Back to School for the Metric System

One of the supporters of my documentary project is Nicholas Seet and as a result of my contact with him, I started a class a month ago called “Financing the Entrepreneurial Enterprise.”

During the first class we did briefs on the various projects we wanted to launch. The reaction to this documentary by the class members was very positive. In fact, one of the other students told me she’d worked in international trade and conversions had caused problems because sometimes people got them wrong and the company received less money than they should have.

Dual labeling can cause mistakes for employees at the register

In another case, a local business owner told how dual labeling was causing her problems. She owns a pet accessories store and sometimes employees in a hurry charge the kilogram price rather than the pound price. Thus, they’re charging less than half of what they should and she loses money every time that happens.

Back to class

One of the big pushes of the class is to raise a small amount of money ($2,000 or less) to help finance our projects (or small parts of them). For the class, we’re working through something called Main Street Crowd that focuses on community-based fundraising efforts. Within this context, it’s to give us successful crowdfunding experience to help prepare some of us to finance larger amounts through sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

My project ask will be $1,500 and will be earmarked for my travel and time in Washington D.C. where I plan to have a number of on-camera interviews. Some of the folks I hope to meet with include the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Smithsonian Institution, Center for Science in the Public Interest and others since they’re all based in the D.C. area.

I’ll use Main Street Crowd to raise money within my class

I’ve already drafted and gotten feedback on my campaign content for the project’s Main Street Crowd page and yesterday we were supposed to have draft scripts ready. In addition to my script, I showed a Prezi presentation while I read the script as kind of a storyboard. Since Prezi allows you to animate your content (kind of like PowerPoint on steroids) it had a pretty good flow.

I received a couple of comments for improvement but the instructor said I could basically record that presentation, add the narration, begin with some live video of myself and I’d have a pretty compelling video for the campaign. What I was planning for was much more time consuming so that came as a welcome relief. I still need to clean it up since it was intended to just give the class an idea of what the images would look like. Once it’s ready, it will be part of my Main Street Crowd page and you can take a look. I know I have a larger number of international readers of this blog and, yes, you can contribute if you’d like.

In other news

– Because of my presentation at the MidSchool Math Conference earlier this year (the conference is already slated for next year) I was approached to take part in a career fair later this month in Taos, about 80 km from where I live. I need to pull together a 45-minute presentation for middle school students that I’ll repeat five times during the sessions. Will probably lose my voice by the end of the day but the more I can get the word out on this project, the better. Not sure if I’ll present at the conference next year. I have an application in.

– Last month was my busiest month of all time. Thanks for helping this happen!

The highest bar represents almost 9,000 pageviews for September. The dark blue bar is for unique pageviews. Most visitors click on two of my pages.

The Metric System and Our English Roots

When I mention converting to the metric system in this country, aside from its immediate rejection by some because it represents change and change is almost automatically considered bad for our survival (see my previous post on “The Metric System as Predator”), one of the reasons brought up to reject it is our English past.

President Obama addressing British Parliament in 2011 (White House.gov)

As Americans we tend to identify strongly with our British history even though we wouldn’t be a country today unless we’d fought so hard against English rule. We like our association with our Anglo-Saxon roots but we tend to like them on our own terms. It’s one of the reasons we follow the royal family’s every move in the tabloids even while we hold a love/hate relationship in everything from British music to international politics.(There’s contrasting dislike of the French but I’ll save that for another column.)

In his book Blood, Class and Empire: the Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, Christopher Hitchens sums it up as:

The odd combination of rivalry and alliance, collusion and suspicion, was to be the pattern of Anglo-American relations for many years—until the entente of 1898 in fact—and in some reminiscent forms even after that.¹

(Yeah, I admit it, I had to look up entente.)

It wasn’t that long ago that President Obama also spoke of our strong kinship while addressing the British Parliament (4:27 into clip):

I’ve come here today to reaffirm one of the oldest, one of the strongest alliances the world has ever known. It’s long been said that the United States and the United Kingdom share a special relationship.

Ironically, it was that break with our royal past that opened the door for us to become the first country in the world with decimalized currency (Thank Thomas Jefferson for our 10 dimes and 100 pennies) even while we still struggle to integrate the rest of a measurement system that no other country would think to give up. (No country that switched to the metric system has ever switched back.)

When people raise this idea of embracing our imperial past two things immediately jump into my mind.

• The metric system was officially adopted in the U.K. in 1965 but its adoption remains “soft” and there are some imperial units still in use. When I asked the head of the U.K. Metric Association about this state of affairs, Robin Pace responded “Because you don’t use it. ”So, Britain is more metric than we are and it’s reasonable to say that we’re holding back both England and Canada from full adoption. That prompted my column on our bad international example for both the U.K. and Canada.
• If people want to argue that giving up our current units is somehow abandoning our legacy, then I say let’s embrace it all the way and recover our lost measurement history and bring back the hogshead, chaldron, scruple, minim and perch to name a few. If we want to be ridiculous let’s be ridiculously ridiculous.

