Maybe the long and the short of it is that Burma is the South-East Asian version of the Dominican Republic ---- a mish-mash of Imperial, metric, and local units depending on place, context, and commodity or economic sector.
----- Original Message ----- From: "ezra steinberg" <[email protected]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, February 13, 2010 1:28:27 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific Subject: Re: [USMA:46615] Re: Burma I just bought and downloaded the Lonely Planet guide to Myanmar (Burma) or at least the chapter on practical matters. (It cost me less than two bucks for just the one chapter and my curiosity got the better of me. Here is what they say about weights and measures: 1 Burmese viss or 100 ticals = 3.5 lbs; 1 gaig = 36 in; petrol is sold by the gallon [sic]; distances are in miles, not kilometres. Since I believe the books are published in the UK, they must be referring to an Imperial and not a U.S. gallon. I noted in one of their (free) excerpts from another part of the book that they referred to the length of a particular railway journey in kilometres, which I presume was done for the benefit of their (UK) readers. In the chapter I downloaded they also refer to customs regulations as follows (in part): Visitors are permitted to bring in the following items duty free: 400 cigarettes, q100 cigars, 250g of tobacco, 2L of liquor and 0.5L of perfume. While these values may be conversions to metric for the UK reader, I suspect that the rational amounts listed indicate that these are the values announced and enforced by the customs authorities, which I presume means the officers look at the metric values listed on the labels of the good brought into the country and ignore any Imperial or USC indications. But of course I cannot know this for sure just from this excerpt. I also learned from this chapter that Myanmar has one of the highest rates of death by snakebite in the world. Be careful! They also say that the local Myanmar Standard Time (MST) is 6.5 hours ahead of GMT/UTC (1 hour ahead of India and half an hour behind Thailand). And they say that twenty-four hour time is often used for train times. I won't reproduce what they say about toilets. Suffice it to say it's not up to North American or Western European standards. Most Myanmar Buddhists use an eight-day week in which Thursday to Tuesday conform to the Western calendar but Wednesday is divided into two 12-hour days. (Wow! -- Ezra) All Myanmar traffic goes on the right-hand side of the road. This wasn't always so. In an effort to distance itself form the British colonial period, the military government instigated an overnight switch form the left to the right in 1970. By far, most cars either date from before 1970 or are low-cost Japanese models, so steering wheels are perilously found on the right-hand side -- this becomes particularly dicey when a driver blindly zooms to the left to pass a car! There was no mention of whether Fahrenheit or Celsius is used ... or something else altogether! Oh, and last but not least, the Burmese word for "help" is "keh-bah!" (They also list many other useful phrases in translation, including "I'm lost', "I've been robbed", and "Go away!" :-) Cheers, Ezra ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Trusten" <[email protected]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, February 12, 2010 9:27:13 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific Subject: [USMA:46615] Re: Burma Pat, that's interesting, because sometime in 2007 or 8 I received an answer from one of the Myanmar national standards officials in response to my inquiry about metrication there. He told me that his country has no plans to change over to metric. That must mean that metric has seeped into use there, which would make sense since all of the neighboring countries must use nothing else. Paul ----- Original Message ----- From: Pat Naughtin To: U.S. Metric Association Sent: 11 February, 2010 23:56 Subject: [USMA:46598] Burma Dear All, I came across this quote from a most unlikely source, Peter Hitchens in an anti-metric diatribe at http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/02/collected-works.html By the way, before someone mentions this canard, it's not true that Burma hasn't metricated. It has, as I can recount from my own visit there. Cheers, Pat Naughtin Author of the ebook, Metrication Leaders Guide, that you can obtain from http://metricationmatters.com/MetricationLeadersGuideInfo.html 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. S ee http://www.metricationmatters.com for more metrication information, contact Pat at [email protected] or to get the free ' Metrication matters ' newsletter go to: http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter to subscribe.
