I’ve gotten a lot of emails about my articles about the necessity of the U.S. converting to metric soon (President Obama, Give Us a Yard and We’ll Take a Meter; Some Practical Consequences of Going Metric). Let me address a few of them.
My recent entry: President Obama, Give Us a Yard and We’ll Take a Meter has generated a fair amount of email (thank you, by the way). Among the comments were concerns about various aspects of doing the conversion, specifically about all that math to go from one system to another. Then there were comments about the realities of conversion. Let me try to address both of those items.
For all intents and purposes, the United States stands alone in relying on an inefficient and antiquated measurement system. For decades the cry has been that it will be too expensive or too inconvenient or too confusing to change to the worldwide metric standard. With the current economy in dire straits, can we really afford this ridiculous policy? Not only does it makes us look like provincial boobs, but (and this will get people’s attention) it costs us money. If ever there was a golden time to attack the problem with a bold mandate for change, this is it.
In everyone’s life there are things that are easily understandable. But then there are other things that just never seem to make any sense at all. Here are some of the things that I just don’t get.
Myanmar. Liberia. The United States. Out of 193 countries in the world, these three hold the distraction of continuing to clutch onto the antiquated avoirdupois system of measurement as their standard. While we easily accept that there will always
Episode 25 F0403 -"Rolling D30" posted on March 8, 2010.
Coming soon: Episode 26, "F0404 - The Grasp of Charybdis" ETA March week 4, 2010.
Est. time between episodes 12-14 days.
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