Posts Tagged ‘metric’
“The metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet”*…
Nearly everywhere in the world, folks use the metric system to measure things; here in the U.S. we use the Imperial system. (Note that Britain should really be a dark shade of green– i.e. a little yellow, mixed with a lot of blue. Brits may regularly use inches, ounces, miles, and pounds in everyday life, but have officially been Metric since 1965.)
Mike Sowden (amusingly and informatively) recounts the history of the metric system, then muses on why Imperial measures– the mile, the inch, the cubit, the ell– have staying power…
… Yes, all of these lack precision, so they’re useless for modern science, and would be incredibly dangerous if used for engineering purposes. But they also tell a story of people’s relationship with the space they moved through.
A lexis of movement – perhaps in a similar fashion to the language of landscape that writer Robert MacFarlane has done so much to retrieve.
This is why I’m on the fence about Imperial now. There’s no question that Metric is necessary as a standardised, exact form used to make cars that don’t shake themselves to bits, planes that don’t fall out the sky and spacecraft that can launch themselves to interplanetary targets with mind-blowing accuracy.
But the versions of Imperial still being used by people in everyday life deserve their place in the world too.
Anyone brought up thinking and feeling temperature in Fahrenheit can tell us Celsius-reared folk something different about how we can experience the world. Anyone cooking in pounds will be thinking about food a little differently (“well, it’s just 2 cups, isn’t it?”). All these things are tiny windows into new ways of seeing what we think we already know…
In defense of an old way of measuring: “Why Go Imperial in a World Gone Metric?” from @Mikeachim.
See also: “The real reasons the US refuses to go metric,” and explainer from Verge Science on the last big attempt to turn the US towards Metric, why it failed, and the ways scientists and manufacturers have snuck it in anyway.
* Dave Barry
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As we muse on measurement, we might pause, on Pi Day, for a piece of pi(e)…
… in celebration of Albert Einstein’s birthday; he was born on this date in 1879.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
“Race does not stand up scientifically, period”*…
The genetic distance between some groups in Africa, such as the Fulani of West Africa (above) and the Hazda of Tanzania, is greater than supposedly racially divergent groups such as East Asians and Europeans.
If race categories were meant primarily to capture differences in genetics, they are doing an abysmal job. The genetic distance between some groups within Africa is as great as the genetic distance between many “racially divergent” groups in the rest of the world. The genetic distance between East Asians and Europeans is shorter than the divergence between Hazda in north-central Tanzania to the Fulani shepherds of West Africa (who live in present-day Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Guinea). So much for Black, White, Asian, and Other.
Armed with this knowledge, many investigators in the biological sciences have replaced the term “race” with the term “continental ancestry.” This in part reflects a rejection of “race” as a biological classification. Every so-called race has the same protein-coding genes, and there is no clear genetic dividing line that subdivides the human species. Another reason for using the term “continental ancestry” in lieu of “race” is improved precision for locating historical and geographic origins when we look at the genome. Thus, continental ancestry allows for more genetically accurate descriptors. For example, President Barack Obama was not just the first socially “black” president. He was also the first (as far as we know) who has European and African ancestry.
In sum, racial categories now in use are based on a convoluted and often pernicious history, including much purposefully created misinformation.
It is a good time, then, to dispel some myths about genetic variation that have been promulgated by both the left and the right alike…
Setting the scientific record straight on race, IQ, and success: “What Both the Left and Right Get Wrong About Race.”
* Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher
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As we hear Bob Marley sing “One love, one heart, let’s get together and feel all right,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1795 that the first (but still provisional) official standard “metre bar” was forged in Paris. Made of brass, its length was one ten-millioneth of the northern quadrant of the Paris meridian.
In the aftermath of the French Revolution (1789), the traditional units of measure used in the Ancien Régime had replaced; the livre monetary unit was replaced by the decimal franc, and a new unit of length was introduced– the metre.
This first prototype was short by 0.2 millimeters because researchers miscalculated the flattening of the earth due to its rotation. Still this length became the standard– replicated in platinum– until 1889, when new, more accurate measurements were used to create a new standard metre, that gained acceptance across the world.
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