At 02:26 -0700 6/26/1999, Markus Kuhn wrote:
[snip]
>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.
Nope. We buy *lots* of metric cars, and frequently check the tire pressure
in kiloPascals. Scientific and engineering instruments are usually metric.
Also:
2-liter and sometimes 1-liter soda bottles
milligrams (rarely micrograms) of vitamins, minerals, and medications
lots of electrical units (volt, ampere, watt, ohm, ørsted, farad, coulomb,
gauss, maxwell, weber, tesla, henry, even franklin sometimes)
seconds down to nanoseconds
Hz to GHz
microns and nanometers (replacing Ångstroms for wavelengths of light)
Kelvins
lumens, lux
calories (actually large Calories, 1 C = 1 kc)
carat
rad
prefixes up to tera- (1e12), but not peta-, exa-, zetta-, or yotta-; and
down to nano-, but not pico-, femto-, atto-, zepto-, or yocto-.
We're mainly holding on to
in., ft., yard, mi. (and nautical mile)
oz., lb., ton
acre
fluid oz., cup, pint, quart, gallon
dry pint, quart, peck, bushel
the 12-hour clock
barleycorns = 1/3 in. (shoe sizes)
Fahrenheit degrees
horsepower
BTU
Roman numerals for release dates of movies
>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/>
Of course the *proper* system of units is the one in which the basic
physical constants such as c, G, h, Q and the other free parameters of the
Standard Model all have value 1, or in some cases 1/2--at least until we
find the free parameters of the appropriate family of superstring models.
The space of possible models currently being investigated has 203
dimensions, according to a reasonably recent paper.
-- Edward Cherlin President Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Help outlaw Spam. <http://www.cauce.org/> Talk to us at <news:comp.org.cauce>
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