By KSN Chief Meteorologist Dave Freeman

As if I don't have enough to do this busy winter storm season, I have decided to take up tilting--tilting at windmills, in the finest spirit of Don Quixote. Today's target: the much beloved but confusing system of measurements known as the "English system."

Now don't get me wrong--I love the English. They gave us our country (OK, well, we kind of took it from them but they have turned out to be pretty good sports about that), Sherlock Holmes, Winston Churchill, fish & chips & vinegar, the Beatles and James Bond. But when it comes to the "English system" of measurement, it just doesn’t measure up!

Let me ask you to think about this whole thing from "scratch." Which system would you choose:

1. A system which is based partly on units of 12 (inches to feet), partly on units of 3 (feet to a yard), partly on units of 5280 (feet to a mile), partly on units of 212 (degrees Fahrenheit to boil water), partly on units of 16 (ounces to a pound) and which requires the use of fractions (when is the last time you tried to add 3/32 to 7/8?)
   
   or
   
   
2. A system based on units of 10, where everything is easily added, subtracted, multiplied and divided using simple decimal point calculations, and where 0 is freezing (for all practical purposes) and 100 is boiling (for all practical purposes).

If you could truly be objective--stepping back from habit and comfort zone--and simply judge this case on its merit, it would be a slam dunk for the metric system of measurement!

We took a few tentative steps in that direction back in the early 1970s, of course, but faded in the home stretch. While a few metric units have penetrated the popular culture of the U.S. (2 liter pop bottles, and a few other liquid containers being the best example), most of that effort simply ran out of steam. The kilometer/mile signs faded from the highways, and we settled back into the familiar but unwieldy English units.

During that same period of history, globalization accelerated at a bewildering pace and the Internet and satellites shrank the world to a virtual neighborhood! Almost the entire rest of the planet, of course, uses the metric system. This makes it increasingly awkward and difficult for us to compete on the world market. Even here in the KSN WeatherLab, the ONLY thing we do in English units is the public forecast we provide to you! Everything else we do in metric units!

So, at the risk of suggesting something sensible, I would like to suggest that the time has come to revisit this issue. The time has come to recognize that there is an international language of weights and measures and we're not using it! The time has come to show the rest of the world that the spirit of Yankee ingenuity is alive and well and savvy enough to speak the international language of science and technology. Anybody out there listening?

By the way, that windmill looks about 28 meters high.... or 91' 10 21/64".

Dave Freeman
KSN Chief Meteorologist
weatherlab@ksn.com