Metric essay

[John Carroll]

The essay is wonderfully puts many of my observations into 
words.  I went though engineering school in the last moment of 
slide rule usage which coincided with a really dedicated effort to 
convert every student to metric units.  I emerged with no bias 
toward ether system and still flip back and forth easily.  The trick 
is to develop a set of personal references in each system and 
NOT try to convert everything.

The observation that binary fractions of a unit of measure are 
easy to use is the best demonstration of the artificialness of a 
decimal system.  I have never seen a 1.3 mm pitch thread, but 
1.25 and 1.75 pitch taps are easy to find.  Metric users revert to 
fractions when they have a chance.  Change gears for lathes do 
not come in decimal increments.

On the other hand, I have never seen even the most dedicated 
American machinist insist on a microMETER indicated in 
1/1024" readable to 1/4096".  The process of dividing 1/12 of a 
foot into .001 or .0001 units seems perfectly normal.  They 
measure long things in inches as well.  The same person would 
be amazed if a surveyor measured his house lot in inches and 
fractions or decimals rather than .01 foot.  It is difficult to make 
an argument against a unified system of measurment when 
information and products travel so easily.

The problems with adapatation is mostly prejudice and illusion.  
Every day I watch machinists struggle to make sense of metric 
dimensions.  If they would reach out and mash the button that 
switches their machine to metric measuring units and work for 
one day without converting any thing, they would have the 
problem licked.

Europeans, Asians and Africans don't give a hoot if we produce 
and consume in metric units.  It is simply an economic issue 
where a good's value is associated with it's desireability.  We 
can produce all the yards of cloth we want but if the potential 
customers want meters, they will pay more for meters, other 
things being the same. 

The real tragedy is that we came so close to evolving with six 
fingers on each hand.  We could have had a twelve based 
system.  The base divides rationally by 1,2,3,4 and 6.  The 
european peasants and central american indians had it right 
when they observed that eggs and apples fit nicely in boxes in 
dozens and a dozen dozen is a nice large number.  Gross, 
acres, years, hours, minutes  and miles all divide nicely by 12.  
We have a de facto 12 based system in some aspects of 
commerce.  

My personal vote is for a 16 based system to achieve an 
improvement in precision and computation speed.  No more 
decimal adjusts and floating point precision would be more 
easily maintained.  I wonder how long it would take us to reach a 
consensus on the names and shapes of the six new digits.  
Well, I guess we already have ten, eleven and twelve named, 
we only need three  more.

John Carroll

 
John Carroll
jcarr at cyberhighway.net