“Our life is frittered away by detail… Simplify, simplify.” – Henry David Thoreau
Life is complicated. I don’t think that too many people will disagree with me on this subject. And the more convoluted things are the more stressful and taxing life becomes.
To live a more serene life, everybody should strive for simplicity. And many do.
One notable exception seems to be the United States.
“The United States is now the only industrialized country in the world that does not use the metric system as its predominant system of measurement.”
Can you believe this? The country that gave the world the transistor, the defibrillator, the hard disk drive, the laser, the integrated circuit, the global navigation satellite system, the contraceptive pill, the light emitting diode, the computer mouse, the cordless phone, the compact disc, the wireless local area network, the personal computer, the Global Positioning System, the digital camera, the Internet, etc. this country is still using the Imperial System.
A true relic from the past.
The Imperial System used in America is a legacy of the British Empire that was a leading commercial power from the 16th to the 19th century.
But the Imperial System is outdated and overly complicated. Inches, feet and yards might have been handy in the 18th century, but today it is hopelessly cumbersome and inefficient.
Most of the world is now using the metric system an internationally agreed decimal system of measurement.
It was originally based on the mètre des Archives and the kilogramme des Archives introduced by the French First Republic in 1799.
The Metric System is a decimal measurement system that measures length in millimeters, centimeters, meters, and kilometers; capacity in liters and milliliters; mass in grams and kilograms; and temperature in degrees Celsius.
It is exquisitely simple and easy to use and I wonder why the US still did not implement this system countrywide. The kids would gobble it up like candy.
As usual, the main obstacle to this transition is probably cost and inertia.
A bad excuse when enormous sums are wasted on ridiculous projects.
Similarly, the US hemmed and hawed for a long time before finally starting to implement the more secure chip-based credit cards that has been used in Europe since the mid-1990’s.
Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet. Dave Barry
Don’t be phobic, think metric.
Alain