Word: metrication
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...drive to adopt metric, Americans are dragging their feet...
Though Congress in 1975 legislated a gradual and voluntary changeover in weights and measures, nothing seems harder to do than to get Americans to adopt metric, the system used by all the world except Brunei, Burma, North and South Yemen-and the U.S. In 1977, a Gallup poll found Americans opposed to metric by better than 2 to 1. As part of their continuing struggle to bring the U.S. in line with the rest of humanity, leading proponents of metric, or, more formally, the International System of Units (known by its French initials SI), gathered in Arlington, Va., last week...
Pessimism abounded. A few years ago, the metric forces thought they could get the U.S. to switch in a decade. Now they do not expect metric to prevail before the year 2000. "It will be a generational change," says David Goldman, head of the National Bureau of Standards' metric office. "Only when youngsters who learned metrics in school reach upper-level management will the change really occur." Nor can the metric campaign expect much help. Though Deputy Secretary of Commerce Guy Fiske warned that American industry faces increasing resistance in trying to sell nonmetric goods abroad, the Administration...
...blowouts, platform fires and other accidents. The world's largest oil spill, in fact, occurred in the Caribbean when a well being drilled by Pemex, the Mexican national petroleum company, blew on June 3, 1979. Before it was capped 290 days later, it had poured some 475,000 metric tons of oil into the sea. Scientists still cannot say what the effects were on the rich fisheries, coral reefs or sea-grass beds of the Caribbean basin. But they agree that the beautifully delicate world of the Caribbean could not readily withstand a repetition of that environmental disaster...
...case involved the supertanker Salem, registered in Liberia, which offloaded 180,000 metric tons of Kuwaiti oil at the South African port of Durban in late December 1979. In Parliament last week, the South African government acknowledged that it had paid $45 million for the oil. The ship then sailed for Europe but sank mysteriously in the Atlantic off the coast of Senegal on Jan. 17,1980. The trouble was that the cargo it had left in Durban had actually been owned all along by the Shell International trading company, and the Salem was supposed to have been carrying...