Different things. A large adversary is the
500lb (or 400kg if you prefer) gorilla. The
elephant in the room is a secret or inescapable
fact that hampers progress, or something like that.
Examples: If I'm a small medical company going
up against GE Medical in an account, then GE Capital is the 500lb gorilla.
If I'm at a family party and everyone is
pretending to be happy and jovial, but really
underneath the surface, Uncle Bob is going to
jail tomorrow for tax evasion....that is the elephant in the room.
:)
At 08:17 2008-06-27, Paul Trusten wrote:
Pat, I always thought that the American metaphor
involved a gorilla, not an elephant, in the
room. It is a gorilla of a certain weight. We
pick on 800 pounds. So, there's something like a 400 kg gorilla in the room.
Paul
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Pat Naughtin
To: <mailto:[email protected]>U.S. Metric Association
Sent: 27 June, 2008 03:35
Subject: [USMA:41262] Metrication elephant
Dear All,
I have just read the seven questions that
'Scientists and Engineers for America and
fifteen other science organizations' have united
to ask the 2008 congressional candidates in
preparation for this year's elections in the USA[i].
I was initially overwhelmed by the simple power
of these seemingly innocent questions.
Obviously, scientists and engineers are highly
intelligent and knowledgeable people who should
know and understand these issues, but I was
especially impressed that so many organisations
had been able to write, edit, and agree on such
a diverse range of science and technology policy
issues and then reduce their ideas to seven apparently simple questions.
But a thought crept into my mind that, after a
while, became hard to ignore there's an
elephant in the room. The highly original,
smart, clever, and creative scientists and
engineers who wrote the seven questions had not
begun to address the most basic measurement
issues, because they simply didn't see them.
When I read through the seven questions again, I
realised that many of the troubling issues
underlying these seven questions could be
dramatically relieved if the USA upgraded to the
same sane and rational measurement policy used
by every other nation in the world, and promoted
and used by them on a daily basis.
I am aware that the cliché, 'an elephant in the
room', is overused and I know that it usually
refers to an issue that people try not to see,
because it might embarrass them[ii].
This example of an 'elephant in the room' is
mostly about how the USA is out of step with
every other developed nation in the world,
because the USA is now the only developed nation
in the world that has not upgraded to the metric
system. In the USA, the 'elephant in the room' is a metrication elephant.
After a while, I had another thought. Perhaps
it's me who is seeing an elephant in the room
that's not there. Perhaps my belief in
Condorcet's original thought in the 1790s
that the metric system is 'For all time; for all
people' is coloring my judgement about the metrication elephant.
To see if this was so, I considered each of the
questions raised by the Scientists and Engineers
for America and fifteen other science
organizations one at a time. Their seven
questions are listed below, followed by my
comments in italics, testing my insight that all
of these seven questions have metrication issues at their core.
Innovation
Science and technology have been responsible for
half of the growth of the American economy since
World War II. But several recent reports
question America's continued leadership in these
vital areas. What policies would you support to
ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation?
Almost all scientists and engineers now use the
metric system or SI units on a daily basis. The
media and industry then go through complex and
expensive steps to dumb these down to old
pre-metric measures for the public and for
politicians. As a media example, the National
Geographic magazine dumbs down metric units on a
regular basis, as does the Reader's Digest; the
Associated Press in the USA actually has a
policy in its Style Manual (in 2008) to dumb
down all metric units to old pre-metric measures.
As an industrial example, the car industry
designs and builds in metric units, then uses a
thin veneer of old measures (mph, ml, psi), so
that clients in the USA will not be aware that
they have been driving all-metric cars, trucks,
and tractors since the mid-1970s. This dumbing
down for the public comes at a huge monetary
cost to the nation. (Watch the 2 1/2 minute
video[iii] as you work out the cost of this
calculation applied to the whole nation of the
USA. Note: the exhaust pipe in this video was
designed and made as 180 millimetres at the
front and 140 millimetres at the back so they
are actually working out 'What is 180 mm minus 140 mm?'
Climate Change
The Earth's climate is changing and there is
concern about the potentially adverse effects of
these changes on life on the planet. What is
your position on the following measures that
have been proposed to address global climate
changea cap-and-trade system, a carbon tax,
increased fuel-economy standards, and research?
Are there other policies you would support?
There are two sadnesses about the closely
related issues of climate change and energy.
The first is that the British Association for
the Advancement of Science (BAAS) made clear the
differences between energy and power in the
1880s, and published their results in 1889. The
BAAS defined the unit joule for energy and the
unit watt for power in 1889. Most of the media
and our world politicians have not yet caught on
to this 120-year-old distinction. Unfortunately,
understanding the concepts of energy and power
lie at the very heart of our understanding of
the greenhouse effect, global warming, and
climate change. Without understanding the two
simple units joules and watts, and their
underlying concepts, we are condemned to talking
about the climate change issues as if we were
trying to find our way into the future, at high speed, in a fog.
