From: James Nichols (smilr_at_mac.com)
Date: Mon May 03 2004 - 07:04:32 PDT
I must disagree with some of your points:
On May 3, 2004, at 8:25 AM, Johannes Wolf wrote:
> Chris,
>
> just my two cents to put things into the right light:
>
> beeing an engineer, I cannot agree at all to your statement.
>
> As soon as it comes to physical units that can be expressed using basic
> units like
> meters, grams, liters, you are simply lost if you stick to the
> outdated but
> traditional imperial units.
I've used these 'outdated' measurements all my life (being a united
states citizen), and I can say that I at least am not completely lost -
If you're familiar with a system it will seem like second nature - the
only thing metric has going for it is that it is easier to familiarize
oneself with than imperial.
> And to make it crystal clear: the demand for unified metric units comes
> clearly from scientists and engineers who need to work with them for
> their
> daily tasks, because using SI units makes life much easier. The SI
> (Systeme
> International d'Unites) is existing since 1954 and now it is really
> time to
> get rid of the antiquated imperial units.
I would agree that scientists and engineers are those who are pushing
most for the change to SI, but in schools and colleges even here in the
united states these fields are already taught in SI - that some of the
measurements used elsewhere in the country use a different system does
not preclude us from using it where such precision is necessary. Where
it isn't so necessary, (baking, road distances etc.) what everyone is
comfortable with here (imperial) will be difficult to dislodge.
>
> And please do not mix up technical + scientific issues with politics
> and
> history.
Sorry - that is the nature of our world, ill intentioned acts may cause
the best results in the world, but are they wrong still for having ill
sources?
> You may be right, that nowadays in the computer age it does not matter
> which
> units you use, but
> 1) real life proofs the contrary (remember the famous lost NASA
> mission) and
Which is not an argument FOR SI, but rather for a unified standard
accross all fields. If the rest of the world used Imperial this would
not have happened. If the world had used some other measurement system
based off of the width, volume, etc. of a fig leaf this would not have
happened. There must be some other good reason for the standardized
world system to be SI rather than any other. (Bite the bullet here - I
do agree that of the systems out there, SI is probably the best for
such a thing)
> 2) I am totally against that new generation of engineers who are not
> able
> anymore to be critical with respect to computer generated
> (measurement or
> simulation) results (they believe totally blind in the computer
> generated
> data) and who are not able to perform a simple check by hand with
> estimations.
In complete agreement here ;)
>
> Johannes Wolf
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