Dear All,
I have just read the seven questions that 'Scientists and Engineers
for America and fifteen other science organizations' have united to
ask the 2008 congressional candidates in preparation for this year's
elections in the USA[i].
I was initially overwhelmed by the simple power of these seemingly
innocent questions. Obviously, scientists and engineers are highly
intelligent and knowledgeable people who should know and understand
these issues, but I was especially impressed that so many
organisations had been able to write, edit, and agree on such a
diverse range of science and technology policy issues and then reduce
their ideas to seven apparently simple questions.
But a thought crept into my mind that, after a while, became hard to
ignore — there's an elephant in the room. The highly original, smart,
clever, and creative scientists and engineers who wrote the seven
questions had not begun to address the most basic measurement issues,
because they simply didn't see them.
When I read through the seven questions again, I realised that many of
the troubling issues underlying these seven questions could be
dramatically relieved if the USA upgraded to the same sane and
rational measurement policy used by every other nation in the world,
and promoted and used by them on a daily basis.
I am aware that the cliché, 'an elephant in the room', is overused and
I know that it usually refers to an issue that people try not to see,
because it might embarrass them[ii].
This example of an 'elephant in the room' is mostly about how the USA
is out of step with every other developed nation in the world, because
the USA is now the only developed nation in the world that has not
upgraded to the metric system. In the USA, the 'elephant in the room'
is a metrication elephant.
After a while, I had another thought. Perhaps it's me who is seeing an
elephant in the room that's not there. Perhaps my belief in
Condorcet's original thought — in the 1790s — that the metric system
is 'For all time; for all people' is coloring my judgement about the
metrication elephant.
To see if this was so, I considered each of the questions raised by
the Scientists and Engineers for America and fifteen other science
organizations one at a time. Their seven questions are listed below,
followed by my comments in italics, testing my insight that all of
these seven questions have metrication issues at their core.
Innovation
Science and technology have been responsible for half of the growth of
the American economy since World War II. But several recent reports
question America's continued leadership in these vital areas. What
policies would you support to ensure that America remains the world
leader in innovation?
Almost all scientists and engineers now use the metric system or SI
units on a daily basis. The media and industry then go through complex
and expensive steps to dumb these down to old pre-metric measures for
the public and for politicians. As a media example, the National
Geographic magazine dumbs down metric units on a regular basis, as
does the Reader's Digest; the Associated Press in the USA actually has
a policy in its Style Manual (in 2008) to dumb down all metric units
to old pre-metric measures.
As an industrial example, the car industry designs and builds in
metric units, then uses a thin veneer of old measures (mph, ml, psi),
so that clients in the USA will not be aware that they have been
driving all-metric cars, trucks, and tractors since the mid-1970s.
This dumbing down for the public comes at a huge monetary cost to the
nation. (Watch the 2 1/2 minute video[iii] as you work out the cost of
this calculation applied to the whole nation of the USA. Note: the
exhaust pipe in this video was designed and made as 180 millimetres at
the front and 140 millimetres at the back so they are actually working
out 'What is 180 mm minus 140 mm?'
Climate Change
The Earth's climate is changing and there is concern about the
potentially adverse effects of these changes on life on the planet.
What is your position on the following measures that have been
proposed to address global climate change—a cap-and-trade system, a
carbon tax, increased fuel-economy standards, and research? Are there
other policies you would support?
There are two sadnesses about the closely related issues of climate
change and energy.
The first is that the British Association for the Advancement of
Science (BAAS) made clear the differences between energy and power in
the 1880s, and published their results in 1889. The BAAS defined the
unit joule for energy and the unit watt for power in 1889. Most of the
media and our world politicians have not yet caught on to this 120-
year-old distinction. Unfortunately, understanding the concepts of
energy and power lie at the very heart of our understanding of the
greenhouse effect, global warming, and climate change. Without
understanding the two simple units joules and watts, and their
underlying concepts, we are condemned to talking about the climate
change issues as if we were trying to find our way into the future, at
high speed, in a fog.
Energy
Many scientists and policymakers say energy security and
sustainability are major problems facing the United States this
century. What policies would you support to meet the demand for energy
while ensuring an economically and environmentally sustainable future?
