Bonjour Louis, I had heard that the metric calendar was not popular with the church because of the 10 day week and therefore 3 more days between worshipping days. Thus when the calendar was abandoned so was decimal time. I agree with your last comment. The metre and the kilogram, and the gram, work fine for me. It all depends on how familiar one is with their common uses. I fine the gram as a base unit is perfect in my molecular biology lab. I'm sure the original designers of the metric system were taking into account not only the shipping industry's needs but those of the apothecaries, jewellers, and precious metalsmiths when they decided on the grams. Grams are to kilograms as grains (the base unit for both the avoirdupois and troy masses) were to pounds. greg Saskatoon SK Canada >>> Louis JOURDAN <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 2001-03-26 05:48:02 >>> At 16:05 -0700 01/03/25, Dennis Brownridge wrote: >I have often lamented that the founders of the metric >system didn't make the base unit about a decimeter long instead of a meter, >and while they were at it, give it a one-syllable name, like "met." "mFtre" is pronounced (in French) as a one-syllabe name. Had the founders of the metric system to worry about the translation of the original names in all languages in the world, possibly they would have given up ! >If they >had also retained the original mass unit (grave = 1 kg), instead of >switching to the thousand-times-smaller gram, For most people, the base unit of mass (or weight !) is the "kilogramme". The fact that officially it is its thousandth part does not matter to them. >and the original decimal time >units, if the decimal time had been so appealing to people, why did it not survive more 7 months (from 22 September 1794 to 7 April 1795) ? >most of our metrication difficulties would be solved. It is ironic >that the principal defects of SI are the metric base units. May I disagree ? The metrication difficulties you experience do not stem from the "deficiencies" of SI. This is a bad excuse. Louis
