Regulating With Metrics

[Alan Barnard]

Yes. You have highlighted the problems:

1. It would have to be a 100 percent change and a very swift one, no dallying about and no "dual" systems.
2. The government would have to do it in a very high handed, no nonsense manner.
3. Who's going to put up with that?

Just remember these simple rules:

hectares (ha)  x 2.471 = acres
hectares (ha) x 107,600 = square feet (ft2)
acres x 0.404 69 = hectares (ha, indeed)
square yard = 9 square feet (ft2) = 1,296 square inches (in2)
mile = 5280 feet = 63,360 inches

Etc.

Sample of sane system:

10 mm = 1 cm
100 cm = 1 m
1000 m = 1 km

Etc.

Alan Barnard
Salem, MO

----- Original message ----------------------------------------
From: david at piano.plus.com
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Received: 2/5/2008 10:39:38 AM
Subject: Re: Regulating With Metrics


>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



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