Edumacated

[elfs]

This afternoon Omaha and I and the girls did our weekly grocery shopping. I went up to the deli and said, "I'd like eight ounces of sliced roast beef, please."

The girl behind the counter looked at me with a puzzled expression for a moment and then said, "How much is that? I'm not very good with ounces."

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[fallenpegasus]

The US "went metric" very soon after France invented the system.

Things like pounds, inches, and gallons are all actually legally defined in terms of grams, and centimeters. The controlling document is "NIST Special Publication 811", which you get get online from the NIST's website.

It's just that the controlling legal system will have a very hard time finding an effective way to *stop* people from using "English" units. All our stuff is already labelled in metric.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Things like pounds, inches, and gallons are all actually legally defined in terms of grams, and centimeters. The controlling document is "NIST Special Publication 811", which you get get online from the NIST's website.

There's a reason for that (which you, f.p., probably know, but others might not): the rank-n-file of NIST are physicists, chemists, and other scientists.

Metric is the system of units of science.

Actually, no, let me correct that: There is a system of units, used worldwide by all branches of science, called "SI" units. What we call "metric" is a subset of the SI units, and has, for some time now, been using a completely different set of definitions than the ones laid down in Paris 2 centuries ago...

...all but the kilogram, which is the only SI unit still defined in terms of an anthrocentric artifact. All of the other SI units are defined in terms of the fundamental SI units, which in turn are defined using physical properties.

(There are physicists whose careers are devoted to improving experiments to measure the natural phenomena that define a meter, a second, an ampere, ...)