One regular complaint of the anti-metric lobby is that 10 is not divisible by 3 or 4. This is quite true - a fact that was not lost on the committee that was set up by the French Government in 1790 to investigate weights and measures and in particular the fact that the "pied" (foot) and the "livre" (pound) had different values depending on where the user was and what commodity was being bought or sold. The five members of the committee were the five most able scientists of the day and included Laplace and Lagrange (whose names are known to every undergraduate maths, physics or engineering student today). Their conclusions were:
1. Counting and subdivisions of units of measure should have the same radix - the favoured values being 10 or 12. 2. From a philosophical point of view, radix 12 was better than radix 10. 3. The problems of replacing a decimal counting system with a duodecimal counting system was however doomed to failure. Thus, units of measure should use the same radix as was used for counting, even if this meant sacrificing divisibility by 3 and 4. With all due respect to the Dozenal Society of America and the Dozenal Society of Great Britain, I do not see any prospect of the nations of the world changing to a base-12 system of counting - the use of decimal counting is too ingrained in our society to make such a change feasible. In the early days of the metric system, time was decimalised - the French Revolutionary Calendar had 10 days in a "week", 10 "hours" in a day and 100 "minutes" in an hour. This has long since been abandoned In short, there was a very strong commercial pressure for the French to sort out their weights and measures, but the system of measuring time worked, so there was no commercial pressure to change it. That is why the second is the base unit of time rather than the "metric second" (0.864 seconds). -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Patrick Moore Sent: 25 March 2015 20:01 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:54667] Re: Iowa State editorial The long link did not work even with Facebook for me, but the following did work, without Facebook: http://www.iowastatedaily.com/opinion/article_445f120c-d0aa-11e4-86a1-9bb97d e9119e.html?mode=jqm The author (Clay Rogers) clearly has emotional issues and is unlikely to change his mind. The editors are listed here: http://www.iowastatedaily.com/home/contact_us From: Mark Henschel <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Reply-To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Wednesday, March 25, 2015 3:01 PM To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: [USMA:54666] Iowa State editorial For those of you who are not on facebook, there was an article posted recently from the Iowa State University student newspaper that was very antimetric. Paul Trusten and I both responded. Here is my response: Sadly, the author of this article really has no convincing arguments as to why he prefers the customary system over the SI metric system. I get the feeling he really does not have much evidence and is looking around to find some argument that sounds plausible to support his position. The fact is that the Metric System is easy. It was designed on purpose to be simple. Everything, from designing and building houses and airplanes to mixing chemicals or food is much easier using metric units. Anyone who has actually done anything or created anything using both systems can tell quite quickly how much easier it is to do anything that involves any amount of calculating using a decimal system rather than a system based on, let's see, maybe 12, maybe 3, maybe 16, or maybe even 5,280. There is a reason the entire world uses the Metric System, and why more and more Americans are seeing the advantages of using the international system of measurements, now called SI. It is easy. SI is simple to use, and facilitates communication. As those much smarter than myself have already pointed out, there is no "if" in metrication. Metrication is only a matter of "when", not "if". Link to the article in question in case anybody else wants to respond: (http://www.iowastatedaily.com/opinion/article_445f120c-d0aa-11e4-86a1-9bb97 de9119e.html?mode=jqm<http://l.facebook.com/l/KAQHkp6Vp/www.iowastatedaily.c om/opinion/article_445f120c-d0aa-11e4-86a1-9bb97de9119e.html?mode=jqm>)
