When I was an impressionable 5-year-old, the government did something that scared the pants off of me: It passed the Metric Conversion Act, threatening all of us with having to learn an entirely new system of measurement.
I don't know why I was so scared. I hardly knew the old system, so it shouldn't have been such a big deal. Nonetheless, I carried this fear with me through high school and even into adulthood. It wasn't until recently that I realized, Hey, I never did have to abandon cups, inches, feet, and pounds after all.
And that got me wondering, What the heck happened? As far as hyped events go, it turned out the metric conversion was about as exciting as the Y2K bug and those endless debates over when the new millennium really began.
In other words, it wasn't something to get all worked up about.
We can still drive 55 miles per hour on the freeway. We still watch football played on 100-yard fields. And we still order Quarter Pounders at McDonald's. (So bad for us! But so delicious!)
Anyone keeping score might look at those facts and think, "Ha! Those metric-lovin' troublemakers lost! Inches forever!"
But, as I've learned, this would be the wrong conclusion.
Don't believe me? Well, when you go to the store to buy a jug of soda, what size are those big plastic bottles? That's right. Two liters. And when Marion Jones won her gold medals at the Sydney Olympics, were her races measured in yards? Nope. Meters. And does your nonfat milk carton indicate zero ounces of fat? Sure doesn't. It boasts zero grams.
That's right, people. There's a creeping "metricization" going on. And someday, you may finally have to admit that kilo for kilo, it really is a better system.
It's hard for me to write that. I am a huge fan of the United States' resistance to conversion. The American Revolution lives on. Give us inches or give us death!
We're the only industrialized country in the world not officially using the metric system. But we're inching toward it, so to speak. Metric is the preferred measuring system for U.S. trade because our overseas trade partners all use it. The Food and Drug Administration requires both inch-pound and metric measurements to appear on the products you buy at the store. And American scientists have long used the metric system. (However, scientists are not 100 percent reliable in this practice: The Mars Climate Orbiter failed because two teams of engineers used two different systems of units for the same measurement.)
But most everyday Americans are sticking to their pounds and ounces. Perhaps it has to do with notions of American individualism and a need to do things differently than in Europe. After all, the metric system emerged in France in 1670. Three centuries later, Paris is still home to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. (Interesting aside: Napoleon took on the metric system in 1812, and France reverted to the old system of weights and measures until 1840.)
I say, "Let them eat Quarter Pounders."
Like it or not, though, there are some undeniably nice things about the metric system. The nicest is that all the units of measure are divisible by 10. Even total mathophobes can multiply and divide by 10. All you have to do is add and subtract zeroes. Even if you aren't good at math, you already know how to do this, because the U.S. currency system operates by this principle (there are 100 cents in a dollar).
The decimal system, as this is called, supposedly came from the ancient Chinese and Egyptians. We got the duodecimal system from the Romans--this is the one where 12 and its factors are dividers. An example of this is the foot, which has 12 inches.
The Maya used the vigesimal system, based on the number 20. And the Sumerians and Babylonians gave us my favorite to pronounce: the sexagesimal system. Here, everything is divisible by 60. We use this to measure time and angles.
And it gets even more complicated than that. Before we had really sensitive scientific instruments, we measured things based on what was at hand. Literally. The phrase "Give him an inch and he'll take a mile," may have started out "Give him an inch and he'll take an eln."
Write this down for when you're a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: A meter is defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red radiation of Krypton 86. Or, even more precisely, a meter is the length that light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
I am not kidding here. If you're ever caught without a meter stick, all you have to do is whip out your Krypton 86, and you'll know for sure whether that bookshelf will fit in the corner of your living room.
All kidding aside, the "metricization" of America has clearly begun, and the day of full conversion is coming. The experts won't put a deadline on when this will happen because they know it's hard for us to give up our quaint, comfortable ways.
But when that day comes, 28.35 grams of prevention will be worth 453.6 grams of cure.
If you give a guy 2.54 centimeters, he will take 1,609.34 meters.
A touchdown will occur after the ball crosses the 91.44 meter line.
And a 113.4-grammer from McDonald's will still taste delicious.
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