The second sadness is that we have yet to decide and agree on how we
measure energy. Most discussions about energy (such as a cap-and-trade
system, a carbon tax, increased fuel-economy standards, and research)
quickly dissolve into discussions about how to convert between the
various randomly generated ways that individual industries have
decided to try to measure energy. Although the idea of energy has only
been fully understood since 1889, getting to grips with the idea of
energy is now crucial to our understanding of issues such as: energy
pricing, energy conservation, peak energy, and peak oil. We urgently
need to have a common language to discuss these issues rationally and
these should be encapsulated in the single energy unit, joule, which
should be used by all industries, in all nations, in any discussions
about energy pricing, energy conservation, peak energy, or peak oil.
In the article, 'A word about global warming'[iv] there is a list of
some of the different ways of measuring energy used in 2008. Any
politician who tries to gain a basic understanding of global warming
will need to learn most, or all, of the 198 different old pre-metric
measures and the 39 006 conversion factors between them.
Education
A comparison of 15-year-olds in 30 wealthy nations found that average
science scores among U.S. students ranked 17th, while average U.S.
math scores ranked 24th. What role do you think the federal government
should play in preparing K-12 students for the science and technology
driven 21st Century?
Every child, in every school, in every subject, who uses a computer,
writes every report and every essay on an all-metric computer. They do
this while believing that they are working with old pre-metric
equipment measured in inches. This is because the computer industry in
the USA designs integrated circuit chips using nanometres and
micrometres, which are then placed into 'mother-boards' in cases built
to millimetre precision; the computers are then sold to the students
using words like the 'seventeen inch model'.
And software writers are no help to the children of the USA. For
example the widely used Microsoft Word (Education Edition) has
measurements such as its rulers, margins, and column spacing all set
with defaults in inches, half inches, and quarter inches. If an
enterprising student changes the defaults to metric (say to the
worldwide printing industry default of millimetres) they will meet
such oddities as rulers with groups of ten millimetres divided into
quarters that are 2 1/2 millimetres long.
Enormous effort, and cost, is spent teaching children in the USA about
the use of old pre-metric measures, about the metric system, and about
how to convert between the new and the old[v]. This expense of money
and children's time does not happen in any other nation except the
USA. Children in all other advanced countries simply learn the metric
system, and then use it.
Meanwhile school children in the USA leave school to join a workforce
predominately using metric measurements[vi]. Manufacturing industry
must then pay the cost of retraining their USA workforce to work with
the metric units used in USA industry. Some companies don't do this
for their new staff; they simply import immigrants who have acquired
their metric skills from anywhere else in the world.
Water
Thirty-nine states expect some level of water shortage over the next
decade, and scientific studies suggest that a majority of our water
resources are at risk. What policies would you support to meet demand
for water resources?
Both industry and individual citizens need to know how to measure
water so that we can all understand how to collect it, and to share it
wisely and fairly. This is enormously difficult to do using inches of
rain, gallons per cubic foot, cusecs of flow, and acre-feet of water;
water calculations are only attempted by specialists in the USA. On
the other hand (say in Australia) any child can work out that when a
millimetre of rain falls on a square metre of roof, a litre of water
flows into a rain water tank, so it is easy to work out that a 6
millimetre shower of rain on a 200 square metre roof will collect 1200
litres of rain (6 x 200 = 1200 litres). Any senior primary school
child in Australia can do a calculation that requires a specialist
expert in the USA, and being able to 'do the sums' soon leads to an
understanding of water issues.
Research
For many years, Congress has recognized the importance of science and
engineering research to realizing our national goals. Given that the
next Congress will likely face spending constraints, what priority
would you give to investment in basic research in upcoming budgets?
What is the cost, both in time and in money, of doing research using
international metric units, and then having to dumb these down for
politicians and for the public? The Mars Climate Orbiter springs to
mind.
Health
Americans are increasingly concerned with the cost, quality, and
availability of health care. How do you see science, research, and
technology contributing to improved health and quality of life?
It is reported that, at present, there is an average of 1.7 medical
errors per patient per day in USA hospitals[vii]. Many – but I don't
know how many– of these are due to conversion errors when converting
patient's body mass from pounds to kilograms (or in the case of babies
from pounds and ounces to kilograms and/or grams).