This grasping at our history seems somewhat ironic to me since we no longer use the “Imperial” units in this country we originally brought over; we currently use “U.S. Customary” units. Thus, our units don’t perfectly align with any other country in the world. The Imperial liquid ounce is 28.4131 mL, while the U.S. fluid ounce is 29.5735 mL.

It doesn’t initially sound like a lot but with large amounts it can really add up, particularly if we’re talking about prescriptions.

Came out earlier this month

By the way, just got a copy of John Marciano’s new book: Whatever happened to the metric system. I’ve just started it but it’s getting some attention in the media. Based on previous communication with the author, I knew it wasn’t going to be pro-metric but frankly, anything that gets the discussion back on the table after 30 years works for me.

Thanks,

Linda

Notes: ¹Location 1798 on my Kindle.

Could the Metric System Help Our Student Assessments and Education?

Earlier this month the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) announced its 2012 scores for 15-year-old students in reading, math and science literacy. It also includes

…measures of general or cross-curricular competencies, such as problem solving. PISA emphasizes functional skills that students have acquired as they near the end of compulsory schooling.

For the bottom line: The top 10 countries, had a range of scores from 55.4 to 19.4 for math literacy proficiency level 5 and above, while we scored an 8.8.

Frankly, I was surprised that this news caught some major (if fleeting) media attention. (What to see more coverage? Type “PISA scores” into a search engine and then search “News.” Or, some are complied here.)

Where the top countries scored (partial graph, for whole thing, go here):

Countries with top PISA scores

Where the U.S. stands

The assessment is coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and is conducted in the United States by the National Center for Education Statistics. Given that pedigree, it could be difficult to accuse the test of bias against the United States. I’ve written about our apparent lag in math and science education behind emerging economic entities and its potential relationship to our lack of metric adoption, so let’s see where we stack up this year.

The report states:

In the United States, 9 percent of 15-year-old students scored at proficiency level 5 or above, which was lower than the OECD average of 13 percent. The U.S. percentage was lower than 27 education systems, higher than 22 education systems, and not measurably different than 13 education systems.

And for math literacy:

The U.S. average score was 481, which was lower than the OECD average of 494.

Bottom line: By the time our children are 15 years old, not only are they not in the top of math and science literacy, in many cases they’re barely hanging onto the bottom of average. It’s a sorry situation.

Just having a bad year with the test results?

So, could this be an aberration? Perhaps we were just a little bit off in 2012. On that topic, the report states:

The U.S. average mathematics, science, and reading literacy scores in 2012 were not measurably different from average scores in previous PISA assessment years with which comparisons can be made (2003, 2006 and 2009 for mathematics; 2006, and 2009 for science; and 2000, 2003, and 2009 for reading)

As I’ve written in this blog before, it’s not so much that our students are falling behind, it’s that other counties’ student are making much more rapid progress.

Interestingly, earlier this week I came across the review for a book that seeks to debunk what I (and others) have identified as an American decline. While I’ve been looking at the areas of math and science education, Josef Joffee’s new book, titled The Myth of America’s Decline: Politics, Econimics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies, apparently takes a much wider view of view of the situation. While I am very hesitant to say much about a book I haven’t read, let me quote from the publisher itself and let you know where I see a major problem:

Buttressing his argument with facts, Joffe demonstrates that America’s future is sanguine. In contrast to the Carter years, the economic woes of the Obama era look more like a nasty migraine. By historical standards, the U.S. defense burden today is extraordinarily low, hence sustainable over the long haul. Immigration (plus a healthy birth rate) will not only keep the nation younger than China, Japan, Europe, and Russia but will continue to bring in the world’s best and brightest. Indeed, America is the “world’s Ph.D. factory” both in science and engineering, while its R&D spending dwarfs the “rising rest.”

[Emphasis mine.]

That last statement above is misleading as far as I can tell. I’ll have to get my hands on a copy so I can look up his source for that statement but based on the research I’ve done so far, that’s not what I’ve found.

According to our National Science Foundation (National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2012):

Besides the generally vigorous pace at which the global total of R&D is now growing, the other major trend has been the rapid expansion of R&D performance in the regions of East/Southeast Asia and South Asia, including countries such as China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. The R&D performed in these two Asian regions represented only 24% of the global R&D total in 1999, but accounted for 32% in 2009, including China (12%) and Japan (11%).

[Emphasis mine.]

