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Petition For Metric In US Halfway To Requiring Response From the White House
fsterman writes "Without any prompting from the U.S. Metric Association, a We The People petition to standardize the U.S. on the metric system has received 13,000 signatures in six days. That's half the number needed for an official response from the White House. It looks like ending the U.S.'s anti-metric alliance with Liberia and Burma (the only other countries NOT on the metric system) might rank up there with building a death star."
It isn't just a simple matter of teaching metric either. All these industries and their supporting industries must switch or provide parallel measures (of course, the old timers will stick to imperial in that case, since it's there too). That's very, very, very expensive both in material and time.
That sounds like something that will require a lot of work, and will require hiring a lot of people to do that work.
If only there was an unemployment problem in America...
-I only code in BASIC.-
If we are going to adopt a decimal system of weights and measures at least we should go with an American one.
From your link:
"Jefferson proposed to divide the foot into 10 inches, 100 lines, and 1000 points"
This is exactly how land surveying is done today in the US. Steel and fiberglass land surveyor's tapes and leveling rods are graduated in 10'ths and 100'ths of a foot as the standard. It has carried over from the land surveying electronics revolution in the 80s to be incorporated into total stations.
On a total station, you can switch between metric and English at the press of a button, but since land surveying is "1/3rd measurement and 2/3rds law" as one former boss put it, doing measurements in metric when a deed calls out English is just nuts.
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BMO
...Chinese glyphs make them more primitive than using an alphabet...
If I may pick up on this one: The Chinese writing system is in fact very far from being 'primitive' in any sense of the word - it is uniquely suited to the Chinese language and continues to this day to be better than all the alphabetical systems that have been attempted over the years: Bopomofo, Wade-Giles, Pinyin and several others. There are two reasons for this, in my view.
One is that the Chinese language doesn't have the same grammatical need for expressing different word forms - there are no inflections etc, so the same word form is used throughout, unlike in English (e.g. 'be', 'am', 'is', 'are' ...). Thus you can use the same character for a word everywhere without the sort of modification you see in Japanese, and there is no incentive to get away from the writing system.
The most important reason, however, is that the Chinese writing system allows you to write all the different dialects in the same way; this means that you can communicate things like common legislation and culture over the whole of that vast country. When you compare things like spoken language or local culture across Chinese, the differences are at least as great as the differences you find in Europe, but all Chinese feel they belong to the same nation - that is ultimately because of the writing system. It is also interesting to note, that the groups that want to break away from China are exactly the ones whose languages are not compatible with the writing.
And of course, once you master Chinese writing, it turns out to be hugely convenient, because it is so compact and concise.