On Friday 14 August 2009 14:09:04 Stephen Davis wrote: > Do you think that for effective integration of SI into American society, it > would have to forced through and made mandatory to only use SI units? > > Or do you think freedom of choice and polite persuation would be more > effective in getting the benefits of SI across? Something that seems to be > the consensus of quite a few on this board? > > Personally, I think a properly organised mandatory implementation of SI > both in the US and Britain is the only effective way doing it, much like > the way decimal currency was introduced in the UK way back in 1971.
I think that if a few key things are metricated by force at once, the rest will follow. They are education, journalism, weather reporting, and gas prices. Education is key because if a child does not learn a language, he is unlikely to find that language easy as an adult. My father, who was French, introduced me to the metric system before the schools started teaching it; that's why I think in metric today. For the same reason, and because my mother came from El Salvador, I find Romance languages easy. Schools should teach metric first, and delay old units until the children have shown that they can multiply three-to-eight-digit numbers correctly by hand, if they introduce them at all. And they should ask the students to divide 299792458 by 9192631770 before introducing 0.45359237. The others are things that change every day. Implementing a rule that journalists must report metric quantities as is will just take a few days to break the habit, much shorter than planning switching every sign on every highway. Pierre