As for us churning out huge numbers of PhDs, here’s a chart I’ve used before that illustrates where undergraduate degrees in science and engineering are being earned and would seem to indicate that we’re falling behind compared to many of the same countries who are outscoring us (Tough to get a PhD in this country if you’re not first granted a Bachelor of Science) :

Science and engineering undergraduate degrees worldwide (National Science Foundation)

I do believe that we are getting behind the curve in some ways and our continued lack of metric system adoption is one example.

Sure, we might still be in the lead in some areas but think of all the empires that have come before: the British, Mongol, Roman, French, Ottoman (and many others you’ve probably never even heard of) and ask yourself if they recognized they were about to decline or were sure they’d be on top forever? I’m guessing the latter.

I’m not saying that metric system adoption is a panacea for all our problems but why can’t we at least stop handicapping our children with a measurement system that our competitors dropped many years ago? Our dysfunctional use of our U.S. customary units certainly aren’t helping us progress as a nation.

Happy holidays,

Linda

Why measurement systems (including the metric system) are important

Let’s, for a moment, set aside how important it is to get medication doses correct and ask the more basic question “Why does it really matter what measurement system we use?”

My answer to that question might shock you: Fundamentally, it doesn’t.

What really matters is that people working together use the same one. What the metric system has going for it is that it was designed for all of the units logically interrelate to each other. That last point is a big deal.

Metric measuring tape

Back before the world was so integrated it was less of a problem if each little hamlet developed and used its own measures.

The way I like to put it is: “So how tall is it?” one peasant asks another.

“Why, it’s as tall as Larry’s door,” answers the friend. They’ve both been to Larry’s house and can use that as a point of reference.

To say that’s Larry’s door could now become the standard of length/height for that community really isn’t that far off.

Under this scenario, the only people for whom that would really cause a problem would be for the traders who’d have to learn multiple units to deal with multiple localities as they sold their wares. It was also a way of keeping outsiders out since their lack of familiarity with the regional units would immediately make them stand out.

For reasons that I’ll explore in my documentary, we continue to isolate ourselves, and handicap our children, through our lack of metric adoption.

The units we currently use in this country are not only a mishmash of almost totally unrelated units that were cobbled together but we’ve put ourselves totally out of step with the rest of the industrial world.

Metric units are streamlined and basic. Easy to learn and apply. That’s why almost everyone else in the world has adopted them.

While I have enlisted an American culture expert to interview to help address why we’ve been so resistant to such a change, I suspect that there are multiple reasons for our behavior on this issue in the past. The poll that ran on this topic previously to helped identify them.

Recycling our past

As we move toward metric adoption, we’ll find ourselves with items we no longer need. Mostly what comes to my mind are the measuring cups we use for dry ingredients in the kitchen (in a metric world, grams are the necessary and superior way to go). It’s also possible that people might still have liquid measuring cups without milliliters but they’d probably have to be pretty old or rulers (or tape measures) that don’t have metric measures on them. (Not sure what the cutoff date for such items might have been…the 1970s when we had our last metric push? Might need to investigate this some more.) Items like wrenches in U.S. customary units also come to mind.

Great idea to recycle tape measures–hopefully nonmetric ones.

Earlier this week I came across the above image of a clutch made from measuring tapes and got to thinking about what we could do with non-metric items we’d longer need. (I know I currently have a tape measure with inches on one side. It looks like the item above uses both metric and nonmetric.)

In the meantime, feel free to share your ideas of what other items we’ll need to try to recycle into something useful or interesting (maybe even beautiful) once we’ve adopted the metric system in this country and even your ideas of how to do it.

I wouldn’t ask you to do anything that I’m not willing to do myself and I have an idea for something to do with my dry measuring cups that just came to me so I’ll try to get that put together up for my next post.

Want to share your ideas of what other things we’ll not need in a fully metric world? Feel free to add them to the comments section.

Want to share an image of possible way to use old, nonmetric items using one of many reputable filesharing sites? (I’d recommend  Imgur http://imgur.com/ or Photobucket http://photobucket.com/ feel free.* Or even post to my twitter account: https://twitter.com/milebehind. Who knows, maybe I’ll add your ideas to my “Hall of Fame.”

I look forward to hearing from you!

Thanks,

Linda (milebehind@gmailcom)

Notes:
* Just please don’t send me image files. I won’t open them for security reasons.

The clutch image from http://www.perpetualkid.com/tape-measure-zippered-bag.aspx

Metric tape measure photo: Simon A. Eugster

Will the United States REALLY Be the Last Country to Adopt the Metric System (SI)?

It came to my attention recently that of the three countries in the world that don’t currently use the metric system on a routine basis: the United States, Burma and Liberia, it appears Burma has now announced its intention to switch over.

(Don’t let the Myanmar reference throw you, I’ve been using “Burma” in my writing and discussion because our government via the CIA Factbook classifies it as Burma.)

