Higgs Boson wrote:
On Sunday, November 17, 2013 4:58:21 PM UTC-8, songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:

...

Apparently in the USA metric is approved but not compulsory (or
traditional

measures are not forbidden) consequently there is no money
available for

conversion and education costs so nothing is done.



it is taught in the schools and it appears on all

packages that i've seen in recent years along with

the other measurements.


Y'see, Songie, that's eggzactly what I was on about -- the two sets
of measurements. I cited the awful, expensive, humiliating debacle
of the Mars shot as an example of potential -- in the case of the
Mars weather shot -- ACTUAL damage when 2 sets of measurements try to
exist side by side.

Always on the search for a conspiracy g I thought of the wonderful
Latin saying -- one of the half-dozen I remember -- "cui bono" = who
profits?
Who DOES profit by retaining the anachronistic English measurement (a
yard is the distance from King John's nose to his outstretched hand)
?

USA traditional measure is not even the same as English, your volume
measures are not the same as Imperial. But all measures are to some extent
arbitrary, the yard may have been the distance from nose to finger but the
metre was the distance between two lines scratched on a platinum bar that
were supposed to be a fraction of the distance from Paris to the north pole
but wasn't. Neither are specified that way today. It isn't the old
standards that are the problem, the key difference is that the divisions and
multiples in traditional measure are neither consistent nor decimal.

I doubt that anybody profits directly but there are political
considerations. The issue is whether the national government will spend
politial capital making it happen. Clearly no recent President or Congress
has thought it worth their while in the context of a citizenry who distrust
their leaders and in some cases do not want an effective central government
at all.

I can see the Tea Party rousing the Right to resist such an unwarranted
incursion upon personal freedom... "how dare they try to tell us how to
measure stuff by some weird European way.....". The fact that traditional
measures are the weird ones and that other than one or two small backwaters
the USA is the only country to resist metrification has escaped their
notice.

D