Title: Message
Then there's this character.  Sorry to see he's from our area.... <sigh>
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Nat Hager III [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, 2003 June 04 15:04
To: metric mailing ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Subject: The Sentinel Online - Archived Story.htm

I guess this sells newspapers... <sigh>
 
Nat
 

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In for a penny, in for a ... kilogram

By Rich Lewis May 29, 2003

While the rest of us are busy worrying about the upcoming war with Iran, SARS, mad cow and West Nile diseases, certain members of the scientific community are in a panic about something more... uh... weighty.

While the rest of us are busy worrying about the upcoming war with Iran, SARS, mad cow and West Nile diseases, certain members of the scientific community are in a panic about something more... uh... weighty.

The kilogram is shrinking.

Sorry, but it's true. The Christian Science Monitor last month, and the New York Times on Sunday, both reported that Le Gran K - the little lump of platinum-iridium that is the world's official standard for the kilogram - weighs less than it used to.

This is apparently very bad news because whole chunks of the metric system are tied to it.

In the wonderful 1982 movie, "The Time Bandits," a bunch of greedy dwarves endanger all creation in their effort to acquire "The Most Fabulous Object in the World." We never find out what it is, but they easily could have been talking about the Gran K.

The cylinder sits in a heavily guarded safe in a chateau in Sevres, France, near Paris. Only three people have keys to the safe, and by the terms of an international treaty signed in 1875, the anointed trio - accompanied by more armed guards - must visit the LGK once a year. I wonder if they sing to it or just stare at it.

Eighty copies of the LGK were made and bestowed upon the countries that signed the treaty. Every once in a long while, the copies are brought to Sevres and compared to the LGK itself.

The last time that was done, not all the copies agreed. They seemed to show that the LGK had lost 50 micrograms. That's about the weight of a grain of sand - which may not sound like much - and, in fact, isn't much - but the LGK is supposed to be perfect, unchanging. It is, after all, supposed to be the ultimate standard for how much things weigh.

Nobody knows what's going on. Maybe the iridium is losing atoms or the copies are gaining atoms. Some people think it has something to do with the Earth's gravity. Maybe the perfidious French are fiddling with it when the guards are having lunch. Whatever.

The plain fact is, I don't care a dit. The kilogram could double or disappear altogether as far as I'm concerned. Because I don't have a clue how much a kilogram is. Oh sure, my college roommates used to buy bags of oregano or catnip or something like that by the kilogram - or "key" as they called it. It was puzzling because you couldn't cook or keep cats in the dorm, so I don't know what they were doing with this stuff. Maybe it was sachet. It did have a certain pleasing aroma.

Anyway, the concept of "kilogram" just doesn't compute in my mind. I do ounces and pounds.

Which makes me wonder: Whatever happened to all that metric stuff anyhow?

It seems that at one time we were being told that the United States was going to be converted to metric in just a few years, and there was nothing we could do about it. So instead of pounds, we'd have those unstable kilograms, and feet would become meters and miles kilometers, and gallons would be liters and temperatures Celsius and so on.

Oh sure, you see some of that here and there. They don't have a 100-yard dash in track anymore; it's now the 100-meter or 109.361-yard dash. Soft drinks and car engines come in liters, whatever that means, although milk still comes in gallons and car tires in inches.

For everyday life, the traditional measures rule. When was the last time you told someone Newville was 17.7028 kilometers from Carlisle? Or that you just bought a nice 8,093.71-square-meter building lot for your new home? Which is two acres.

In 1975, Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act, which was supposed to put us on the road to a total metric mindwashing. Ha. Here we are 28 years later still pounding and inching along. Yes, in 1988, Congress ordered all federal agencies to use metric in nearly all of their activities, but those are still "mile markers" up there on I-81, not "kilometer markers."

The United States stands proudly with Liberia and Burma as the only three nations on Earth (which is about 25,000 miles in circumference, not 40,233 kilometers) which have not made metric their official measuring system.

And this is a good thing. The metric system is boring and sterile, suitable only for mathematicians and other colorless folk. Everything is ten or a hundred or a thousand of something else. It lacks the human touch of the inch ("the width of a thumb" or "three barleycorns") or the mile (the distance covered by a Roman legionnaire walking 2,000 steps).

The division of the foot into a dozen inches instead of the all-too-even 10 was not only imaginative and distinctive, it also helped to ensure that generations of children would have to learn the times-tables up to 12.

Further, remember that Le Gran K is kept in France. Why? Because the French invented the metric system in 1790. Imagine how bad we would feel now if were committed to the metric system after what those snooty ingrates did to us at the U.N.

So let the weight of that glob of platinum-iridium fluctuate like some metallic Oprah Winfrey. Our way of measuring is just fine.

Even if I'm not really sure what a barleycorn is.

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