From the CIA Factbook

Anyway, this was sent out as a news story, ironically during our county’s National Metric Week and dated 10/10 no less:

Myanmar is preparing to adopt the metric system or the International System of Units (SI System) as the country’s official system of measurement, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

The reason given:

 …to streamline the weight measuring process in exporting agricultural products such as rice, beans and maize for which various measurement systems have been widely applied, according to Dr. Pwint San, Deputy Minister for Commerce.

Interestingly, I tried to confirm this from another news source but was unable to do so. I was only able to find the exact same story posted on a couple of other sites. Granted, one of them was on page 90 of a pdf titled: Myanmar Investment & Industry Information for Oct-5-11, 2013 and that cited Myanmar Time[s], October 6, 2013. Couldn’t locate the original story even after I switched to the English version of the Times. I also tried to confirm the information on the Myanmar government’s site, and while there I did discover it had a trade conference that week (which would make sense in terms of timing) but only the headlines were viewable in English so I couldn’t find anything more official.

Additional research led me to the following story from last year (July 26, 2012) that cited something from previous year that with the headline and subhead:

Myanmar is converting to the metric system
It’s certainly going to cause a lot of controversy and resistance within the country, but let’s see. 

The article’s lead went on to say:

THE basket, viss, tin and tical would largely disappear from Myanmar if the Ministry of Commerce gets its way.

At a meeting on the development of wholesale centres held in Magwe last month, participants agreed in principle to the government’s proposal to adopt the kilogram as the basic unit for commodities trade in all townships.

If implemented, the kilogram would replace traditional, non-metric measurements that are used widely in domestic trade. The government is pushing the change to make foreign trade, which is conducted exclusively in metric measurements, simpler and bring the country into line with its trade partners.

That would seem to confirm that the intention of the government so maybe it was able to make progress

My contact with the National Institute for Standards and Technology wasn’t able to shed any additional light on this subject but sent me some new references.

So, will Myanmar leave us in the dust regarding metric system adoption? It remains to be seen since I haven’t been able to locate information outside of what’s cited above (such as a proposed adoption date) so I’m willing to sit back for a while and see what else transpires on this front.

Still, if it does comes to pass, it will be the latest country the U.S. Metric Association will recognize as moving toward metric adoption since Jamaica in 1998. That’s not a typo, the fourth to the last country to switch to the metric system did so during the LAST century in 1998.

We are a member in the international organization that supports metric system measures around the globe

And just to be clear, every country in the world has “officially” adopted the metric system, including the United States. In fact, the United States signed the Convention of the Meter in Paris back in May 1875 and to this day is a member of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.  (World Metrology Day is on May 20 each year to commemorate the signing.)

Do we really want to come in second to last in this important race? Or even last, as is looking more likely?

It’s time to gain some momentum on this front and I plan to write about that more next weekend, stay tuned.

Thanks for your interest,

Linda

Top 10 Reasons to Switch to the Metric System Revisited

As I mentioned last week, some recent media coverage on our lack of metric system use by Discovery News and Scientific American has resulted in a lot of traffic to this site. Of particular interest is my post from last September on the Top 10 Reasons the United States Should Use the Metric System (or SI).

I’ve included some of my statistics for illustration.

All the traffic to this blog

Thought it might be a good idea to dust this off and post it up front. I made a couple of tweaks (I’m a writer, I can’t help myself) and have added a pdf to make it easier to pass around if people so choose. I only ask that the information’s source not be removed since down the road I’ll need to fundraise and I’d like to be tied to this work in people’s minds.

My page stats for the past week

I’ll be back next week with fresh content and, since I’m beginning a new phase of this project, with more “behind the scenes” information that I’m hoping you’ll find interesting.

Top 10 Reasons the United States Should Use the Metric System (or SI)

1) It’s the system 95 percent of the world uses
(It’s not standard in the U.S.,  Burma and Liberia)
2) It’s easier to make conversions
(You just move the decimal point right and left)
3) Teaching two measurement systems to children is confusing
4 ) It’s the language of science
5) It’s the language of medicine
6) Conversion errors by the humans using them are inevitable
(We lost a Mars orbiter that way and pharmacy mistakes are common)
7) It’s the language of international commerce
8) Many hobbies and sports use the metric system
9) Its use is necessary for travel outside of the United States
10) So we look less foolish and ignorant to the rest of the world

And a few more for good “measure..”

11) Less clutter since you don’t need liquid and dry measuring cups and teaspoons and
tablespoons (Just a scale and liquid measuring cups)
12)  It’s much easier to conceptualize 1 gram versus 1/28th of an ounce or 1 milliliter
verses 1/29 of a liquid ounce (rounded measures)
13) There are fewer measures to learn. Most people will use meters, liters, and grams
verses more than 10 for liquid and dry U.S. customary measures alone
14) It was designed to be easy to learn and use
(In 1790s Europe the literacy rate was around 60 percent)
15) It makes us a friendlier international tourist destination.

