New here :-)

What makes the transition to metric units more complicated is the unhandiness of some of the units, both physically and in terms of the references to them. For example ... a gallon is a pretty handy unit, though somewhat large, but a quart is pretty handy. The metric unit close to that is the liter, which is also a handy unit, though the next unit up is what? ... a decaliter? ... that's a mite large, eh? Likewise, handy units of measure, e.g. inch, foot, yard, etc, are not so common in the metric system.. You're always dealing with a milli-this or a kilo-that and that often makes it hard to visualize, and, consequently, communicate, not to mention, understand, what's being described. Once you've gotten used to the new units it's not so bad, but making the transition is what folks seem to resist. When you talk about how big something is, in the English system, you're talking feet and inches. When you say 44 cm, not everybody can immediately envision what you mean, but when you say "foot," since almost everybody's got one or two, they have a rough idea. Likewise, a gram, which is a reasonable measure for something really expensive, like cocaine, gets to be pretty unwieldy when you're talking about how much flour goes into a loaf of bread. In Germany, I remember dealing with a pound (half a kg) which, at 500 g is not far off the English pound (454 g). The fact that the Germans use a "Pfund" as a handy unit suggests that the metric units do leave something to be desired. After all it's not easy to grasp what a gigasecond is, nor is it useful to time events in microfortnights. I have to agree with the remarks about the cup, teaspoon, etc, but, again, everybody has a notion of how much that is, and anyone who's seen Justin Wilson's cooking program on PBS knows how easy it is to approximate that without any measuring instruments at all. On the other hand, how much baking soda is 13.5 g or how much milk is 100 ml? (...see how we're having to deal with large numbers of small units?...) The struggle is getting past the period of adjustment. In reality, the term "mile" refers to the 1000 paces of a marching army, so it's a thousand of something just as the kilometer is. Evenutally folks will figure out that a quarter teaspoon (about the smallest amount one's asked to measure when cooking) is about a cc, (maybe) and a tablespoon is really pretty close to some number (12 ?) of ml. Then, if a quart is 946 ml, then a cup must be on the order of 250 ml. Not precisely, but sort-of. In the meantime, here we are ... Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sellam Ismail" <foo(a)siconic.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 9:08 AM Subject: Re: New here :-)