On Friday 04 December 2009 10:41:14 Bill Hooper wrote: > On Dec 4 , at 3:18 AM, Parker Willey Jr. wrote: > > I have polished my web pages (showing) how simple the metric system is. > > > > Check it out at http://sites.google.com/site/parkersinet/metric > > > > You may have some critiques of it but let me know what you think. > > Your item #2 in proposed legislation contains a non-SI unit. > > Your text is: > > 2. All weather forecasts on radio and television stations licensed by the > > FCC in the United States must begin including SI Metric units such as ... > > barometric pressure in millibars starting January 1, 2010. > > The millibars you recommend in the last line are not SI metric units. The > SI metric unit of pressure (barometric or any other) is the pascal (symbol: > Pa). Barometric pressures are in the thousands of pascals and therefore > probably should be expressed in kilopascals (symbol: kPa). Normal or > average atmospheric pressure is about 101.3 kPa. (There may be different > standards for identifying "normal" or "average" air pressure.)
101.325 kPa, to be exact, is the standard. In weather, only snow should be measured in centimeters (1 cm snow is about equivalent to 1 mm rain). Screen sizes should be in millimeters, not centimeters, and should be height and width, not diagonal. I measured some screens and found that they are round numbers in millimeters - but not *decimally* round numbers. One is 288×216, which is round in the sense than both numbers consist entirely of twos and threes. If the aspect ratio is 4/3, one number is sufficient, else both must be given. If you mean "pertaining to the Middle Ages", the word is "medieval", not "mid-evil". #5 should apply to lubricating oil too. Also the current laws that make pricing mandatory in gallons and optional in liters need to be reversed. #7: If there is a current requirement for sizes to be round non-metric units, I'd simply repeal that requirement, rather than require round metric sizes. 9. The bushel, peck, hogshead, dry quart, and dry pint are abolished. All produce sold in such units must have the mass in grams or kilograms on the label. 10. For all paper makers, if one makes two sizes of paper between which there is an ISO standard size, one must also make an ISO standard size which is between those two, unless those two are both ISO standard sizes. 11. Anyone who makes rulers marked in non-metric units must also make rulers marked only in metric units. Fuel economy should be in liters per megameter (or microliters per meter, or milliliters per kilometer, which are all equivalent). Litres au cent may be what they use in France, but being the first to metricate, they didn't have the experience of trying different methods to see which works fastest. The speed page should have a chart for km/h vs. m/s, preferably with the km/h numbers being multiples of 9 since those come out round. There's no need for a km/h-mi/h chart since you already have a km-mi chart. Pierre -- li fi'u vu'u fi'u fi'u du li pa