To_10_Reasons_Metric (pdf)

Shortchanging American Children with Our Measurement System

While over the past year I’ve looked at metric adoption from a number of angles, the thing I keep coming back to again and again is how we’re shortchanging our children. Granted, my own daughter is almost 25 years old now so my own progeny concerns me less than our children as a whole and the generations that will follow them.

Metric units are used internationally for science

We are doing them a huge disservice every year that we continue to use U.S. customary units (for those new to this blog, we imported imperial units and then futzed with them so they no longer align with any other country in the world) in our education system. Metric units were designed to work together in very logical ways rather than the hodgepodge of units that make up our current measures.

Right now we teach our children both U.S. customary and metric units and under the new Common Core Standards (talked about this in a previous blog) measurement standards are dropped from the curriculum once students hit sixth grade. Still, every minute our customary units are taught in school is a minute wasted and that time would be better spent on other subjects. And every minute that metric units get second billing to U.S. customary units means that we’re ill preparing our children for careers in science, medicine and any activity that will take them out of the country or deal with others internationally.

Increasingly our children will study abroad—but they won’t know the measures used almost everywhere else in the world.

In fact, our children are less likely to stay within our borders during their education than at any point in our history and, according to the U.S. Department of Education,

Over 80,000 Americans study abroad at the college or university level each academic year. The number of U.S. students going abroad has increased by about two percent annually over recent years, and this type of study opportunity is now an established part of American academic life.

Of course, the minute most of our students hit the ground in another country they face an additional hurdle beyond language and culture: lack of familiarity with the metric system that almost everyone else uses. Luckily, the metric system is easy to learn but why make our children have to learn one more thing on the fly when they shouldn’t have to.

In fact, within the first month on this project I was flying to Washington, D.C. to visit friends and begin my research when I happened to sit next to a middle-school math teacher (one of many coincidences I’ve encountered on this project but that’s another blog).

She basically said that her students didn’t think it was a good use of their time to learn the metric system because they’d never use it again. She also said her counterargument was that it was like learning a second language and it might come in handy since other people use it.

Even as early as I was in this project, I offered her the following counterargument to use instead…

Sure, you don’t need to learn the metric system if you:

• Never plan to leave the country;
• Don’t plan on a well-paying job in science or technology;
• Don’t plan on a well-paying job in medicine;
• Don’t plan on doing anything associated with international trade (including manufacturing and distribution).

Students arriving here will have difficulty learning our illogical measurement system

Not only does our metric adoption hang up our students leaving the country, it also hangs up students coming to our country to study here and they mean big economic business:

(July 13, 2013) Association of International Educators released new economic data today showing that the 764,495 international students studying across the United States supported nearly 300,000 jobs and contributed $21.8 billion to the U.S. economy in the 2011-2012 academic year. Further analysis shows that for every 7 enrolled international students, 3 U.S. jobs are created or supported by spending in the following sectors: higher education, accommodation, dining, retail, transportation, telecommunications, and health insurance. 

International students must start scratching their heads almost the minute they arrive here because they’ve never encountered a system as messed up as ours. “Wait,” I imagine them saying to themselves, “I thought this country was advanced.”

While I’m not suggesting that students wouldn’t come here to study because we don’t use the metric system, it just makes it more difficult for them than it needs to be. International tourism is also one of the reasons Hawaii has considered adoption of the metric system to make it easier for travelers to get around once they arrive. To me, that just adds one more reason to change over to the metric system.

Those with our children’s interests at the forefront will assist with metric adoption

As this movement progresses, it will very important to let parents, grandparents, guardians, etc. know the disservice we’re doing to our current and future generations by clinging to our outmoded ways. Riled parents would probably be one of the most effective ways to give this movement some momentum—but they need to understand the issue first—something I’m hoping to help with.

Let’s give our kids a break and provide them with the best system available and help prepare them for today’s world—it’s the least they deserve from us even if the switchover will take a bit of effort on our part.

Linda

Living La vie Mètrique: An Australian’s Take on Metric System Adoption Part II

It’s forty-one years since the metric conversion process began in Australia, and thirty years ago the Metric Conversion Board lowered their flag, produced their last report and said “Mission Accomplished.”

So what has changed? Just about everything, that’s what!

A metric kitchen

Here’s a photo of what’s in my kitchen cupboard: a kilo of flour, a liter of vinegar, a 100 gram jar of coffee. The water bottle is 600 mL, as that size replaced the Imperial pint. You can also get 1 L and 2 L sizes for milk and other liquids. The plastic container of pasta at the back has a capacity of two liters, and that size is stamped on the base; a lot of storage containers are marked like that.

