Re: ENGLISH!

Homer2911 wrote:
*** Chambers wrote:

The reason why the Imperial System has not been efficiently swept away is that the government is afraid to alienate a large section of voters, gullible readers of tabloid newspapers. Government policy is therefore blown off course by the views of an aggregate of lazy-minded people who cannot be arsed to learn anything new, and who are encouraged to remain in that state of lazy-mindedness by their low-quality newspapers.

Why do you suggest the Americans haven't adopted the metric system?

Americans don't need low-quality tabloids. They are perfectly capable
of producing low-quality broadsheets. (Admittedly, an ex-Australian
bears part of the blame for that; but that doesn't bother me because his
moving was a good thing for Australia.)

That's a digression, though, because I doubt that US newspapers have
taken any position at all on metrication. The reasons, as I see it, are
more to do with political stance. Australia and the UK both used to
lean towards the socialist end of the political spectrum, and socialists
tend to be sympathetic to the notion that long-term gain justifies a bit
of short-term pain. More: to make this sort of widespread change, some
degree of centralist government intervention is needed. That sort of
intervention goes completely against the grain of US mainstream political
attitudes.

The change of units worked very well in Australia because it happened
quickly. Obviously there had to be some sort of transition period, but
there were laws put in place to say things like "by such-and-such a
date, canned goods may not be sold with odd-numbered weights such as 454
gm". The result was that people quickly got used to the change. There
were also some cost savings arising from the fact that a dual system ran
only briefly.

In the UK a longer time was allowed for the transition, and I think that
was a mistake. I presume that it means that you still have to have car
speedometers with dual markings, and that there are accidents resulting
from people being confused over the speed limit.

The USA seems to have allowed for an infinite transition period. That
means that it's stuck with the costs of running a dual system until Hell
freezes over or until there is a major change in the politicial
landscape. I think both are unlikely.

The transition costs that I saw for me personally were small. The main
thing I noticed was having to have two sets of spanners, because nuts
and bolts last for a long time. That's one small step for a man, but a
major overhead for anyone involved in manufacturing. If the official
transition is made quickly then that cuts down the time that spare
parts, dual inventories, extra tools, etc., must be kept. If the change
is made slowly then it's a longer-term problem.

Now that I think of it, there was one extra cost for me of having a dual
system, one that happened before the official change. I was an
engineering student at the time that electrical engineering calculations
were done in metric and mechanical engineering calculations were done in
imperial units. In my mechanical engineering subjects I, and all my
fellow-students, wasted a lot of time because of the overhead of
perpetually having to look up the conversion factors between BTUs and
rods, poles, and perches, together with conversions between horses and
kilowatts. We lost a great deal more time having to repeat calculations
because of the high incidence of mistakes caused by the calculations
being more complicated than they needed to be. Then we had to deal with
things like looking up steam tables and wondering why the entries
between 100 degrees and 212 degrees seemed to be missing. Luckily a lot
of that rubbish was being dumped by the time I graduated. I've often
wondered how many disasters and cost overruns and various other failures
have been caused by the increased probability of error in such calculations.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org

Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain
eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists.
My e-mail addresses at newcastle.edu.au will probably remain "live"
for a while, but then they will disappear without warning.
The optusnet address still has about 5 months of life left.
.

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