About immigrants, this is all anecdotal, but my parents are both immigrants
(from The Netherlands) and they are both generally appalled that the US
never switched to the metric system. My wife is a Brazilian immigrant, and
she also wishes the US would get on board. Immigrant groups are a natural
ally for us, I think, because they will adapt to be here, but they also
realize more than others how awkward and isolated our system is.
My dad told me an amusing story, that back when he came to the US in the
early 60's, he saw a patient (my Dad's an MD) who happened to work for NIST.
My dad asked him why the US never adopted the metric system, and the guy
said "Oh, we're working on that, we should be switched over in a few years".
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Pierre Abbat" <[email protected]>
Sent: 01/18/2009 6:39 AM
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
Subject: [USMA:42354] Is there any literature on metrication in the US aimed
at immigrants?
The church yesterday held a health screening where they checked our
cholesterol, glucose, and other signs. After getting my blood glucose
checked, I went to another station which had a digital scale
(pèse-personne).
I stepped on it and it showed my mass in pounds, which is meaningless to
me,
since I have always thought of it in kilograms since I was 36 kg when they
introduced metric in school. The nurse then tried to divide by 2.2 in her
head and got it wrong. I volunteered my calculator, which has the
conversion
built in; she entered the numbers and got 0, because it's reverse Polish,
which she's unfamiliar with.
After everyone else had been weighed, I turned the scale over, flipped the
switch, stepped on it, and read 56.8, which agrees with my mass measured
at
home, considering that I was wearing clothes. I know she is familiar with
kilograms because (1) she's an immigrant; (2) I overheard her explaining
to
the previous patient that you divide your mass in kilograms by the square
of
your height in meters; and (3) I talked with her after flipping the
switch.
It appears that the immigrants try to conform to what they think is the
way we
do it. Is there any literature aimed at people who come here already
knowing
metric, but haven't lived through the introduction of metric in the 1970s,
empowering them to push Americans to metricate?
Pierre
