Re: US cultural conventions

From: Markus Kuhn (Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Sat Jun 26 1999 - 05:31:31 EDT


"A. Vine" wrote on 1999-06-25 21:11 UTC:
> For the record, were Germany or France or any other "enlightened" culture
> isolated geographically (and economically) from other parts of the world, they
> would no doubt have incompatible cultural norms.
>
> Witness how long it has taken England to adopt metric standards, for example.
> Look how close they are. Consider their trading partners. But note also that
> they are on an island.

I don't think so. How did Japan, New Zealand and Australia introduced the
metric system, A4 paper, etc. so successfully many decades ago? They are
also islands, economically powerful, and have the US as a major trading
partner. No, blaming the geopolitical and economic position of the US
for its sticking to medieval conventions is, even though I have heard it
as an argument frequently, just wishful thinking. The underlying reasons
are much more grim and have probably more to do with a political culture
in which public figures are proud of their scientific ignorance and
their demonstrated lack of critical thinking. This leads then to
ridiculous Congress debates where much too senior congressmen hold up
milk packages during their speeches and amuse themselves about the
prospect that Americans would have to buy milk by the 3.785 L. Well, the
US have started to teach the metric system widely in schools and
universities in the 1970s, so when these kids reach the age of 60 in
2020 and become Congress members, I hope that then this one will finally
be resolved. Until then, the dominant use of SI units in the US will
unfortunately remain the 9 mm bullet.

Markus
(thanking you for allowing a refreshing round of US bashing and
now ngoing back to working on the Unicode X11 fonts ... :)

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>



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