From: gerard@caliban.soest.hawaii.edu (Gerard Fryer)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.usa
Subject: Re: Metric! 100km/h $4.00/kg $0.62/Litre!
Date: 27 Aug 92 23:11:33 GMT
Organization: Scum Of the Earth and Senile Tenured

In article <1992Aug27.012132.11193@citec.oz.au>, sgccpgs@citec.oz.au (Paul Salanitri) writes:
|> So!  I hear that by 1996 you will have to go METRIC!!!!!!
|> It's not so bad, REALLY!
|> BTW. When you get those (100) signs up, that doesn't mean you can go
|> 160km/h (100 mph).  But I'm sure some will try!

Anyone can live with any system.  The problems come only when you try
to translate from one system to another.  I hear arguments like "Who's
gonna wanna buy 454-gm cans of salsa?" But, of course, salsa won't be
sold that way; it'll be sold by the half kilo.

Back in the grim old days of the Arab oil embargo, when gas prices were
skyrocketing, Hawaii had the dubious honor of being the first state in
the union to have gasoline rise above $1/gallon.  The trouble was that
the pumps had too few digits.  Some gas stations tried setting their
pumps to half the price and asking people to multiply by two but, of
course, that led to all sorts of arguments (multiplication by two is
tough).  So they recalibrated to liters.  Since the prices were
changing rapidly anyway, people got used to it in no time.  People
would even boast about how many miles/liter they were getting (!).
Then the pumps gained another digit, we went back to gallons, and
metrication took a giant step backwards.

The only industries now embracing the metric system in the U.S. are
liquor and windsurfing.  The windsurfing is interesting because it
happened through public choice rather than because of directives from
on high.  First it was sails.  The giant Hong Kong sail lofts were
metric so those of us with custom locally-sewn sails, to give sensible
answers to the eternal question "What size are you rigging?" had to
learn to multiply by eleven.  That got old fast, so we forced the
home-grown lofts to go metric.  Now, even in such uniquely American
windsurfing meccas as Hood River or Corpus Christi, everyone knows that
if it's a 3.5 day it's going to be possible to get your little 250cm
board up into a plane and have fun - nobody ever mentions square feet
any more.

Perhaps the best writing about conversion of units was an article Lord
Ritchie Calder wrote in Scientific American back in the late sixties in
anticipation of both British and American moves to the metric system.
He explained most of the fears and how to answer them, and basically
gave the British gummint the resolve to stick to their timetable (more
or less).  To bad few Mercans read the article (and too bad I cleaned
out my office last week, otherwise I could give you the reference).

Of course, we all know that the British duodecimal system (12
inches/foot; 12d/shilling, etc.) was superior to the mere decimal, but
the strength of the metric system certainly shows that Napoleon's
advisers knew what they were about when they pointed out that man has
only ten fingers.  Now if we could only do something about circular
measure and time - I guess nautical miles is one measure that is not
about to be replaced by kilometers.

-- 
Gerard Fryer  (g.fryer@soest.hawaii.edu)
School of Ocean & Earth Science & Technology
University of Hawaii at Manoa