"Frank Sledge" wrote on 1999-06-26 17:23 UTC:
> I prefer the traditional units because they refer to
> things rooted in human reality. My foot is about
> 1 foot long, and a pint of water weighs about a pound.
> Meters, grams and liters are just nerdy abstractions
> with no connection to human experience -- which is,
> I suspect, why geeks prefer them.
Don't mix up *your* customary reality with "human reality":
- My hand lying flat on the table is 10 cm wide (±5%)
- The finger nail on my little finger is 1 cm wide (±5%)
- I stretch my arms to the sides and my elbows are around 1 m apart (±8%)
- When I walk fast (just not yet running), my steps are around 1 m
long (±10%), which is extremely useful to measure distances in the
3-300 m range without tools.
- My hips are 1 m above the ground
- Almost all adult humans are between 1.50 an 2.00 m tall
(in Europe, 90% are between 1.60 and 1.90 m).
Also natural constants turn out to be surprisingly round and easy
to remember in this planet's customary units:
- The speed of light very close to 300 000 km/s
- The length of the equator is very close to 40 000 km
- One liter of water weighs extremely precisely 1 kg
- Earth's gravitational acceleration is very close to 10 m/s² (-1.9%)
- Atmospheric pressure is very close to 100 kPa (+1.3%)
- The speed of sound in air is easy to remember as 1/3 km/s or ~1000 km/h.
- water freezes at 0 °C and boils at 100 °C and 20-25 °C is the
most comfortable room temperature range.
And even many of your daily products that you might think are inch-based
were indeed completely designed in metric units (for instance the so-called
3 1/2 inch floppy disk, which is actually a fully metric Japanese-designed
90 mm disk, that was relabeled in an anti-metric craze by IBM marketroids
for the American market in the early 1980s into Imperial units).
> I'm all for an international system of measurement to
> be used as an auxiliary, an adjunct to our local
> cultural units, rather than a replacement for them --
> as Esperanto is supposed to be an adjunct to our
> local languages rather than a replacement. But this
> international system should be based on human things
> and natural phenomena -- a unit of length equal to
> average human height, for example.
If you have a serious look at the global customary system of units, you
might discover that it is already way better based on "human things and
natural phenomena" than your old Imperial units.
For an excellent collection of more information on the metric system,
please have a look at
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/
The also offer a pretty good bimonthly newsletter on the introduction of
the metric system in the US.
Markus
(thanks for allowing a short detour from Unicode,
which will hopefully become one day as widely
implemented as the metric system.)
-- 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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