I’ve recently begun to use the Metric system in my personal life. Most notably for temperature. Only recently did I realize just how alone, and asinine, we are being as a country by holding out while the rest of the world has standardized on a consistent system of measurement.
Never mind that scientists and airlines need to use the metric system and constantly translate between it and our obsolete Imperial system, but we come up against this every day. How many people go out for a 3.1 or 6.2 mile run? If you want to compete in the Olympics I’m sure you’d be in for a surprise if your practiced every day in a 25 Yard pool. Or ran 100 Yard sprints. Anything we want to do where *we* don’t control the environment we have to translate. It’s inefficient and, frankly, it’s pathetic.
If the spineless politicians of the 1970’s hadn’t backed down we would have two generations of Americans comfortable with this system and it would be another non-issue-that-was-an-amazing-vote-grabbing-issue-of-the-day.
The USA insisting on using its own measurement system (well.. we’re in the company of Liberia and Burma… can you even find those places on the map) is reminiscent of the bully tactics for which people criticize entities such as Walmart. Making everybody with whom we do business conform to our way of doing things. We might as well also dig in our heels and insist on different timezones than the rest of the world. Because we can.
My only two criticisms of the Metric system are:
- I can’t really identify with the temperature scale. This is because I have very little history with it. I can viscerally understand that 72 degrees Fahrenheit equates to a pleasant summer day and that 90 degrees is hot and 40 degrees is not. But this is something that I am now working to overcome by adopting metric, at least personally, for the next few months. And would be a no-brainer to the kids today if they just grew up with degrees centigrade.
- Harder to fix: I’m not sure why some genius decided that we should move from “Miles per Gallon” to “Liters per Hundred Kilometers”. There is no level on which that works for me. Why we just can’t use the directly relatable “Kilometers per Liter” is a mystery to me. It’s a small issue but it’s a very foreign way of thinking. I am curious if Europeans or anybody else in the world are comfortable with that approach to performance.
Just my rant for the day. I hope we take this up and that we can get past the old guard that can’t let things change because they are too terrified or mentally challenged to work with a system that, while probably not *better* in every way is most certainly *consistent* with the way the rest of our planet does things.