Keith, writing regularly for a newspaper and local magazine I constantly
have my feet tangled in the metric web. For a news article we must (by
law) use hectares when describing an area of land. I also write regular
opinion columns and in those we ignore the metric universe, I use acres
because both I and my neighbours know what an acre looks like. We can all
do the arithmatic to convert acres to hectares to acres but few of us can
"see" a hectare in our mind or, better, when looking our across some land.
The interesting thing among journalists is that the further one is from the
land the more accepting they are to using the mysterious hectares. For a
while in the construction business they used metric measure. Elevations
were in millimeters. The pipefitters and electricians and others just
couldn't get their heads around "elevation 65,342", so they spent the first
day after getting blueprints converting everything to feet and inches. If
the companies supplied metric measuring tapes, the workers just brought in
their own. After a while the prints started arriving in feet and inches,
everyone kept quiet and there was no fuss. We have sort of accepted
temperature read in Celcius because no one really cares (except body
temperature). We accept buying gas in litres because, at 60 cents per
litre, we couldn't take the shock of what it cost per gallon (4.5 litres
per imperial gallon equals $2.70 per gallon - if people thought about that
every day we'd have a revolution). As to pascals (and kilopascals), even
the guys in industrial instrumentation who know that a pascal equals one
newton per square meter fill their tires in pounds per square inch. Have a
happy metricless day
Don Maroc
Vancouver Island, Canada
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