Health & Fitness
Isn't it time we started thinking in metrics?
Sometimes being the most powerful and arguably the most influential nation on the planet has its drawbacks for us day-to-day citizens. We live on a Bell Curve somewhere between overwhelming corporate greed and abject laziness. For example, years ago we were stunned and horrified by the notion that we should convert to the Metric System of Measurements. Everyone else in the world was using it but us, Liberia, Myanmar (Burma) and Bora Bora somewhere, or was it Australia? Anyway, now it's just us, Myanmar and Liberia not speaking metric and I think that tells us that we're sliding down the bannister to third-worldliness.
We could have made a few adjustments back then and today we'd be speaking the same language, measurement-wise, that is, as the whole rest of the world. But nooooo, we were wiser than the rest of the world and stuck with this inch, foot, yard, mile, pint, quart, gallon Imperial thing while the rest of the world talks in grams, kilograms, liters, meters and kilometers. Even the English abandoned their own Imperial system and went Metric.
Scientists, even scientists in this country, tell us on PBS that something is twenty kilometers away and weighed 32 grams. Sure, miles and ounces are good enough for the great unwashed who watch NBC, ABC and CBS, but we public television viewers are faced with a real dilemma: we have no idea how far something traveled or weighed because we have to mentally convert it to miles and pounds and we can't or won't bother do it. I, myself, just say miles or pounds and forget it. Doesn't matter that much in the scheme of things. I'm not a heavyweight. All I really need is to be amused. I could be amused just as well in metric, of course, but people other than scientists would have to do it too. I'm not going to go it alone.
Metric is factored by ten. Everything is divided or multiplied by ten. Everything from an eeeny-teeny 1-microgram atom to a 10-kiloton atom bomb. How easy is that?! I've long ago semi-converted: when measuring anything under a foot, I use picas and points, which are measures used in the printing industry. They have a factor of 6. Much more convenient as the only fraction is one-half. No 13/16ths or 3/32nds: just picas and half picas. I think we avoided converting years ago because our industrialists didn't want to convert their machinery. Surely that must have been done by now, since half the foreign cars are manufactured here. We must be the only country in the world whose mechanics have to have two sets of wrenches. We are stuck in this fog nebula between Metric Heaven and Imperial Hell. Have you ever heard anyone nabbed with 2.20462 pounds of heroine? No, if he was, he was captured with a single kilogram of the stuff. Even drug dealers have converted to metric, for crying out loud! Now, even pot comes in grams, er, so I'm told. Years ago, it came in "baggies" but I'm not sure that was a legitimate measure.
We buy soda by the liter or litre—not sure which—but gasoline by the gallon. We used to buy soda by the quart! What the heck does a liter bottle hold? Looks to be about the same size as a quart but you can't tell by me. I just buy it. I went to Canada a few years back and the price of gasoline tripled. I almost scurried back across the border but they were selling it by the liter and even though by dollar x liquid measure it was a little more than here in the US, it wasn't so bad that I had to leave cut my trip short.
In 1967, the world watched as the Swedes moved their cars over to the other side of the road, the side we drive on, as it happens. They were driving on the left, now they drive on the right. They called the campaign "Dagen H" and it took four years of preparations and six hours of actually doing it. You went to bed driving on the left and woke up driving on the right. Well, figuratively speaking — they weren't sleep-driving. Conversions like this are hard for many to accomplish. I went to Bermuda, rented a two-seater moped and began driving on the left, as they do there. I was so confused that my mate on the back seat, twelve years younger and obviously more adaptable, offered to drive the thing and let me sit on the back seat and enjoy the ride. That's the way the day went. I could have adapted if I needed to but I didn't need to. She did instead, bless her.
Back to Sweden, from Wikipedia: “On the Monday following Dagen H, there were 125 reported traffic accidents, compared to a range of 130 to 198 for previous Mondays. No fatal traffic accidents were attributed to the switch. Experts suggested that changing to driving on the right would reduce accidents as people already drove left-hand drive vehicles, thereby having a better view of the road ahead. Indeed, fatal … accidents dropped sharply as a result.” Based upon that and hoping we Americans are as smart as Swedes, we ought to be able to switch to Metric nirvana with as much ease as they switched driving lanes.
At my age, I don't have to make that jump. But on an intellectual level I have to say the time has come to “think” in metric measures. The time has come to convert to metric and join the rest of the civilized (again, arguably) world!