A (Fur)Long Shot

We need to switch to the metric system.

The entire rest of the world sells gasoline by the liter, plywood by the meter, and fresh produce by the kilogram. It just doesn't make sense for the United States to stubbornly insist on gallons, feet, and pounds in the modern world of global communication and international business.

Besides, gallons sound too much like Harry Potter's Galleons, feet too much like a smelly part of the human body, and pounds too much like that currency that the British invented before Rowling brought about the Galleon. Just kidding, I mean before the euro. Oh wait, the UK hasn't really adopted the euro, now have they? Well, in that case, perhaps there is no real pressure for the US to standardize.

Honestly, though, the system used by the United States (and, Wikipedia reminds me, Burma and Liberia), just doesn't make sense. It's as though someone started a game of Scrabble, couldn't make anything with their letters, and so decided to invent brand new words to explain that which simply did not need re-explaining. Inch? Quart? Mile? Acre? Jigger (3 tablespoons)? Furlong? (Yes, that's one of ours, equal to about, though not quite, 200 miles). You simply can't do that in Scrabble, it's cheating.

The other player, of course, used real words like Yard, Fathom (2 yards), Rod, Survey, Link, Foot, Barrel, Cup, the list goes on. When they were done, one of the founding fathers must have walked by, picked up the board, and went, "Aha! These will be our national measurements!" He then proceeded to name the system "United States Customary System." Seriously? They get "Metric" and we get "USCS"? That's incredibly unfair. Metric, clearly, is superior. So why do we still use the other thing?

Somehow, the soda industry is ahead of the curve, selling in 2-liter bottles. Way to go, Coca-Cola & Pepsico (who I'm confident pretty much control all soft drinks in the nation). Now it's time for the rest of the industries to follow.

Come to think of it, some already have. Take the computer industry, for example. Yes, we buy our LCDs in screen sizes measured in inches, but we clock our processors in gigahertz, value our hard drives in gigabytes, and occasionally complain that someone just downloaded a ton of annoying viruses (ton being, originally, the metric unit equal to a megagram). That's not bad; adopting the metric prefixes (tera, giga, mega, kilo, etc) is a good start.

But we can take it further. In fact, to truly adopt metric, we have to take it where it's never gone before. Let's start applying metric thinking to everything. Currency, to start with. If the dollar is our standard, we'll offer decadollars ($10) and hectodollars ($100), or, for smaller exchanges, decidollars ($0.10) and centidollars ($0.01). No more of those crazy fives or twenties.

Of course, other things will follow. Colors, for example. Who can remember fuchsia or aquamarine? Pick a standard, like blue, and compare absolutely everything to it. Purple becomes megablue, while yellow is more of a miliblue. Easy enough.

Next, we'll take on our system of time. What's with this system based on 60, 12, and 24? AM and PM? No way. When time goes metric, we will have days (equal, as they are now, to the standard of a rotation of the Earth, or 86400 seconds) comprised of 10 decidays (approximately 2 hours each), represented on analog clocks by 10 marks for each deciday (none of this, twice-around-the-clock AM/PM garbage). Each deciday will be further broken into centidays (approximately 14 minutes each). A third hand will cycle around the face of the clock, marking each miliday (approximately 1 tick every minute). This would truly simplify the entire process, and, at any given time, a digital display would read something akin to "6:7:3" (6 decidays, 7 centidays, and 3 milidays, or 16.152 hours, also known as 4:09 PM). But truly, metric is simpler, each digit only ever being 0-9.

Can you feel the revolution just bursting to begin? A new world, run by prefixes and powers of ten, standardized for a simpler, more modern planet. And think of all the problems it would solve! No more miscommunication! No more confusion, conversion, or complication! Just pure, simple, base-ten mathematics. The world would truly be a better place. So please, write to your legislators. We need to be on the metric system.