I haven't had a chance to call them yet, but here's the letter I sent
to Barack Obama, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Anna Eshoo, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Elaine Alquist and Paul Fong.
"""
The economic disaster brings us fresh opportunity to think about the
things that aren't working and make fixing those things part of our
economic stimulus. A great example of this is our broken customary
measurement system needs to be done away with in favor of metric.
Currently, we use a confusing and out dated system of measurements
rather than the easy system the rest of the world uses. This is one of
the factors that makes our economy less efficient than that of other
countries and makes our exports less desirable (no one outside the USA
wants to know about our customary measurement system).
The confusing nature of this system leads to substantial losses such
as the $360M Mars orbiter and the $25,000 congress wasted last year
because of a conversion error when buying carbon credits.
It also leads to errors in medicine (children ending up in E.R.
because of conversion errors and errors involved with parents using
teaspoons out of the drawer rather than a measuring spoon if given a
prescription in teaspoons instead of milliliters) and extremely
valuable time wasted in our classrooms as we have to teach our
children a difficult set of units and then even more difficult
calculations using those units (as they involve conversion from
metric) rather than the much more straight forward metric version.
Our children come out of school unprepared for the global economy
because they're unable to effectively use the global language of
measurement.
It's time to fix this mess. Please require that new infrastructure
built with the stimulus package is exclusively built using metric
measures and that conversion to metric is one of the goals of the
stimulus.
"""
You can send a letter to your representatives too by going to http://gometric.us/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/2009%2D02%2D09%2DLetterToCongress
, filling your zip in the box and following the instructions on
congress.org
Paul
--
Go Metric
http://gometric.us/
