Regulating With Metrics

[david at piano.plus.com]

I'm going to go perhaps slightly off-topic with a little rant here.

I'd like to suggest that metric measures are good for lots of engineering
measurements, including piano regulation, but that imperial measures are
better for lots of practical daily living tasks.

In the UK we have a pusillanimous yellow-bellied government approach to
metrication:  A poor grocer was flung in jail and left to rot, just about,
for selling a pound of carrots; petrol (gas) is measured at pumps in
litres, BUT all motorway signs are in Miles, and road speed limits shown
in Miles Per Hour. (read about the grocer at 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,422250,00.html )

A headlong rush to conform to some european legislation saw a couple of
retail traders persecuted for using pounds and ounces, but at some point
it dawned on governemnt that if the UK wants to continue to trade with the
USA, which pretty much has little interest in metric, then it had better
stick with inches and pounds,  The reflection that commerical trade with
the USA is enormous in quantity and value, somehow dampened the ardor of
the supposed moral crusade for metric!

So now we are stuck with a betwixt-and-between system.

I ask students "Do you use metric or imerial" and they say "Oh metric".
And when I ask "wheat height are you?" they reply "Five foot nine".

Many have very little sense of weights and measures at all, in either
system.  If I ask them to estimate the width of the room, they don't have
a clue.  I show them a packet of butter or a carton of milk and ask them
weight or volume, and they simply don't know.  It's partly because no-one
asks for stuff in small shops any more but buys pre-packed in
supermarkets, but it's also because we are schizophrenic about measuuring
systems in the UK.

Personally I think the foot, being anthropometric, is a very useful
measure.  Metric has no middle value - it's ok for very small (mm) and for
large (km) but it doesnt have a handy measure like the foot. My Size Ten
(UK) shoe is 12 inches in length, and it's great for pacing out the
measurements of a room.  And to my mind, it is easier to envisage what is
meant by a length of Six Feet than it is to mentally "see" 180cm (or
1.8m)because you feel mentally what one foot is.

End of rant.  And, finally, a question:  What are there 4840  of?

Best regards,

David.







http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,422250,00.html