Hey, anyone remember the metric system? Perhaps some of our international readers could provide insight into what it is like to live in a world governed by units that come neatly packaged by factors of ten, rather than the charmingly anthropocentric system of ounces and inches and acres that we favor here in the U.S. True, some of us science types will occasionally speak of centimeters, but in my circles we usually set hbar=c=1 and express everything in electron volts, so it’s barely metric at all.
Via Lawyers, Guns & Money, Dean Dad reminds us of the time when a titanic struggle raged for the soul of this great nation, with the forces of American exceptionalism valiantly beating back the invaders who would have us measure football fields in meters rather than yards. (Or, even worse, “metres”!) Without the patriots of the Reagan Administration to save us from the malaisical cosmopolitan wussification favored by Jimmy Carter, the speed limit on many interstate highways might be 90 km/hour even today.
Some of our younger Gen-Y readers might be skeptical that this was ever such a big deal. One of my favorite stories recalls a discussion in an English class at the end of my first semester in college in 1984. Our mischievous professor asked each of the students to give an example of a belief we held that we thought would be controversial among our fellows. Given that this was a middle-class suburban Catholic institution, there were too many ways for me to get in serious trouble here (um, “God doesn’t exist”? “abortion should be legal”?). But I chickened out, and settled on something that I thought satisfied the letter of the assignment without being too crazy — I declared my support for the metric system.
You would have thought I had called the Pope a Communist. The class (including the professor) exploded in exasperation, rolling their eyes and moaning “Oh no, you’re not one of those people, are you?” People are very attached to their weights and measures, as it turns out. But I stuck courageously to my convictions, defending the usefulness of making easy conversions between units at different scales.
If I were to do it again, though, I might go with the god-doesn’t-exist business.
#41 (and hard hardware in general): it is intriguing that industrial installations in Spain, theoretically a SI country, use inches for pipes and similar. This is because a lot of it is produced in UK, I guess.
Also skin (for tannery) is measured in square foots, or it was twenty years ago. Perhaps UK controls the commerce here too?
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