A measure of sense

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Mark Twain 

Inscribed under his bust in

The Hall of Fame

The U.S. owes the world an apology and a lot of money. Because of our insistence that we're the brightest and the strongest nation that ever existed, our country refuses to change from the archaic method of measuring mass and distance to a more logical way of calculation.

Although the U.S. approved the change in 1866, it was never instituted, and we remain the only English speaking country on the face of the world to never have adopted full use of the metric system of measure.

That hubris caused at least two fatal airliner crashes because of a foot/meter confusion and a couple of other planes also went down because of liters/gallons issues. That's cruel arrogance on our part, and costs us hundreds of millions of dollar through lost exports, as well as human lives.

The Mars Climate Orbiter and hundreds of millions of dollars were lost in 1999 because one team used metric in its navigation calculations and the other team used a system based on the feet and fingers of Englishmen. (A measure of one rod is the distance covered by the shod feet of 16 British churchgoers or 16½ linear feet.)

The length of a meter (3.3 ft.) is based on the emission line from krypton 86. Our antiquated measure of the inch began as the length of three barley seeds, placed end to end, as decreed by Edgar the Peaceable, king of England from 659 until his death in 697.

The Romans established 12 inches to the foot, and 3 feet per yard, then left it in England as a cultural artifact. Britain formally instituted the decimal (metric) system in 1965, although many of their (and our) food products are still bought and sold by their original measures, such as bushels, or pecks for grains and fruits.

Before our current administration took office, I didn't imagine that the country could be so arrogant as to refuse to adopt a policy accepted by all of the rest of the world, and a marvelous facilitator of calculations for distance, area, and mass. One unit of metric measure translates easily into another, without complicated manipulations.

For example: one cubic meter of water weighs a metric ton (2,200 lbs.); land is measured in hectares, or 100x100 meters square, and there are 100 hectares in a square kilometer; a liter of water weighs a kilogram. The entire system translates from mass to weight with little mental effort. In our method, few even know the weight of a gallon of water.

Many Americans are averse to using the metric system. because they say it will be difficult to translate from inches and pounds into centimeters and kilos. It isn't necessary to translate. All one has to do is get a superficial feel for meters and kilos and what they represent.

When I was in the Peace Corps, people often came to the office to have me calculate the acreage on different plots of ground. That's where I appreciated the base 10 logic. The task would have been difficult to do with any accuracy using our system if I could have done it at all, but metric made it a simple task.

There was a movement afoot in the late 1970s, I think it was. A lot of the establishment began calling for the adoption of the metric system, and the effort gained momentum for a while. But the conservative element that still plagues us today began whooping up the lie that the base 10 metrics were a Communist tool, designed to subvert our sacred capitalism. It was a lost cause after the Communist-fearing public found its voice and started trumpeting alarm, encouraged by pseudo-patriots who have always plagued us with jingoistic rhetoric just to serve their own base prejudices.

It's estimated that the changeover to an already approved adaptation of a logical measuring tool would cost the U.S. economy over a trillion dollars, but it would be a one-time phenomenon. Further estimates say that our American industries and commercial businesses could increase their gross profit by at least 10 percent in a short time if they abandoned the current method and joined the rest of the modern world.

But the problems will keep appearing. We'll continue to be the only developed country in the world which uses a method of measure as awkward as ours. But, to the American hordes patriotism is more important than logic. The empty-headed flag wavers have their priorities, and they're a politically noisy group of fools who most often have their way with us in the many facets of living where progress is feared: education, healthcare, environment, and others.

We need some luck, or maybe we need a plague that has a working knowledge of the metric system as a shibboleth for survival.

That will thin them out, and progress will be possible, maybe.

**Data source: Wikipedia