The Miscellany Act (user search)
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Author Topic: The Miscellany Act  (Read 6957 times)
True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
Ernest
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« on: November 22, 2004, 10:15:43 AM »

Section 5 Clause 1 is already US law.  All of the customary units of measure are defined with respect to SI.

Section 5 Clause 2 is close to the existing law.  Most items of commerce now are required to use dual measurement.  Where it would change the law is mainly in the areas of road signage, weather reports, construction, and cooking shows, where the use of SI is essentially non-existent.

Section 5 Clause 3 is said by the proponent to provide an exception for road signs due to the cost and confusion.  But that is hardly the only area that sudden metrification would cause problems.  The gradual metrification that the US has been undergoing in daily life and commerce is slow, and while I would like to see it pick up the pace, going to pure SI overnight is not something I favor.

That said, I wonder if the use of the metric system would increase if the term SI Swimsuit issue had a different connotation. Smiley
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
Ernest
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« Reply #1 on: November 22, 2004, 03:48:34 PM »

The US actually has two inches, both defined in terms of the metric system.

The common inch (or international inch as it is officially called as it was adopted in 1959 by an agreement between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States) uses the conversion 1 inch = 25.4mm.  However, there was a large amount of geodetic data using the inch as it was defined in US law in 1866 which was 1 meter=39.37 inches. This inch is called the survey inch.  The two inches differ by 2 parts per million, so you have to get to some extremely fine tolerences to notice the difference.  The difference between the international inch and the old pre-1959 imperial inch is about 1 part per ten thousand which caused a more noticable, but still not easily noticable change for the Brits.

However, if conversion from the survey inch to the international inch was deemed impractcal when all that is required is a single (albeit non-decimal) conversion factor, can you imagine the troubles that would be caused by a metric requirement, particularly when all the existing geodetic data is in survey units?
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