Count me with the optimists. I am often pleased by the positive attitudes toward the metric system that I hear from my friends and acquaintances. Just yesterday a member of my congregation stopped by and noticed my thermometer and other devices, and we had a good chat about the metric system. He said he didn't know too much about everyday units but he was learning because of a project he was working on (I'm not sure if it was work or school).
He doesn't need to be involved in metric advocacy to be an asset. There are a lot of people out there that think metric is a good idea, and I think a lot of them are young and have yet to make their mark in the world. With the help of people like that we will change one thing at a time until it becomes obvious that the U.S. has a lot of metric usage and we might as well go the rest of the way. By the way, the other day someone asked me what atmospheric pressure was. I replied that it was about 101 kilopascals, and another person said it was 760 torr (which he clarified was mm Hg). Another person asked what that was "something like 29 inches, right?" The other guy said, "Inches? Who uses inches? You must be an engineer because they're the only ones who use inches." I said, "Them and pilots." The inches guy said he was in the air force, so maybe that's why he thought about inches. I think he said something about the air force changing that, but I'm not sure and the movie was starting then so I couldn't ask. Carl -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Ma Be Sent: Monday, June 02, 2003 9:07 AM To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:25902] Re: 480 km to El Paso I'm always amazed at the level of optimism that our colleague, Jim, expresses here time and again, despite evidence to the contrary... It sort of reminds me of a painting I remember having seen in Sco Paulo in a Painting Festival years back whose title was "A magnitude da brancura" (the magnitude of whiteness). It simply was a white canvass with a tiny little red dot at the center! In other words, despite the 'magnitude' of the white canvass what people really paid attention to was that silly insignificant 'smudge' always wondering what the heck that was all about!!... :-) Anyhow, I'll be long dead till I see *in public use throughout the US* any appreciable amount of REAL metric data. In the meantime the clock is still ticking (we have ~6-7 years left on our bet, Jim!... :-) ). Good to hear from you as usual though. Cheers, my dear friend. Marcus ____________________________________________________________ Get 25MB of email storage with Lycos Mail Plus! Sign up today -- http://www.mail.lycos.com/brandPage.shtml?pageId=plus
