There is a problem facing society, but no one is willing to talk about it. Virtually every journalist, television reporter, and blogger has personally encountered this problem, and yet – silence.
The problem is the metric system. Not just the metric system, but the US customary units as well. Basically, in order to be useful, a measurement system must:
- Have well-defined units that everyone agrees on.
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Give people the ability to measure things and understand quantities.
Neither system really meets both of these criteria. The metric system, although it meets the first point, fails miserably on the second. The US system fails the first point semantically, and does a really poor job on the second point.
Allow me to illustrate:
Scenario 1: The news has just reported that a 4,081,440 - foot wide asteroid is heading toward the Earth.
Scenario 2: You just heard on the radio that a 695,622 km² area of the ocean has become an oxygen-free dead zone.
Now, think quickly – how do you react to this news? Do you panic? Do you relax, secure in the knowledge that the asteroid will burn up in the atmosphere and the dead zone will clear up in the spring?
Nobody knows! What the hell is a kilometer? How I measure something be that many feet wide, when I only have two feet, and neither one is a foot long anyway?
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