Metric System
1st May 2014
Freeberg has an opinion.
I hate the metric system.
Not that it doesn’t have its uses. If I’m calculating the accumulation of kinetic energy in an accelerating mass, and the capacity of that kinetic energy when it’s converted into something else, the metric system would be my first choice.
It is the advocacy for the metric system that cheeses me off. The idiotic arguments. “Ten is sensible”; that right there, that’s it. No, ding-dong, ten is not sensible. What is two-thirds of ten? You want to build a house that way?
See, for guys who have hammer-loops in their jeans that they use to actually hold hammers, and carry a tape measure clipped to their belts, twelve is better. It’s better for actually building things. Twelve is a composite that is the product of a low prime times the square of an even lower prime. Ten is just two primes, great for multiplying but lousy for dividing.
I remember the day I realized that ‘progressives’ were really reactionaries with long hair — it was the day I read a diatribe against the metric system by some hippie in the Whole Earth Catalog, reciting all of the arguments that the Duke of Wellington would have used against it (except, perhaps, the expression of contempt for the Lower Classes).