koffl next back Author : Jan B. Hurych
Title : PARALLAXES
Essay: MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONLY ONCE! (4)



Measure twice, cut only once!

You may not believe it, but even here in Canada we have to measure twice and not only because of that old proverb, which stands in the title of this essay. As you may know, we have a Metric system, but our neighbors in the U.S.A., who are our major business partners, still keep the older, so called Imperial system of units. It is rather illogical, considering they were the very first colony which separated from British Empire. But all jokes aside, the situation is not that simple. In Canada we were decided Metric system - this is not some grammatical error, just the fact that there was no referendum or plebiscite on it. And from that time on we are supposed to enjoy the apparently faultless system. It was not the first time the government made our enjoyment a law or they foolishly thought so.

Well, coming originally form Europe, I could easily move in the Metric world; never mind the fact that after landing in Canada, I became an "imperialist" - no, not in Marxist sense of the world, just "the user of Imperial system of measurement". Ten years later, the "reformation" to Metric system caught me deeply immersed in inches, miles and gallons. Sure, metric is the system which is rather simple and units are easily convertible - in the same system, that is, not between Imp and Met :-). Conversions between kilo, hekto and deka are as simple as moving of decimal point, right? Otherwise, we also use Met the same way we used Imp, only the unit sizes are different, right? Sure, but most of our documentation is travelling back and forth between us and U.S. and we cannot expect everybody there to do any recalculations - even if he knows how.
And so we write everything in double units and our cars have two scales on their speedometers. Where you do not see dual units however, you better be careful: some travel maps (i.e. both issued by AAA or CAA - American or Canadian Automobile Association) have distances in Canada in kilometers and in the U.S.A. in miles. True, they are in different colors, but dimensions are not shown. So it may happen that you cross Canadian border to get to Helena (the Capital of Montana, in case you wonder) and you may get there two hours later than you planned.

Some things are not easy to change, say tools for instance. And so we still drill with a quarter inch drill, while the stores are full of metric drills that nobody uses. Our bureaucrats are also trying to cut anything non-metric and introduced some new, impractical units instead of simple, old ones. If you want to blow your tire, at the service station that is, you may wonder what those strange kiloPascals (kPa) mean. I asked the attendant, but he laughed: "You have to read it on the side of the tire, Sir, I wouldn't really know. All I know that one kiloPascal is something like if you sneeze in your tire."

And we go round and round and the circles have no end. Our cows are now delivering milk in liters instead of quarts, and our hens are delivering eggs in Metric diameter, instead in inches and so. We just have to hope their orifices changed to Metric too, otherwise it could be quite painful :-). Sometimes it is not so funny: once human lives were endangered when one airplane was filled in Montreal by x liters instead of x gallons and had to make emergency landing somewhere in Prairies.
And just last week, I have read that US spacecraft heading to Mars was destroyed because its computer could not convert Imperial units to Metric ones. It happened after it travelled over 9.5 months (approx 290 days?) and 669 million kilometers (something like 400 million miles, I presume?) and it was just about to go into orbit around the Red Planet. They said it measured the acceleration in Imperial units - by the way, what is the unit for...well, forget it.

The habits of people change much slower, however. I remember one owner of gasoline station, who - as a revolt - was selling his fuel still in gallons. Fortunately he was only sentenced to pay a fine, not hanged, drawn and quartered - as he would probably deserve in middle ages for breaking the law of his king. :-). How deep in our mind is actually the Imperial system embedded was explained to me by my friend Fred: "When I was told my mother-in-law was three thousand kilometers away, it didn't tell me too much, but when I got the letter that she was put six feet under, I knew exactly what they meant."