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It might (or might not) happen that people
will use the term "foot" to refer to a length of 30 cm. However, it's not
coherent with SI and will never receive official sanction from CGPM (Conf�rence
G�neral des Poids et Mesures). I wouldn't recommend it as a
practice.
You mention "the average person." Such a
person, in another era, might have been referred to as "everyman," which isn't
very politically correct, these days, but it avoids the need to define what we
mean by average. Everyman (and "everywoman") is about 19 times as likely to live
outside the U.S. as in the U.S. Other than in the U.S., everyman (and
everywoman) already understands metric measures and is comfortable with them.
Getting back to averages, their average intelligence is probably about the same
as the average intelligence in the U.S. With the advent of metric-only labeling,
I think Americans can become comfortable with metric without the creation of
pseudo-legacy units.
Just my opinion, of course.
Bill Potts, CMS
Roseville, CA
http://metric1.org [SI Navigator]
Hello I am going to put an opinion forward witch
will probably upset some people but here goes. I have given a lot of
thought to this. The word foot is a part of American and Canadian
measurement language. What does anybody think of changing the foot from 12
inches to 30 Cms, but still calling it a foot. Most people when they
talk of lenth talk in feet IE if a person has a boat they will say it's
40 feet. They never say 3 yds and 1 foot. If this were to happen my
suggestion is to make all rulers 30 cm with no inches. The argument against
this could be that using a 30 cm foot if a person wanted to convert it to cm's
as the number of feet got higher the cm numbers would be very high. This
is true but how many people convert the number of feet to inches.
The metric foot would be divided in to ten 3 cm parts. For
example peoples heights instead of saying 5 ft 1 in they could say
5.1 feet. This works out to very close to 5 feet 1 inch. Most
people know their height approx. I know this sounds very radical and you might
think i am trying to go backwards but like i have said before i would
like to have the metric system accepted by the average person. I know
this is not perfect but sometimes comprimise is not so bad. With a 30 cm foot
if you asked a person what is a tenth of it they could easily tell you.
If you asked a person what is a tenth of a 12 inch foot you might have a
little more trouble getting an answer. Thank you very much, i hope i
didn't upset anybody to much, but sometimes i feel we who love the
metric system can forget about the average person. I'm saying this to
myself more then anybody else.
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