It bothers me when I see attempts to pick and choose among scales of
units when it comes to metric education and metric usage. All students
of SI should be trained to manipulate decimal fractions and decimal
multiples of SI units with complete facility, across the SI prefix list
in both directions, yocto to yotta! By the time they complete their
metric exercises, this should be second nature to students. I don't
think this is done in the U.S., and maybe someone on the list can tell
me how it is done in other countries,but I would insist on it.
Sometimes, for example, a drug dose gets expressed in grams on my
hospital's computer when it should be in milligrams (i.e., following the
rule of 1000). To the WOMBAT eye, however, it is sometimes
incomprehensible. I get nurses asking me what 0.75 g means! If they
don't see it written as 750 mg, they panic. That kind of query is
intolerable to me. It just shouldn't happen. Growing up in 1950s U.S., I
spent much time with a device called a multiplication table, that taught
me how to learn multiplication by rote. Would that, at at later time in
my education, I would have worked with a table of SI prefixes and
mastered their manipulation as well!
The list of steak servings on the menu of that Sydney restaurant I
visited a year ago should be understood instantly as 0.4 kg, 0.5 kg, and
0.7 kg if the user wishes, but it was stated, respectively, as 400 g,
500 g, and 700 g. The New Zealand tape measure I have is a number line
of millimeters, but the user should be able to mentally interpose
centimeters and meters instantly, anywhere on the tape.
I agree with the choice of the millimeter in some work. But that choice
of the millimeter should not be made outside of a context of SI fluency
on the part of the users. The user should be able to think naturally in
terms of centimeters also, or meters, if (s)he so chooses. I believe
that the choice should always be made through understanding, and not by
some rote imposition.
--
Paul Trusten, R.Ph.
Public Relations Director
U.S. Metric Association (USMA), Inc.
www.metric.org
3609 Caldera Blvd., Apt. 122
Midland TX 79707-2872 US
+1(432)528-7724
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Brij Bhushan Vij wrote:
Tom Wade, sir(s):
>> The most suitable units for this are centimeters.
Insisting on the use of 'millimetre' as a base unit may defeat the
purpose of educating the YOUNG tots in schools. Milli- being a
sub-multiple [10^-3 i.e. one-thousandth]. This was the general
argument when 'Metre, m, was taken to be the acceptable unit' for
length so as to become the bridge between *small & large* measurement
for length. METRE does need to be redefined in Le Systeme
Internationale d'Unites (SI) as: one-10^5th of arc-angle Pi/180 (one
degree);