(Note: All the photos in this article, plus a few extra are available here: http://www.imgur.com/a/hYZjb at a slightly larger size)

A loaf of bread is usually 680 g, as that replaced the 1½ pound loaf, but you find other sizes. The labels on the supermarket shelves include comparison prices (in $ per kilo or $ per 100 g) to make it easy to compare prices of different-sized packets.

All of the products except the tin at the far right are labelled in metric units only. The only ounces or fluid ounces I ever see are on goods intended for the US or UK markets.

Beer is sold in 750 mL “long necks” or 375 mL “stubbies.” Wine is also in 750mL bottles, or in casks (Americans call it box wine) of two or three liters.

Metric road sign

Traffic signs are all metric. Speed limits are in kilometers per hour (abbreviated km/h), distances in kilometers and  height clearances in meters. Speed limits are usually 40 or 50 km/h around built-up areas, 60 km/h on arterial roads, 80 or 100 km/h (sometimes 110) on highways.

Walking and cycle tracks have distances marked in kilometres or meters on signposts. In fact, unless the distance is meters the unit is omitted, so if you see a sign saying “City 5.3” you can correctly assume it is kilometers.

Cars have had metric nuts and bolts for years, the same as the US, and we buy gas and oil by the litre. Engine capacity is in litres and power is in kilowatts instead of horsepower.

My gas meter reads in cubic meters and my water meter clicks over a notch every time a liter flows through it. Electricity bills have always been in kilowatt-hours, and on gas bills they convert the cubic meters into the energy consumption in megajoules (MJ) where it used to be in therms. (1 therm = 100 000 BTU)

At the hardware store, what you would call a “2 by 4” and we used to call a “4 by 2” is now sometimes advertized as 100 x 50 mm and sometimes as 90 x 45 mm. Timber is sold by the metre or in lengths which are multiples of 1200 mm to match the standard 1200 x 2400 mm plywood and plasterboard. (2 x 4s are actually a bit smaller than the advertized size, the metric dimension is the finished size.)

Nails and screws are listed with descriptions like “Nails, Bullet Head, Galvanised, 75 x 3.75 mm” and you can buy them in packs of 2 kg or more if you are building something big. Wood screws and self-tapping screws are described by length in millimeters but their thickness is by gauge. Some old measures keep hanging on.

Plumbing fittings, electrical conduits, switches: all their sizes are in millimeters, but I think the British Standard Pipe Thread might outlast civilization itself. I used to install water-saving showerheads and their flow was listed as 9.5 liters per minute.

The standard ceiling height for houses is 2400 mm (7ft 10½ ins) which was dropped from 8ft to accommodate a rational metric size. A standard door is 2040 mm high, about 6ft 8in. The builders do everything in millimeters; there are no centimeters and no misplaced decimal points.

Buying an appliance? Airconditioners, heaters and stoves all do their cooking in degrees Celsius. The capacity of your refrigerator is measured in liters. It’s easy to envision an array of milk cartons that the fridge will hold when making comparisons. The capacity of a washing machine or dryer is in kilograms.

TVs (and computer monitors) are usually measured in centimeters, but you still see a lot of them advertised in inches for the screen size. The dimensions of all products, appliances, furniture, curtains, bedsheets, is always in millimeters or centimeters and their weight is in kilograms.

Paper sizes changed, too. Australia previously used the British sizes with strange names like Octavo and Foolscap, and odd ratios of height to width. Now, ISO 216 sizes are used everywhere. Standard writing paper is A4, 210 x 297 mm; two of them side by side are an A3 poster-sized sheet if you turn it through 90º, and an A4 folded in half is an A5 which is suitable for a pocket notebook.

This makes things easy for enlarging and reducing on a photocopier; you scale the original up by 41% or down to 71% to get to the next size. You see fliers, bills, newsletters, posters, catalogs, brochures; all of them based on the A-series paper size.

Weather forecasts are all metric, as is information in the news. Temperatures are in degrees Celsius, rainfall in millimeters and wave heights in meters at sea, but wind speed is in knots for shipping and km/h on land.

When they were discussing irrigation and river flows on the news a while ago, (a hot topic on a continent that is mostly desert,) we heard about megaliters and gigaliters. That’s a thousand and a million metric tons of water. A serious amount of water.

The language hasn’t changed a lot. People still use terms like footage, mileage and say “going the extra mile,” but in describing metric measurements people will say so many ‘mil’ for millimeters or milliliters, and say ‘kilos’ for kilograms. The next pub might be a few ‘kays’ down the road.

There are still a few minor problems. Clothing sizes for one. For mens’ trousers and shirts it’s just a matter of measuring the neck or waist in centimeters. For womens’ clothing there is a supposedly standard set of sizes, but no two manufacturers are alike. Also, sizes have inflated over the years, as we have become a nation with a larger waistline. (I remember seeing a cartoon of a woman telling her husband “Size twelve? No, much too big. Get me a size ten, and make sure it’s the biggest size ten they’ve got.”)

