I had some interesting conversations today. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and my coworker, who is from Russia, mentioned how warm it is. I looked up the weather online and it said that it was 23 degrees, by far the warmest it has been this year. Denis, my coworker, looked at it and said, "You understand Celsius?" I told him that I don't use Fahrenheit, and actually I understand Celsius better now. He mentioned how he doesn't use Fahrenheit either, and thinks Celsius is a lot easier to use. He knew that 32 was the freezing point and 100 was very hot, but nothing else. We talked for a little about how much simpler the whole metric system is. He mentioned how confusing our system is, and I told him how we are converting very slowly (I mentioned that package labels will be changing somewhat over the next few years).
Earlier, in my History class, we were talking about the resistance to many of the changes that industrialization brought about. My teacher mentioned that people tend to resist change and asked for examples from the class. I resisted saying the obvious, since I knew someone else would bring up the metric system. Overall the discussion was quite positive. At an appropriate point I mentioned how quickly Australia converted. The teacher mentioned England's slow conversion positively but accurately (as far as I can tell). A woman from Eastern Europe expressed frustration about how confusing our system is. A few months ago I talked to a girl from New Zealand who thought the metric system is easier, and a woman from Australia who basically said she had pretty much forgotten the old system and found a visit to the U.S. required an adjustment. All of these encounters help me feel pretty confident about the future. Most Americans I talk to are positive toward the metric system (at least in principle), and most visitors to the country seem to firmly prefer the modern system. There are exceptions, but overall it is encouraging. Besides, this is probably a low point for support for conversion in the U.S. I look forward to the time when the country gets around to discussing it again. Until then, lets keep working on making some changes. I can't wait to see some metric-only labels at the grocery store! Carl
