Dear Terry, I suspect that I am the 'academic' referred to in this article. I have found the original script of the 'Ockham's Razor' that I presented on Radio National in January 1995. I have copied it below.
'Ockham's Razor' is a weekly national science-based program where a speaker is invited to present a monologue on radio for 15 minutes. The program is broadcast nationally and then re-broadcast internationally on 'Radio Australia'. The furthest response that I received to my talk was from Japan. When I reread this, a few minutes ago, I found that it stands up fairly well. Although I did cringe a bit about the errors I made when I referred to shoe sizes, overall my views haven't changed much over the last 8 years. Cheers, Pat Naughtin LCAMS Geelong, Australia on 2003-03-11 05.45, Terry Simpson at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s11563.htm SI in Australia Pat Naughtin Surely one of the greatest applications of Ockham�s Razor was Simon Stevin�s 1585 vision that measurement and calculation could be done using a decimal system. In one stroke eighths, twelfths, scores, and quarters, were thrown out the window and measuring became much simpler. But like many brilliant ideas though - it didn�t catch on straight away. It took about two hundred years for the idea to travel from Brugge to Paris, a bit over 200 km or close to 1 kilometre per year. From the revolutionary Paris of the 1790s it took a further 90 years for the idea to travel to the United States of America which was one of the first signatories of an international agreement on the adoption of the metric system. Of course the United States did nothing about it, except to sign the agreement. Another 90 years went by until, in 1972, the system arrived in Australia, now fully formed as the International System of Weights and measures commonly known by its French initials SI. It�s now four hundred years later and the process is still not complete. As I said it didn�t catch on straight away. It had lost some of Stevin�s original decimal idea. By now it was probably better described as a millecimal system, rather than decimal, in that it was based on intervals of 1000 rather than 10. For most uses, that is for most people, there were only nine units to learn and this is still true; millimetres, metres and kilometres to measure length; grams, kilograms and tonnes to measure mass; and millilitres, litres and cubic metres measure volume and that�s it. Nothing more to learn, no complicated formulae to translate from one to the other - everything is in 1000s - so three decimal places is all you need know about In the areas where we adopted SI success was rapid and dramatic. Volume and mass measures were immediately successful because we stuck to the SI thousands rule. We had less success where we used some other, non�SI, metric system. The building trades adopted SI fully and the savings in terms of materials and time have been phenomenal. Albert Jennings led the Australian building industry in using SI and pioneered the use of the preferred units, millimetres and metres. He is less well known for his leadership in introducing the 600 mm module into the Australian building industry. I suspect that the savings of materials that this simple act produced have not and probably never will be calculated. Another major success was the introduction of preferred paper sizes. One can only admire the visionaries in Germany who developed the �A� series of paper sizes. The number of trees, nay forests, that have been saved by this simple standard is incalculable. With A0 having an aspect ratio of 1.4142:1 and an area of one square metre all other A series sizes can be cut with the minimum of waste. A generation has now passed since Australia adopted the International System of weights and measures in 1972. At the time some realised that this was a never to be repeated opportunity to adopt the best measurement practices in the world. Generally it�s true to say that we blew it. We adopted SI as the best system available - then, like the United States 100 years before - we didn�t get around to telling most Australian people about it. One major success was in the building trades but lack of training made the rest of the process a shambles. Basically the government told the public that we had �gone metric� then left the public to their own devices to discover what this might mean. And, it seems to me, that each group devised their own methods to obscure and confuse the rest of us. The police force and the judiciary decided to adopt an archaic measuring system based on the centimetre. They seem to have ignored the fact that centimetres are not recommended for use in Australia and that essentially centimetres should have breathed their last with the introduction of the mksA system in 1901. Daily police dish out incomprehensible descriptions of fugitives. This communication problem could easily be remedied by using SI units based on the metre. At a glance I might be able to tell if someone is 1.6 or 1.7 metres - to determine if an unknown person is 163 centimetres is certainly beyond me and I suspect many others. Hardware shops, being aware of the success of the trade training in TAFE colleges, specify dimensions of tools and timber using the preferred SI units - millimetres and metres. Wonderful I hear you say but then you flick to the pages of your hardware catalogue devoted to women�s interests - and the writers are fully aware that there has, thus far, been no training for women in SI. Curtains, curtain fittings and fabrics are described in a mixture of inches, feet and, of course, the archaic and confusing centimetre. Clearly, for hardware catalogue writers, there are two distinct measuring systems in use in Australia - one for men and another for women. Adding innumeracy to illiteracy seems to be the main arithmetic skill of sporting commentators. I need say no more. Scientists, by their own admission, needed no training in SI units since they prefer to make up their own units as they go along. If we asked a scientist "How dense is a piece of string?" most of them would quickly devise a measurement something like �grams per kilometre� or its inverse �metres per kilogram�. Only those dedicated to the art of confusion could create a completely new unit called �tex� with a multiple of �kilotex� and a submultiple of �decitex�. These are the people who would have us measure the warmth of our clothing in �togs�. One can only hope that they are wearing sufficient togs on windy days in the ivory tower at the Australian Standards Association. Perhaps we should say to our scientists something like "I don�t care what you do in the privacy of your own laboratory but please, in the interests of communication, could you express what you say in public in SI". Dieticians are still confused by the introduction of SI. They have yet to make the decision that energy is measured in joules usually