Shoe sizes are much the same. My feet are the English size 9 but I wonder, 9 what? Why can’t they just measure the length from toe to heel? That’s how they do it for the flip-flops (thongs) you wear on the beach.

You can’t get incandescent light bulbs any more, they are all compact fluorescents, so instead of bulbs being described in watts, which is a measure of the power they consume, the output is described in lumens, and I have yet to learn how many lumens my living room needs.

There are still a few Imperial holdovers: some pubs serve craft beers in pints, people still ask about the weight of new-born babies in pounds, and computer typography is 72 (and a tiny bit) points to the inch. But on the whole, metric conversion is complete. Of course, there are lots of older buildings and a lot of industrial machinery, railway track, roads, bridges and dams built in Imperial measurements which will need maintaining for a long time, but they aren’t a major problem, and everything new is in metric measurements.

We have an entire generation of adults who have grown up using metric measures, and I don’t know anyone who would want to change back. And kids at school don’t need to wonder why there are sixteen ounces to the pound, fourteen pounds to the stone, and twelve inches to the foot.

Peter Goodyear

Footnote:
You can download a copy of the Metric Conversion Board’s final report, Metrication in Australia if you click on this link: http://themetricmaven.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Metrication-in-Australia-built-2013-06-24.pdf

It’s a PDF document, fairly short, (127 pages,) but quite comprehensive in covering the background of the decision to change to metric, how the change  was accomplished and the notable successes and failures encountered on the way.

The story of how it came to be publicly available is interesting, and is documented here: http://themetricmaven.com/?p=3612

American Culture and the Metric System: Part II

Last week I just wanted to report on what I discovered through my poll on American culture and metric system adoption without mucking it up with my observations and opinions. I certainly didn’t want to express any of that prior to launching the poll. That didn’t seem sporting.

My observations thus far

Based on the things I’ve read and people I’ve spoken with regarding this subject, I get a few different reactions:

1. Wow, I had no idea we’d gotten so far behind.
2. A negative knee-jerk response to being asked to change something an offer of a quickly-grabbed-at reason why we shouldn’t change (heritage is the one caught most often).
3. We’re the greatest country in the world and we don’t have to change.

Someone did write-in “arrogance” in the metric system poll a couple of weeks ago and I know it’s something I’ve heard directly from people myself (see number three above).

Let’s take a moment to explore that. By definition, arrogance means “having or revealing an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance or abilities.” Is that the boat we’ve gotten ourselves into? Certainly some folks seem to be paddling in that direction.

We’re no longer at the top of some of the good lists

Unfortunately, we’re rapidly losing any claim we might have to being “the best” in a number of critical areas as I’ve mentioned before in this blog:

• We’re nowhere near the top globally in our children’s math and science scores (U.S. Metric Adoption and Common Core Standards)
• We’re no longer viewed as an unrivaled economic superpower (U.S. Sets a Bad International Example—Metrically Speaking)

As I was writing this, I got curious about where we are in terms of patents (certainly a case could be made whether this is an appropriate measure) but I thought it would be an interesting data point.

Looking at the Wikipedia entry (the World Intellectual Property Organization page has the information spread out a lot more) in 2011 we ranked third in number of patent applications behind Japan and China (no surprise there) and second in patents granted (behind Japan).

An interesting data point listed for 2007 (the only year for which this is listed on the page) indicates “Resident filings per million population” also has us ranked third after Japan and South Korea.

We are at the top of this obesity list

For those of you who are saddened that we are no longer first in the above categories, we do apparently excel in a different area: obesity. A recent article by PBS illustrates the sorry story of our self-reported weight problems.

A world-traveling author speaks

Moving away from statistics and back to the culture issue I started with, I did manage to locate someone who has some insight on American culture. Lance Johnson has produced a book for non-U.S. folks about what they can expect upon hitting our soil. Titled What Foreigners Need to Know About America from A to Z: How to Understand Crazy American Culture, People, Government, Business, Language and More. (And, yes, the book is as comprehensive as its title.)

Johnson, who has visited 81 different countries, had to include an entire chapter on measurement which, in part, begins:

As you probably know, Americans can be stubborn about some things. The way he measure things is a good example. Nations began to adopt the metric system in the 1840s, and by 1900 most commercially advanced countries of the world had adopted it…The U.S. has never fully converted to it, even with nudging by government and business.

While the above quote relates specifically to the metric system, he points out in other sections of his book some of our other propensities:

At the opposite extreme, 80 percent of Americans emphasized the importance of personal freedom and individual rights compared to just 30 percent of Asians.

