Scientific Advancement
It was on this day in 1975 that Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act and started the "go metric" campaign with school activities, bumper stickers, public service announcements, and wall charts. But in 1982, Ronald Reagan disbanded the Metric Board and canceled its funding. The metric system was developed 200 years ago, during of the Age of Reason, and is based on numeric intervals of 10, while the U.S.'s measurement system is based on seeds and body parts. Today, the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar are the only nonmetric countries in the world.*
Way to go, Gipper. Get the government off the people's backs.
*The Writer's Almanac
Way to go, Gipper. Get the government off the people's backs.
*The Writer's Almanac
Labels: But You Knew That, Reminders, Science
posted by Yoga Korunta | 09:44
2 Comments:
As a highway/bridge construction surveyor, I've been watching the glacial transition from miles/yards/feet/inches/eighths (the carpenters building the forms for alll of these concrete structures still use fractions of inches, even though we do all the layout in metric!) to meters and millimeters.
Now Massachusetts has decided to abandon its metric conversion project and return to English units. Seems it's way too difficult to learn how to move a damned decimal point around.
Of course, these people vote republican too, so I guess the inches are the least of our worries.
One would say! Indeed, if the poor, uneducated, and easily led are still voting Republican, how can we ask them to learn exponential notation!?!
Damned decimal points!
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