expressed as kilojoules. In every book I have read they coyly place a figure (in brackets) denoting the real energy value of the food in Calories. A quick examination of the figures soon reveals however that the original figure was the Calories and that the translation is the kilojoule figure. I find it hard to believe that no-one has thought about how we communicate standard energy value of foods in the last twenty-two years. Cooks, on the other hand, know that there are no such things as measurement standards. They know this for certain every time they are confronted with an oven. Ovens sport at least one set of numbers that may or may not have any relationship with reality and the cook has no way of knowing which is true. These are the worst kind of measurements - numbers that might not be real. Cooks have to �learn an oven�; that is over time they develop a relationship with the set of numbers and their own cooking style. I repeat, however, that this does not necessarily have any relationship with numerical reality and it is difficult to transfer knowledge to other cooks in anything other than general terms. Dedicated to the art of communicating directly and clearly with their clients the estate agents of Australia have successfully lobbied the government so that real estate sales are exempt from laws relating to SI measurement. No doubt as time goes by we will need skilled historically trained translators to explain 156 ft 8 7/8 inches or 2 chain and 17 links and the number of roods in a by piece of land with these dimensions. Bill Gates, famous for his software company Microsoft is less well known for the concerted push by his company to return us to the imperial measures of old. Unfortunately he is not alone. Every student who uses a word processor on any computer has to come to terms with the imperial measurement policies of Mr Gates and other United States software companies. I know of no word processing package that can be configured to use SI, though some use a metric system of their own devising. Not only must you come to terms with these archaic measures but often programs are written that only use U.S. paper sizes with their built-in waste factors and the aggravation that goes with that. Prior to the introduction of word processors most of us were innocent of ems, ens, picas and points. Now we are up to neck in them. We could easily specify type sizes in decimal fractions of a millimetre. To specify 10 point type as 3.5 mm is clear, gives a roughly four times better range of sizes, and it is so simple that it is immediately understandable by all who use it. William of Ockham could relate to that. Schools have adapted various metric systems and they teach different measuring systems in each different activity. In English you learn about inches and eighths so you can set out your pages - points, ems ens and picas are a bonus. The textile teachers work in centimetres, the woodwork teachers probably use SI while the maths department uses some or all of these. We don�t have a coherent policy on teaching measurement in schools and I suspect that children first begin to learn the practicalities of measuring when they leave school to start their first job. Doctors and nurses have the problem of having to translate baby weights from modern to traditional units so that the weights of grandma�s babies can be compared with the most recent addition to the family. The method of doing this implies that the old units are the reality and that the SI is unreal and probably temporary. Nobody seems to have thought to translate Grandma�s birth weights into grams for comparison - perhaps they will in another generation - or two - when the current crop of babies are grandmothers in their own right. Doctors, of course, also use the idea of specifying dose rates as "units" without specifying what the units are. It seems to me that this is a high risk practice in their particular occupation. Again I don�t think we ever thought that doctors might need training in SI. Poulterers chose to use decigrams to describe the weight of their birds, but realising, perhaps, that decigrams were not a recommended unit they describe the birds purely in numerical terms without a unit. An eighteen decigram bird is simply described as size 18. I can only suggest that a description of 1.8 kg conveys this important point just as accurately yet is much more comprehensible. The clothing industry always have had a love-hate relationship with numbers. A cynic would say that there�s a conspiracy at work here in that you can sell a lot more garments if they don�t quite fit. Consider this scenario. A woman is buying a garment for her mother who is ill. The sales assistant enquires about the mother�s size to be told that she sometimes takes an 8 and sometimes a 10. (Why there is no number 9 in this meaningless numerical system is never questioned.) Anyway, back to the story. The shop assistant informs the purchaser that brand A is a big size and that brand B tends to be small. As a result of this vagary the garment has a sporting chance of being not quite the right size when mother tries it on. This is the best possible result, for the garment maker, in that the mother puts the garment into a cupboard and never wears it. She still has a need for the garment and the maker can expect another sale in the near future, perhaps as soon as mother gets well or talks to another daughter. The practice of specifying size using numbers close to the old size in inches is still a common practice and I suspect that it is done because the industry has no coherent policy or vision of what they require. Shoe sizes are a classic case, of course, where originally a French shoemaker used 100 mm as the basis for children�s shoe sizes with rises of 10 mm. Size 1 was 110 mm long, size 2 was 120 mm etc. This system was then translated into English based on a four inch foot with rises of 3/8" which was as close as English shoemakers could get to 10 mm. Australia is in a great position to lead the world on measuring. We came to the SI late enough not to be carrying too much of the baggage of errors that were made in Europe yet not so late that we can�t communicate the message of simplicity that is inherent in the system as intended originally by Simon Stevin. One can only guess, but I�m confident that if William of Ockham were here he would immediately recognise the SI simplicity. Why don�t we use the hindsight of 400 years to adopt the Best Practice in measurement for Australia? Why don�t we lead the world in measurement practices? Why don�t we have an education policy on measurement? Why do we allow private companies in the United States to dominate and complicate our measuring systems? Why didn�t we or don�t we require that all imports of software conforms to Australian measurement standards? In short why don�t we adopt William of Ockham�s central thesis and Keep It Simple, Stupid. Pat Naughtin