He also points out:

About half believe it is very important to know about the cultures and customs of others in order to successfully compete in a global economy, yet from my experience Americans are quite lacking in this area.

He seems to have hit that nail on the head.

Not doomed by our past

However, I don’t think we’re doomed by our past and we now have to constantly adapt to a rapidly-changing environment. Within that context, the metric system would be a fairly easy adjustment since it’s based on logic. At that point we can finally properly communicate with the rest of the world. (The Top 10 Reasons Why Now is the Right Time for the United States to Convert to the Metric System)

In coming months I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this topic as new information comes my way.

Linda

And the Winner Is: Results of the American Culture/Metric System Poll

I could write almost endlessly about how to interpret the results of the metric system and our American culture poll but while I’m not a woman of few words, I do like to cut to the chase. To be clear, I knew going in that the results of the poll would be unscientific. However, I did ask questions that could reveal information that might be useful to me moving forward with the project.

I thank all of you who took time to respond and help get the word out on the poll. I greatly appreciate what you had to say.

1) Most of the people who responded to the poll already use the metric system. (66 percent)

This did not surprise me. Most people in this country have totally lost sight of the metric system so a poll on a subject would most likely interest those who already use it. And, as I’ve observed in the past, this blog has a large international following so that was reflected in the responses. What was heartening to see was that of those who don’t currently use the metric system, a majority thought it would be easy to learn. And right they are—if one is open to learning it. I applaud their adaptability, it’s a quality much needed in today’s world.

This leads the second thing I learned/confirmed with the poll…

2) By a 2 to 1 margin, it was thought resistance to the metric system was more laziness than due to potential problems conversion itself might cause. (26 percent versus 13 percent)

Okay, I’ll admit that the word choice for the most popular suggestion was somewhat loaded. I could have phrased it more gently but I think it somewhat gets to the heart of the matter. (I’m certainly lazy in some ways.)  Plus, if people didn’t like any of the answers I supplied, they were free to write in their own through the “other” category I included with all of the questions. And, in the interest of full disclosure, since it appears readers can’t view the write-ins (first time I’ve used this poll tool), all of them are at the bottom of this post for your inspection.

The answer to the other question in the poll is somewhat more problematic.

3) Almost half who responded to the poll indicated metric adoption would need to be forced, either through federal mandate (24 percent) or removal of U.S. customary units from products sold in this country (23 percent).

Here’s what’s problematic about this: federal mandate is a viable, real-world option but I’m not sure how the second selection could be adopted as a practical matter. Sure, the federal government could require the removal of customary units (but that would be the equivalent of federal mandate) but short of that, removal of non-metric units would have to be voluntary. Some companies would like to go in that direction—but others would likely need to be forced by consumers—to get to the 100 percent mark.  Since the second option excludes government requirement that would take quite a forceful groundswell. Could happen, but unlikely—too much work. Still, I wanted to get a sense of whether people thought that approach could work, and they think it has potential.

Those are the surface findings. You are free to consider the data yourself and comment on it. After you look at the write-ins below (and look at the full responses in my previous post), you’ll have access to all the same information I do.

Speaking of write-ins, I want to highlight one of them that shows what this movement is up against. This is verbatim except for the quotation marks:

why to change it if the old one worked good so far?

I can only hope that was a joke.

Linda

Write-ins

Question on why Americans don’t use the metric system
– American exceptionalism
– Misguided legislative priorities
– It would be really expensive to change it. (Ie. Signs, teaching, books.)
– The advantages aren’t worth upfront cost, in money and inconvenience, to switch
– Fear of change.
– It was promised that we’d be using SI within a decade, but Govt did nothing
– The change is not Something that us required to improve
– non-metric habits
– republicans
– Structure of American Government
– It hasn’t been forced on us
– All of the above
– DON’T LIKE CHANGE
– it works- we have always done it this way.
– There is no “burning platform” to change
– Fear
– US Congress would not agree, because of big business influance and pressure.
– why to change it if the old one worked good so far?
– Arrogance!
– Lack of strong leadership that understands the implications of not changing
– Lack of metric education in the schools, Americans don’t understand it is easy.
– Education was too stuck on teaching conversion factors , not how to use metric.

Question on what it would take for Americans to adopt the metric system
– Complete decimation of the economy at the same time the metric world is growing.
– Repeal all regulations relating to units of measure
– get rid of republicans
– It has to be necassary
– It’s already happening; just look at the selection at Home Depot. No rush!
– nothing I can think ot
– Stop teaching STEM classes in English units
– Economic incentives
– Heavier teaching in grade school
– Convert American football to metric

Question on current use or difficulty to learn
– I already use it (i’m a scientist)
– I’m a physicist. I use it every day. But 14,000′ peaks are better that way.
– I know it well, but it would take a while to feel comfortable.
– I use the metric system at work