I responded to the article in the Scotsman web site and presumably in the Evening News newspaper (in Edinburgh?) Scotland. Following is the letter to the editor I sent. I don't know if it will be printed or how I would know if it were, but I gave it a try. Maybe they'll at least give it to Mr. Craig (the author) to read.
Regards,
Bill Hooper
What a silly argument is presented by Craig Brwin in his article "If the world went metric" (July 9) He writes:
"The issue of distances and travelling suddenly takes on a whole new light. For a start it would no longer be 46 miles to travel from Edinburgh to Glasgow, it would be 74.029824 kilometres, ..."
How silly! It would be a perfectly reasonable 74 km. It was not exactly 46 miles from Edinburgh to Glasgow. That figure was rounded off to the nearest mile. Similarly, the distance between cities in kilometres would be rounded to the nearest kilometre. No one would need or want to know that distance to the nearest millionth of a kilometre (which is 1 millimetre) as Mr. Brown proposes. That's not good metric; that's just silliness.
Mr. Craig also writes:
"And the speed limit signs would also have to change - but what to? There’s no easy conversion - 30mph becomes 48.28032kmph, ... "
He is wrong. There is, of course, an easy conversion. He makes the same silly eror here as he did previously. While the distance between cities is a fixed measurement and just needs to be rounded, speed limits are even more easily converted because laws can be written to make them whatever the lawmakers wish. When they made laws using Imperial measures, they did not choose a speed limit of 29 mph or 32 mph, they selected a reasonably rounded value of 30 mph. While it is true that 30 mph is close to 48 km/h, it is certainly reasonable for the authorities to set the new legal limit at 50 km/h. That is equivalent to 31 mile per hour and is certainly an acceptably small change from the former mile per hour value.
Much of Mr. Craig's article bemoans the difficulty of coping with exact conversions of values when such exact conversion are not necessary or desirable. Nor are they proposed by anyone who favors metrication. His arguments are silly smoke screens raised by those who favor retaining an outmoded and difficult system in a world that almost universally uses an easier and better system.
Of course it will take a little getting used to, but the small, one-time-only effort to make the change will be rewarded by the savings of time, effort and money that the new, simpler system will provide every day, over and over again, for all the future.
