On 2011/03/31, at 01:12 , Stanislav Jakuba wrote:
> I attended an American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) student design
> competition, a festive event with posters and presentations from four
> Connecticut universities. I attend this competition most years, other
> commitments permitting. I thought I share with you the SI presence.
>
> First, the quality of the 8 projects (2 per uni.) was excellent and it was
> most difficult to select a winner. On the other hand, metrication proponents
> would have had no such problem. There was only one presenter that used SI
> units exclusively. Elsewhere, posters and presentations had the usual mix of
> IP and SI units. No progress in two generations. A casual inquiry confirmed
> that courses are taught in "both systems."
>
> Sorry to spoil your day.
> Stan J.
Dear Stan,
Thanks for this information. I suspect that several forces are operating on the
academics at these universities. Consider these three (there are many others):
1 If the academic engineers chose to teach the most-used metric system
units as actually practiced in engineering they would teach a set like this
1000 1000
millimetres metres kilometres
grams kilograms tonnes
millilitres litres cubic metres
1 metre x 1 metre = 1 square metre
1 metre x 1 metre x 1 metre = 1 cubic metre
As learning these metric system units (for a very slow learner) can take as
long as a minute, the academic engineers are faced with a problem -- how to
replace four years of class time teaching about all the different kinds of
inches, feet, yards, and miles, and how to convert from any one of these to all
of the others (there's thousands of hours class time and homework time on these
activities).
2 The culture of the entire science and engineering "industries" in the
USA is to work in metric and to hide this from the public and especially from
journalists and politicians. It's a bit dated, but I am still impressed that
sixteen groups of scientist and engineers in the USA developed seven seemingly
simple questions about science and engineering to ask of presidential
candidates before the 2008 election. They wanted to ask about: innovation,
climate change, energy, education, water, research, and health and they did
this without once referring to how any of these things could or should be
measured! This struck me as completely astounding. It was as if there was an
elephant in the room — a metrication elephant — that no-one wanted to
recognise. See http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/AMetricationElephant.pdf
3 The mistaken belief in "two systems" when the truth is that the metric
system is the only complete and co-ordinated system that ever existed. All
other measurement methods -- and there are thousands of them -- are simply
collections of measuring words. Consider the word mile after reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile and then try to think about whether the
measuring word, mile, ever belonged to any system.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin LCAMS
Author of the ebook, Metrication Leaders Guide, see
http://metricationmatters.com/MetricationLeadersGuideInfo.html
Hear Pat speak at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lshRAPvPZY
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.
