Thursday, November 25, 2010
A dubious closed club
Today is Thanksgiving and a very frigid day in Park City. Minus fifteen degree Fahrenheit, early this morning! What is it in degree Celsius? Good question; I just “Googled” it: An impressive minus twenty six! This brings me to today's subject. The metric system is the official system of measurement for all nations in the world except for Burma, Liberia, and the United States. As you can see, our good old USA is in very good company! The metric system was adopted by France in 1791, but was first proposed by John Wilkins, first secretary of the Royal Society of London in 1668. At the time, the Brits didn't think the idea was cool.
I believe that we, Americans, are still resisting the metric wave because it wasn't invented here. Yet, it costs us billions of dollars both in inventory duplication, ineffectiveness of all kinds and lost export sales. I know, we can't afford switching to metric now; instead, we pour billions of dollars monthly that we don't have, prosecuting a “just” war in Afghanistan...
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3 comments:
... and the United Kingdom? And that, while driving on the wrong side of the road.
Surprisingly, the US military is metric, with the Marines tempo that is at 10 "klicks" an hour while doing 10mn a mile (not convinced, I guess). The navy also uses a 24 hours clock, does that count as metric? Now, if we could get NASA metric, we could avoid crashing probes on Mars.
I lived in London before the currency went decimal. That was an exercise in futility, to try to figure it out.
To his last days, my dad was still counting in "ancient francs", I cold never figure if he had a ridiculously expensive Peugeot or just an expensive one.
Joyeux Merci Donnant.
Bill
Very good stuff.
This was a nice article to read, thank you for sharing it..
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