time. 5. There is nothing necessarily bad or difficult about living with multiple standards. My computer computes in base two, while I compute in base ten. Converting either of us to the other�s methodology for the sake of uniformity would be a disaster. And as a practical matter, the difference between our ways of doing arithmetic is irrelevant, because the computer itself was designed to invisibly mediate between it and me. 6. Bitterly focusing on British pub pints is an utterly self-defeating strategy, if the goal is universal acceptance of the metric system. What does it possibly matter to the metric system if British beer drinkers prefer to drink beer 568.26 millilitres at a time? The message from British beer drinkers is "Don't mess with the size of my beer." Pick a different issue to get agitated about. David Owen
> > > 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.
