Re: SI &c., eh?

[paul o johnson <pojhome@FLASH.NET>]

Leigh Palmer wrote:

> Grams? What's wrong with the mkg? Mg doesn't get used in this country,
> by the way. They use "tonne" and abbreviate it T. How's that for
> being SI incorrect?

mkg as in millikilogram? I'm afraid your meaning escapes me. Does any
metric country use Mg instead of tonne?

I like to tell the kids in my classes that when the English Parliament
voted to switch to the metric system over a period of years, Charles
DeGaulle was heard to mutter, "The English will be English. I note that
they are converting to metric over a 12-year period, not 10."

My meaning was that the boys in the smoke-filled room blew it when they
decreed that the prefixed unit "kilogram" would henceforth be the standard
unit of mass, replacing the original and still unprefixed standard "gram."

> I get to be the one to let you in on it: the "gal" is already a unit,
> though a non-SI one. It is a unit of gravitational field strength
> used by the geophysicists. The "gee" is also a unit of acceleration,
> of course. I prefer m/s^s.

But why not have a single-word famous-name unit of speed or acceleration
or momentum? Our kids are always looking for shorthand names for
everything. With all the famous folks we have   whose names are not yet
coopted, why not rid ourselves of jawbreakers such as kilogram-meter
squared/second  for angular momentum or confusing dualities such as the
same compound units for torque and work?

> Ah, you're an unrecostructed curmudgeon. We'll have to get the metric
> police on your case! I switched rather than fight.

I am like the pious man (probably a fellow Texian) Isaac Asimov wrote
about, who found something dangerously foreign and radical in the metric
system. Setting his face firmly against foreign languages, he held up his
King James bible and exclaimed, "If the English language was good enough
for the prophet Isaiah and the apostle Paul, it is good enough for  me."

poj