(OT) Metric - was The answer from Yamaha

[John Musselwhite]

At 08:20 AM 10/20/04 -0700, Terry wrote:

>Still haven't heard any arguments for WHY we should switch to metric 
>system; why is it better than our American system?

Here's one. The "American" system is based on rather arbitrary measurements 
for things. When dealing with length it might be in miles or feet, or even 
yards or furlongs with smaller ones using various and sundry fractions of 
an inch, though thousands do make it a little easier than using 
fractions.   In metric there is only one measurement of length (the metre), 
you deal with it in decimals and you never have to deal with fractions.

Imagine if your money wasn't already based on the "metric system" of 100 
cents to the dollar and you had to deal with farthings, pence, shillings, 
florins, pounds and guineas. That's the way the rest of the world looks at 
the old "Imperial System" the Americans still use, while they wonder why 
the heck they still cling to such an archaic system.

Incidentally, one feature of the Google search engine that few people know 
about is its ability to calculate conversions of one unit of measurement to 
another. For example, enter "4 milliliters in tea spoons" into the search 
bar and it returns "4 milliliters = 0.811536541 US teaspoons" or for 
something more exotic, type "speed of light in furlongs per fortnight" and 
Google will return 1.8026175 x 10^12 furlongs per fortnight. For more 
details and a little fun check out 
http://itotd.com/index.alt?ArticleID=286  The sidebar article on how 
Faucault measured the speed of light back in 1849 relates to piano tuning 
in an odd way, since he used a tuning fork to calibrate his device.

Google is great for finding things on the PTG site too. If you haven't 
tried it, type (with the quotes so it searches for the phrase) something 
like: "fabric softener" site:www.ptg.org  into the search bar and in less 
than two seconds you'll have access to 198 links to messages with "fabric 
softener" in them.

For help with some cool additional Google features of which you may be 
unaware, see http://www.google.com/help/features.html

>If some had their way, we would't speak English either!

Ummm.... some would say that you speak (and write) "American", which is a 
subset of English rather than "English" itself.  B-})

>Let's put it to a vote. I would wager that the overwhelming (U.S.A.) 
>majority would vehemently oppose it!

The overwhelming population over voting age just might vote against it. On 
the other hand, the kids who will have to deal with the rest of the world 
in the near future won't have a problem with it because they're already 
learning it...   or they're supposed to be learning it.

I was going to comment on your last paragraph as well, but decorum made me 
delete it. This was long enough already!

                         John