Energy
Many scientists and policymakers say energy
security and sustainability are major problems
facing the United States this century. What
policies would you support to meet the demand
for energy while ensuring an economically and
environmentally sustainable future?
The second sadness is that we have yet to decide
and agree on how we measure energy. Most
discussions about energy (such as a
cap-and-trade system, a carbon tax, increased
fuel-economy standards, and research) quickly
dissolve into discussions about how to convert
between the various randomly generated ways that
individual industries have decided to try to
measure energy. Although the idea of energy has
only been fully understood since 1889, getting
to grips with the idea of energy is now crucial
to our understanding of issues such as: energy
pricing, energy conservation, peak energy, and
peak oil. We urgently need to have a common
language to discuss these issues rationally and
these should be encapsulated in the single
energy unit, joule, which should be used by all
industries, in all nations, in any discussions
about energy pricing, energy conservation, peak
energy, or peak oil. In the article, 'A word
about global warming'[iv] there is a list of
some of the different ways of measuring energy
used in 2008. Any politician who tries to gain a
basic understanding of global warming will need
to learn most, or all, of the 198 different old
pre-metric measures and the 39 006 conversion factors between them.
Education
A comparison of 15-year-olds in 30 wealthy
nations found that average science scores among
U.S. students ranked 17th, while average U.S.
math scores ranked 24th. What role do you think
the federal government should play in preparing
K-12 students for the science and technology driven 21st Century?
Every child, in every school, in every subject,
who uses a computer, writes every report and
every essay on an all-metric computer. They do
this while believing that they are working with
old pre-metric equipment measured in inches.
This is because the computer industry in the USA
designs integrated circuit chips using
nanometres and micrometres, which are then
placed into 'mother-boards' in cases built to
millimetre precision; the computers are then
sold to the students using words like the 'seventeen inch model'.
And software writers are no help to the children
of the USA. For example the widely used
Microsoft Word (Education Edition) has
measurements such as its rulers, margins, and
column spacing all set with defaults in inches,
half inches, and quarter inches. If an
enterprising student changes the defaults to
metric (say to the worldwide printing industry
default of millimetres) they will meet such
oddities as rulers with groups of ten
millimetres divided into quarters that are 2 1/2 millimetres long.
Enormous effort, and cost, is spent teaching
children in the USA about the use of old
pre-metric measures, about the metric system,
and about how to convert between the new and the
old[v]. This expense of money and children's
time does not happen in any other nation except
the USA. Children in all other advanced
countries simply learn the metric system, and then use it.
Meanwhile school children in the USA leave
school to join a workforce predominately using
metric measurements[vi]. Manufacturing industry
must then pay the cost of retraining their USA
workforce to work with the metric units used in
USA industry. Some companies don't do this for
their new staff; they simply import immigrants
who have acquired their metric skills from anywhere else in the world.
Water
Thirty-nine states expect some level of water
shortage over the next decade, and scientific
studies suggest that a majority of our water
resources are at risk. What policies would you
support to meet demand for water resources?
Both industry and individual citizens need to
know how to measure water so that we can all
understand how to collect it, and to share it
wisely and fairly. This is enormously difficult
to do using inches of rain, gallons per cubic
foot, cusecs of flow, and acre-feet of water;
water calculations are only attempted by
specialists in the USA. On the other hand (say
in Australia) any child can work out that when a
millimetre of rain falls on a square metre of
roof, a litre of water flows into a rain water
tank, so it is easy to work out that a 6
millimetre shower of rain on a 200 square metre
roof will collect 1200 litres of rain (6 x 200 =
1200 litres). Any senior primary school child in
Australia can do a calculation that requires a
specialist expert in the USA, and being able to
'do the sums' soon leads to an understanding of water issues.
Research
For many years, Congress has recognized the
importance of science and engineering research
to realizing our national goals. Given that the
next Congress will likely face spending
constraints, what priority would you give to
investment in basic research in upcoming budgets?
What is the cost, both in time and in money, of
doing research using international metric units,
and then having to dumb these down for
politicians and for the public? The Mars Climate Orbiter springs to mind.
Health
Americans are increasingly concerned with the
cost, quality, and availability of health care.
How do you see science, research, and technology
contributing to improved health and quality of life?
It is reported that, at present, there is an
average of 1.7 medical errors per patient per
day in USA hospitals[vii]. Many but I don't
know how many of these are due to conversion
errors when converting patient's body mass from
pounds to kilograms (or in the case of babies
from pounds and ounces to kilograms and/or grams).
Many, many[viii], people die every day as a
result of errors in unnecessary conversions.
Note that the only reason for these conversions
is to maintain the thin veneer of misinformation
that doctors and nurses in the USA are using old
pre-metric measures in their surgeries and
hospitals but this is simply not true and it
has not been true for decades. All medical
research in the world (including the USA) is
done using SI metric units, medical drug
products are developed and tested using SI
metric units, and the doses are then refined and
delivered with dosage units like milligrams per kilogram.