Many, many[viii], people die every day as a result of errors in
unnecessary conversions. Note that the only reason for these
conversions is to maintain the thin veneer of misinformation that
doctors and nurses in the USA are using old pre-metric measures in
their surgeries and hospitals — but this is simply not true and it has
not been true for decades. All medical research in the world
(including the USA) is done using SI metric units, medical drug
products are developed and tested using SI metric units, and the doses
are then refined and delivered with dosage units like milligrams per
kilogram.
Conclusion
So how would anyone go about explaining to the highly intelligent and
well educated 'Scientists and Engineers for America and fifteen other
science organizations' that there is an 'elephant in the room' if they
haven't yet seen it for themselves. I suspect that saying, even
yelling, 'Hey, look, there's an elephant in the room' won't do much
good.
Of course if it was a real elephant, I might just point out the
droppings. And that thought gives me a clue. What are the droppings
from not having a measurement policy in the USA (despite the best
efforts of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin
in the 1780s and 1790s)?[ix] The 'droppings' are the financial costs
to the citizens of the USA that have built up each year for the last
220 years and that will continue to build into the future — there's
quite a pile.
As I am not a citizen of the USA, I suppose that I am not able to ask
questions about policies in an election year in the USA. However, if
someone were to ask policy makers a question on my behalf it might go
something like this:
Not fully adopting the metric system with respect to innovation,
climate change, energy, education, water, research, and health is
costing the USA a great deal of time, money, and international
opportunities. What is your estimate of the cost to the USA of these
losses internationally, and what is your estimate of the cost of
supporting both old-pre metric measures and metric units inside the USA?
In a submission to the President's Math Panel[x], Pat Naughtin, an
Australian expert in metrication, which is the process of upgrading to
the metric system, observed that not using the metric system is
costing the USA roughly 1.27 trillion dollars a year (about three
times the USA military budget). Pat Naughtin's submission contains the
line:
'If Richard P Phelp's estimate of 10 % wasted costs in education were
applied to the whole economy, the loss would be about $1.27 trillion
per year. To paraphrase the USA Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen
(1896/1969):
"… a trillion this year, and a trillion next year, pretty soon adds up
to real money."[xi]
References:
[i] See http://sharp.sefora.org/innovation2008/#questions
[ii] See: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ele2.htm
[iii] The video is on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omh8Ito-05M
[iv] You can view this article at:
http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/AWordAboutGlobalWarming.pdf
[v] In an article, 'The Case for U.S. Metric Conversion Now' (1992,
December 9) Richard P. Phelps stated that:
'It (USA education system) teaches two systems of measurement in the
schools and, the confusion from learning two systems aside, there is a
cost to the time spent in teaching two systems. A full year of
mathematics instruction is lost to the duplication of effort.'
You can view Richard P. Phelps' article after you register on the
Education Weekly database at: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1992/12/09/14phelps.h12.html
[vi] In her paper presented to the National Math Panel, Teach Only the
Metric System, Lorelle Young stated that industry in the USA is now
more than 60 % metric. Lorelle Young's paper can be found at http://www.scribd.com/doc/1233594/-description-tags-8-metric20system
[vii] According to a report at http://www.aarp.org/research/health/carequality/Articles/aresearch-import-711-IB35.html
'The average number of errors per patient per day was 1.7.'
[viii] Go to http://www.visicu.com/solving/research/mederrors.html to
see quotations like this: '… medical errors were estimated to kill up
to 98,000 Americans each year and to be due to human error "60-80%" of
the time. That is more people in one year than died in the entire
Vietnam War. That is more people than die from automobile accidents,
AIDS or breast cancer yearly.'
[ix] Search for the names, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and
George Washington in 'A chronological history of the modern metric
system' to see the part that these three played in the development of
the international system of units — the modern metric system. Go to: http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/MetricationTimeline.pdf
[x] You can see Pat Naughtin's submission to the National Math Panel
by doing an advanced search for 'Naughtin' at: http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/mathpanel/index.html
[xi] See http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/
CostOfNonMetrication.pdf for a summary of where these costs arise.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
helped thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the
modern metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they
now save thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for
their businesses. Pat provides services and resources for many
different trades, crafts, and professions for commercial, industrial
and government metrication leaders in Asia, Europe, and in the USA.
Pat's clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST,
and the metric associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. See http://www.metricationmatters.com/
for more metrication information, contact Pat at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
or to get the free 'Metrication matters' newsletter go to: http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter/
to subscribe.
