Go Metric <-----> No Metric

Britain's leading supermarket chain, Tesco, last year announced that they would return to imperial weights and measures (pounds, pints, inches, ounces and feet). The reaction from the British public and press was overwhelmingly positive. A survey of Tesco customers revealed that about nine out of 10 people still used the old-fashioned measurements in their heads.

Tesco's decision follows numerous small grocery store owners who have become heroes by standing up to the European "food police" by defying the latest rules from Brussels, capital of the European Union. The metric system has been unpopular with the Brits for generations, but it has now become a symbol of the European Union's hegemony and what the Brits perceive as an effort to extinguish British culture. The anti-metric movement has some similarities to the anti-WTO movement.

The official name for the metric system is Systeme International d'Unites. The rabidly anti-French British don't much cotton to that name.

The metric system was originally concocted by French revolutionaries who wanted to impose "order." Napoleon's troops often imposed that order at bayonet-point.

The base-10 system, the metric system was allegedly more rational and therefore easier and more scientific. For instance the kilometer was defined -- by Napoleon's decree -- as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole on a line running through--natch!--Paris. Of course that measure is faulty too, because the frogs didn't realize the earth was slightly egg-shaped. Other metric measures are just as faulty, or just as arbitrary as our imperial system.

The meter is now defined as the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458-th of a second. That comes in handy when you're buying a length of rope!

Is that somehow less rational than our inch, which was defined in 1150 by King David I of Scotland as the width of a man's thumb at the base of the thumbnail? Edward I of England redefined the inch in the 13th century to equal three grains of dry and round barley laid end to end. A foot. . .we know where that came from. The mile comes from the Latin for a thousand steps, or, a thousand steps by feet now much smaller than feet are today...

We were supposed to “go metric” in the 1970s, but it never happened. As a schoolkid in the sixties, it was certainly drilled into our heads. They were preparing us for the Big Changeover that never happened. I can think metric pretty well, but I've always had trouble with metric temperatures (weather and oven). Certainly if you buy wine or distilled spirits in this country, you are familiar with the basics of fluid measurement. And even most other liquids are cross-labeled. But isn't wine just about the only area where we actually have gone metric? It looks like this may take another couple hundred years.
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