Conclusion
So how would anyone go about explaining to the
highly intelligent and well educated 'Scientists
and Engineers for America and fifteen other
science organizations' that there is an
'elephant in the room' if they haven't yet seen
it for themselves. I suspect that saying, even
yelling, 'Hey, look, there's an elephant in the room' won't do much good.
Of course if it was a real elephant, I might
just point out the droppings. And that thought
gives me a clue. What are the droppings from not
having a measurement policy in the USA (despite
the best efforts of George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin in the 1780s
and 1790s)?[ix] The 'droppings' are the
financial costs to the citizens of the USA that
have built up each year for the last 220 years
and that will continue to build into the future there's quite a pile.
As I am not a citizen of the USA, I suppose that
I am not able to ask questions about policies in
an election year in the USA. However, if someone
were to ask policy makers a question on my
behalf it might go something like this:
Not fully adopting the metric system with
respect to innovation, climate change, energy,
education, water, research, and health is
costing the USA a great deal of time, money, and
international opportunities. What is your
estimate of the cost to the USA of these losses
internationally, and what is your estimate of
the cost of supporting both old-pre metric
measures and metric units inside the USA?
In a submission to the President's Math
Panel[x], Pat Naughtin, an Australian expert in
metrication, which is the process of upgrading
to the metric system, observed that not using
the metric system is costing the USA roughly
1.27 trillion dollars a year (about three times
the USA military budget). Pat Naughtin's submission contains the line:
'If Richard P Phelp's estimate of 10 % wasted
costs in education were applied to the whole
economy, the loss would be about $1.27 trillion
per year. To paraphrase the USA Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen (1896/1969):
"
a trillion this year, and a trillion next
year, pretty soon adds up to real money."[xi]
References:
[i] See
<http://sharp.sefora.org/innovation2008/#questions>http://sharp.sefora.org/innovation2008/#questions
[ii] See:
<http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ele2.htm>http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ele2.htm
[iii] The video is on YouTube at
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omh8Ito-05M>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omh8Ito-05M
[iv] You can view this article at:
<http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/AWordAboutGlobalWarming.pdf>http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/AWordAboutGlobalWarming.pdf
[v] In an article, 'The Case for U.S. Metric
Conversion Now' (1992, December 9) Richard P. Phelps stated that:
'It (USA education system) teaches two systems
of measurement in the schools and, the confusion
from learning two systems aside, there is a cost
to the time spent in teaching two systems. A
full year of mathematics instruction is lost to the duplication of effort.'
You can view Richard P. Phelps' article after
you register on the Education Weekly database
at:
<http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1992/12/09/14phelps.h12.html>http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1992/12/09/14phelps.h12.html
[vi] In her paper presented to the National Math
Panel, Teach Only the Metric System, Lorelle
Young stated that industry in the USA is now
more than 60 % metric. Lorelle Young's paper can
be found at
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/1233594/-description-tags-8-metric20system>http://www.scribd.com/doc/1233594/-description-tags-8-metric20system
[vii] According to a report at
<http://www.aarp.org/research/health/carequality/Articles/aresearch-import-711-IB35.html>http://www.aarp.org/research/health/carequality/Articles/aresearch-import-711-IB35.html
'The average number of errors per patient per day was 1.7.'
[viii] Go to
<http://www.visicu.com/solving/research/mederrors.html>http://www.visicu.com/solving/research/mederrors.html
to see quotations like this: '
medical errors
were estimated to kill up to 98,000 Americans
each year and to be due to human error "60-80%"
of the time. That is more people in one year
than died in the entire Vietnam War. That is
more people than die from automobile accidents, AIDS or breast cancer yearly.'
[ix] Search for the names, Benjamin Franklin,
Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington in 'A
chronological history of the modern metric
system' to see the part that these three played
in the development of the international system
of units the modern metric system. Go to:
<http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/MetricationTimeline.pdf>http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/MetricationTimeline.pdf
[x] You can see Pat Naughtin's submission to the
National Math Panel by doing an advanced search
for 'Naughtin' at:
<http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/mathpanel/index.html>http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/mathpanel/index.html
[xi] See
<http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/CostOfNonMetrication.pdf>http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/CostOfNonMetrication.pdf
for a summary of where these costs arise.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker,
Pat Naughtin, has helped thousands of people and
hundreds of companies upgrade to the modern
metric system smoothly, quickly, and so
economically that they now save thousands each
year when buying, processing, or selling for
their businesses. Pat provides services and
resources for many different trades, crafts, and
professions for commercial, industrial and
government metrication leaders in Asia, Europe,
and in the USA. Pat's clients include the
Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST, and
the metric associations of Canada, the UK, and
the USA. See
<http://www.metricationmatters.com/>http://www.metricationmatters.com/
for more metrication information, contact Pat at
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
or to get the free 'Metrication matters'
newsletter go to:
<http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter/>http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter/
to subscribe.
