My friends had a baby today.\u00a0 Congratulations to them!\u00a0 And congratulations especially to Dave, for announcing the baby’s mass in kilograms.\u00a0 I can’t understand why society insists that baby announcements should always be in outdated imperial measurements.<\/p>\n
Sensible people use the metric system<\/a> (or SI units, after the full French title: Syst\u00e8me international d’unit\u00e9s<\/em>) because it is far superior, and it is superior for two very good reasons:<\/p>\n “Yeah, but they’re so easy to visualise”, people say, “and metric numbers are so cold and clinical”.\u00a0 What a load of woolly nonsense!\u00a0 Whose foot?\u00a0 Which stone?\u00a0\u00a0 And where is the problem with visualisation?\u00a0 Try this on for size:<\/p>\n Baby Zo\u00eb was born at 583144929491543703900 +\/- 275778953100 periods of the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom since an arbitrary datum chosen by medieval monks.\u00a0 She has a mass of 3.24 times the mass of a cylinder of platinum-iridium alloy stored in a lab outside Paris.\u00a0 Mother and baby both have heart-rate, blood pressure and temperature within one standard deviation of the mean of their cohort.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n See?\u00a0 Much better!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My friends had a baby today.\u00a0 Congratulations to them!\u00a0 And congratulations especially to Dave, for announcing the baby’s mass in kilograms.\u00a0 I can’t understand why society insists that baby announcements should always be in outdated imperial measurements. Sensible people use … Continue reading \n