Word: metrication
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...1790s, revolutionary France tried to bring order to the existing hodgepodge of weights and measures by adopting the metric system. Its scientists confidently set the meter as 1/10,000,000 of the distance between the North Pole and the equator. Making that measurement, however, turned out to be impossibly difficult not only because the earth is far from a perfect, unchanging sphere but because of France's internal turmoil. The government's surveyors were arrested as royalist spies, narrowly escaping the guillotine...
Working in his Berlin study, musing in his sailboat on Wannsee, lolling in his beach chair at Luebeck, Albert Einstein figured out a new metric. It lies between Euclid's and Riemann's conceptions. It shows that gravity, electricity, magnetism, everything is a logical, not chance, part of the world. It enabled him last week to phrase in mathematical terms a theory by which "everything in the world" can be explained. Albert Einstein's theories have altered human existence not at all. But they have revolutionized human understanding of existence...
...Fuel remainder three [metric] tons...
...have been mixed. Soviet national income has grown at the rate of 4% this year, compared with 2.9% in 1982. Andropov can also take heart from what is expected to be the best grain harvest since 1978. According to U.S. analysts, the yield may reach 200 to 210 million metric tons, well above the average of 177 million metric tons over the past four years. Still, the Soviet Union will not solve its economic troubles by cracking down on drunks and trusting in the weather...
...Crimson mile record is the one honor which has eluded Dixon. Fifteen years ago Jim Baker covered the distance in 4:00.2, and no one has topped it since. Because of the metric system, Dixon hasn't had many chances, but few doubt he has the capability to run a sub-four-minute mile. Dixon is likely to have his final chance when he last dons a Crimson uniform for the Cambridge/Oxford meet in England 10 days from now. For Adam Dixon, an athlete who will be sorely missed, the mile record would just be icing on the cake...