
Yeah. That’s a real map. The United States of America, Liberia in Africa, and the pseudo-Communist state of Myanmar (Formerly Burma). That’s it. 190 other nations around the world, and the area of Low-Earth orbit, the moon, Mars and every probe ever sent out into Space (with the exception of the NASA Mars Probe Mars Polar Orbiter use the Metric System. You should all remember the MPO…
NASA lost its $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter because spacecraft engineers failed to convert from English to metric measurements when exchanging vital data before the craft was launched, space agency officials said Thursday.
A navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the metric system of millimeters and meters in its calculations, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, which designed and built the spacecraft, provided crucial acceleration data in the English system of inches, feet and pounds.
As a result, JPL engineers mistook acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds.
In a sense, the spacecraft was lost in translation.
Yeah. It’s about to get real up in here. SpaceX and every new industry coming online in what is widely being hailed as the Fourth Industrial Revolution of digital and additive manufacturing are not going to mess around. They do not care about the way we have always done things. So I plan my beds, plant my food, grow my food, check my temperatures, build my beds, and weigh my goods in Metric. Because the future is here. We are all just too stubborn to realize it.
To be honest it took me a solid three months to start dreaming in Metric. It’s not hard. It’s just a reframing of expectations and abstractions of dimensions, mass, and volume. I do not care that it inconveniences you. It is the way that 96.8% of the world already thinks this way (335,000,000/7,552,000,000). I have never – NEVER – met anyone not native to America who was annoyed that I could think and describe things in Metric. It’s always just average Americans who are annoyed.
Yes, the entire time I was working on #ProjectMartian here at Mezzacello, every day I would wake up take measurements and if I had to, convert them myself into Metric. I would not want to be the unfortunate Martian who found out the hard way that that door seal was supposed to be 3cm but got mistranslated as 1″ those six millimeters would be #InstantDeath. Switch to Metric already.
4 comments
mark henschel
Dear Mr. Bruner:
Thank you for speaking out about the need to the USA to complete the transition to SI we started in 1975, under President Richard Nixon and Secretary of Commerce Maruice Stans. Sadly, you might have missed the news that both Myanmar and Liberia have set a national policy to adopt the SI Metric System, so the map above should show the USA as the ONLY country on the planet handicapped by the use of a 16th Century measuring system. SI is updated by the GCWM every four years.
Please visit metric.org. Perhaps you will also join the USMA webserver, and perhaps get involved in the effort to update the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act. It is time to make labeling the two liter bottle of soda pop as a two liter bottle of soda pop (only-no ounces or quarts) legal in the USA.
Mark Henschel
Jim Bruner
Americans hate change ALMOST as much as they hate being wrong. In this case, both facts are true.
Jay Emmcee
Preach it brother!
Jim Bruner
You know it. Our grandkids are going to pay the ultimate cost.