The Search for a More Perfect Kilogram (Wired)
Of all the scientific dragons to chase, precision must be one of the most vexing. The Search for a More Perfect Kilogram …
Read more...GBs Are Units of Measure, Too
While the ISU–and NIST for that matter–is really clear on this (I, too, have read the documents), the fact is that separating …
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More Metric Stuff
I’ve gotten a lot of emails about my articles about the necessity of the U.S. converting to metric soon (President Obama, Give Us a Yard and We’ll Take a Meter; Some Practical Consequences of Going Metric). Let me address a few of them.
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Some Practical Consequences of Going Metric
My recent entry: President Obama, Give Us a Yard and We’ll Take a Meter has generated a fair amount of email (thank you, by the way). Among the comments were concerns about various aspects of doing the conversion, specifically about all that math to go from one system to another. Then there were comments about the realities of conversion. Let me try to address both of those items.
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President Obama, Give Us a Yard and We’ll Take a Meter
For all intents and purposes, the United States stands alone in relying on an inefficient and antiquated measurement system. For decades the cry has been that it will be too expensive or too inconvenient or too confusing to change to the worldwide metric standard. With the current economy in dire straits, can we really afford this ridiculous policy? Not only does it makes us look like provincial boobs, but (and this will get people’s attention) it costs us money. If ever there was a golden time to attack the problem with a bold mandate for change, this is it.
Read more...Things I Don’t Get
In everyone’s life there are things that are easily understandable. But then there are other things that just never seem to make any sense at all. Here are some of the things that I just don’t get.
Read more...3 out of 193
Myanmar. Liberia. The United States. Out of 193 countries in the world, these three hold the distraction of continuing to clutch onto the antiquated avoirdupois system of measurement as their standard. While we easily accept that there will always
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