2002-10-14 Taken from paragraph 4 of: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?021014crbo_books1, he states with his own words that he sides with "the pounds & ounce" crowd. Anyone who would spend the effort to write a book and tells you that the original survey of the Meridienne Verte produced an error and then go on to say FFU is more "human" friendly then SI, can not be pro-metric.
His book was written to appear unbiased but it was meant to be a Bible for the anti-metric crowd. Like most unmetricated Americans, I suspect, I've usually sided with the pounds-and-ounces crowd in such disputes. I know that Olympic events are measured in metres, and that dietary fat and cocaine are both reckoned by the gram, but for a long time I vaguely assumed that the metric system was a bust. I also assumed that the metre was a modern invention, and that the world's interest in it must have crested in the early seventies, when I studied it in school. (The relevant chapter in our math book was called something like "Oh, No! The Metric System!") John ----- Original Message ----- From: "Han Maenen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, 2002-10-13 08:42 Subject: [USMA:22689] 600 mile Meridienne Verte- Owen > Mr. Alder may have written a book about the metric system, but why doesn't > he respect its use in France? The 600 mile Meridienne Verte? Maybe the > kilometer is less suited to human needs than the statute mile. He must have > converted everything metric he encountered during his Tour de France to ifp. > More proof to me that in the end both are opposed to metric. > > Quote: > " To come to terms with this history, I set out to retrace their journey. In > the year 2000, at a time when France was celebrating the millennium along > the Meridienne Verte - a six-hundred-mile row of evergreen trees which was > meant to mark out the national meridian, but which was somehow never > planted - I set out on the zigzag trail of Delambre and M�chain. I climbed > the cathedral towers and mountain peaks from which they conducted their > survey, and combed the provincial archives for traces of their passage. It > was my own Tour de France. Delambre and M�chain had demonstrated that the > judicious application of scientific knowledge might, as Archimedes once > boasted, move the world. Where they traveled by carriage and on foot, I > substituted a bicycle. After all, what is a bicycle but a lever on wheels? - > a lever which allows the cyclist to move along the surface of the world, or, > which is much the same thing, move the world. > > > Han > Historian of Dutch Metrication, Nijmegen, The Netherlands >
