Time Magazine Goes Metric? - The U.S. Is 40 Years Behind Going Metric - Correlatives With The JFK Fitness Program & The Move Toward Total Hydration

I remember in 4th and 5th grade (circa 1963-64) diligently studying the metric system in preparation for the big changeover. There would be no more pints or inches. We all received a small bundle of wooden blocks corresponding to various metric measures. Yes, the U.S. was slated to go totally metric 40 years ago. However, we seem unable to shuck the US customary units system (our version of the Imperial system). But you may also remember JFK's physical fitness initiative. The entire country would be buffed up by about 1970. Of all those initiatives, the only one that appeared to have caught fire was the move toward hydration. We were told to drink eight glasses of water a day without fail. OK, we may be fat and unable to determine what a metre of millilitre is, but we are well-hydrated. We won that one!

Much is made of the imperial system's basis of the size of a foot, or the distance between your knuckles. And yet the metric system is based on the speed of an electron, I think. That makes more sense than the distance between some emperor's knuckles?

If the metric system is so wonderful, why then have we not converted to metric for our measure of years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds? Why was it so important to convert linear measures, but not the temporal ones?

As far as I can tell, some foods and fluids are sold my metric measure, but not much else. Except:::::::::::::::::::::::::Hootch! Whiz! Wine! Whiskey! Beer is sold by the fluid ounce, but whiskey and wine: totally metric. The formerly beloved fifth of whiskey is now the slightly smaller 3/4 of a litre bottle. Those little bottles of wine you buy on the airplane: 187.5 millilitres (or, 1/4 of a 750 millilitre bottle [the "new fifth"]. So, we may have really sucked on our adoption of metric measures, but the drunks have it down pat, at least on the fluid measures.

'Time' Switches To The Metric System - Time managing editor Rick Stengel is attempting to force the U.S. towards the metric system? A new memo yesterday told writers and editors that from now on, all measurements will be expressed in "both imperial and metric equivalents." Clearly, this is a losing battle Stengel is waging.

Here is Stengel's memo on taking Time metric:

Time is going global. And metric. Starting with the next issue, we will provide both imperial and metric equivalents for distance, weight, volume and temperature. (We've been doing this for some time in our graphics. Now we'll extend this to the general text as well.) This will help ensure that one text works for all of our international editions.

In most cases, we'll use the imperial measure first and then show the metric equivalent in parentheses: five ft. (1.5 m); 170 lbs. (77 kg); 5 gallons (19 liters); 98.6 degrees F (37 degrees Celsius).