No matter how many barleycorns you lay end to end, you will never make it to a standard coulomb, kilowatt, volt or ampere. It was proudly featured in the 1893 Colombian Exposition, and today essentially everyone in the US has it. Without it there would be no DNA testing, photocopying, cell phones. The current set of US units are so dead, they cannot describe something that first became useful in the 19th Century, completely transformed the 20th, and is taken for granted in the 21st. Now I tell you this information because you are certainly intimately familiar with horses, and interact with them on a daily basis?-right?-you don’t? Well then, why would you object to the internal combustion engine described as having 309 kilowatts under the hood? Too modern?-not enough Mr. It had a 383 cubic inch engine, which probably produced about 415 horsepower. Years ago, a friend of mine owned a Plymouth Road Runner. But the unit used to describe the energy produced by an internal combustion engine, in the land of the Barleycorn Hillbillies, is “horse power.” I am at a loss why we don’t have divisions into “pony power,” “mule power,” and for fine measurement “hamster power.” Power is measured in watts, which is a joule per second, which is of course defined by the metric system (SI). Meanwhile in the 21st century, I haven’t needed a horse for transportation or plowing– at all. Estimates indicate that about one-third of the nations farmland was required to produce horse feed. By the end of the 19th century there were about 30 million horses in the US-about one for every four people. You might not have noticed, but the world has changed a lot since the 17th century. So why did I call the set of units employed in the US as “dead?” It’s simple, they are. Seriously, in the era of cell phones, GPS satellites and such, we are offered a three dimensional volume of beer, which is described as a one dimensional length? I hear rumors that metric countries have a meter of ale, heaven help us, Jethro has arrived in the building. Yes I know it’s traditionally called a “yard of ale” in the country which provided the sourdough starter for our dead units. What’s even more fun is that certain American drinking establishments offer “a yard of beer,” or a half-yard if you’re not that thirsty. Ok, feet weren’t fair? I didn’t use a unit which is close to a meter? How about telling me how many yards are in 1/2 mile? I doubt 880 yards immediately rolled off your tongue. Perhaps Jethro Bodine could give you a hand with that. I’m sure you’re still working on cyphering that there are 2640 feet in 1/2 mile. So how many meters are in 1/2 kilometer?-why 500 meters of course. (3 barleycorns = 1 inch, 12 inches = 1 foot, 3 feet = 1 yard, 5 1/2 yards = 1 rod, 40 rods = 1 furlong, 8 furlongs = 1 mile, there is no two anywhere that I can see). I used a factor of one-half as I’m constantly told that we have a system based on two, a “binary system.” A most annoying fact is that the persons asserting this truism apparently have no concept of how completely incorrect it is. Don’t believe me? How about answering this question: “How many feet in half a mile?” The units just ate your brain. They are corpses that wander our culture eating our brains. That’s why I finally have to put my foot down over this issue.Īfter immersing myself in metric, here is how I’m beginning to react to my fellow citizens describing the world with the dead set of medieval units in everyday use: The units we use are metaphorically similar to zombies from Night of the Living Dead. A foot as a measurement unit?-hilarious and so precious that the Barleycorn Hillbillies would make up such a quaint and absurd fundamental unit, which is different for every person. Imagining further, that this metric person had never heard of a “measurement unit” called a foot, how would it sound after she was told? My expectation is that to a metric person, it would sound like Johnny’s mother was a member of the most unsophisticated culture on this planet. Worst of all, the woman seemed to be proud of it. Perhaps the poor boy had grown up near a nuclear waste site, which caused a new appendage to grow. Suppose this person, who knows only metric, then hears one American woman tell another: “My goodness Alice, my little Johnny grew a foot.” Now the person from a metric country could be expected to recoil at such a statement. The meter is the only fundamental distance base! The meter is also the product of the best metrological methods available. The prefixes are shorthand for how many meters are under discussion, or how many times it has been divided-by one thousand. Try for just a moment to imagine you grew up with a smooth continuous measurement system (i.e. I see nothing but the prosaic utterances of Barleycorn Hillbillies. Many wax poetic about the heritage and richness of these forcibly related units.
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