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, �rsted, farad, coulomb,
gauss, maxwell, weber, tesla, henry, even franklin sometimes)
seconds down to nanoseconds
Hz to GHz
microns and nanometers (replacing �ngstroms 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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