Sun, Dec 29, 2002
Metric system still foreign
By
David Paulsen
Wausau Daily Herald
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
How
cold is cold? Well, low temperatures in Wausau got down to minus 10
degrees last week before warming up to an above-average low of minus
7 degrees.
Weather should be warmer this week with
temperatures expected to range between minus 6 and 1
degrees.
Sound strange? Only if you aren't familiar with
Celsius, the metric equivalent to Fahrenheit. Pass the River Valley
State Bank in Rothschild and other banks with clocks that display
the temperature on both scales, and you might do a double take at
the negative readings.
While Celsius temperatures get a
passing mention in some weather reports, the Fahrenheit scale still
is used almost exclusively in Wausau and around the country despite
the adoption of the metric system by every other country in the
world except two.
That bugs the Kelvin out of Valerie
Antoine, 87, of Northridge, Calif., who has spent 40 years with the
U.S. Metric Association trying to persuade the U.S. government and
the country to go metric without success.
Only Myanmar and
Liberia have resisted the metric system as long, Antoine said in a
phone interview.
"It's very simple," she said.
Metric
measurements are based on factors of 10. On the Celsius scale, water
freezes at zero degrees and boils at 100 degrees. The human body,
normally registering 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, comes in at about 37
degrees Celsius unless a fever kicks it higher.
Wisconsin in
the dead of winter very rarely gets above freezing, meaning long
stretches of negative temperatures on the Celsius scale. Is this
misleading for people raised to believe water freezes at 32
degrees?
"Most banks do put the 'C' or the 'F' on there, and even
though we use Fahrenheit all the time, I'm quite certain that most
people know what the 'C' and the 'F' stand for," said Justin Loew, a
meteorologist at WAOW-TV 9 in Wausau.
Celsius is a convenient
measurement when meteorologists and scientists are dealing with
complex formulas and dynamics, Loew said, but the average weather
watcher rarely has a practical need for it.
"We report the
current temperature in degrees Fahrenheit because that's the
traditional unit of measure that the United States Weather Service
has used through its 150 years and most people are familiar with
that," he said.
Antoine hopes someday Americans will become
just as familiar with heat measurements in Celsius as in
Fahrenheit.
"I think as the younger people grow up and get
used to metric they're going to be a little less antagonized by it,"
said Antoine, a retired software engineer and now the USMA's
executive director.
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