NavList:

George-
" It ill becomes an American, ...to lecture "you folks" (by which,
presumably, he means the rest of the World) about the illogicality of
their measurement systems. "

Lecture? My, are you the propriety police who decide which opinions may be
properly expressed and which cross your personal line into improper lectures?

I merely expressed my own opinion, and I don't seem to recall logic or
illogicallity being mentioned in it. I didn't call meters and centimeters
illogical, I merely said that having to express distances of a certain scale,
using the common expressions of the metric system, was what we would call
kludgy.

The human mind seems to typically stop counting and holding "numbers of things"
at four. Ask someone to remember more than four things, they start to drop the
older ones to keep the new ones. Ask members of some of our native tribes to
count, and they count "One, two, three, many" and there literally is no word for
a number larger than that. It is "many manies".

And here you have a system which, in its usual nomenclature and usage, doesn't
allow for a simple TWO feet, but forces users into SIXTY centimeters? Sorry,
George, but that's simply trying to enforce a system onto organisms that don't
have a natural inclination to use it.

Now, just to make sure you understand I'm not lecturing, I'm trying to EXPLAIN
why metric has failed in America, and how it has failed it's own users all over
the world. It is simply too sharp at the corners. Nine nines of precision and
decimal places may be fine in the labs (and we did and do use metric in labs)
but it doesn't play well in the home, or in many markets. If you folks would
just dust off the concept of the "deci" and call it something simple and short
(two syllables or less please) you might make the sale.

Lecture? I'm pleased to see that you think of me as being up on a podium (that's
sarcasm, incidentally) but there's no soapbox round here. And as for metric
ruling in the UK...when's the last time you went to your local and asked for a
"half liter of stout" instead of a pint? Or do you ask for fifty centiliters of
beer? Right, metric, convenient and comfortable way to do things.



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