Word: metrication
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Among Jawaharlal Nehru's many ambitions for India is to make its measures metric, its thermometers Centigrade and its coinage decimal. Easier said than done. Through the length and breadth of India, there are more than 140 different systems of weights and measures. Dates and records are kept according to 30 different calendars, at least one of which, instituted more than 500 years ago with a slight miscalculation, has slipped out of phase by 23.2 days, so that Hindu dances meant for moonlit nights are often performed in total darkness. To top it all, the Indian coinage system, based...
Last week, having already established a national calendar of twelve months (more or less comparable to the Gregorian) and threatening soon to put weights and measures on the metric system, Nehru's government chose to inaugurate a new decimal coinage. In place of the rupee (20?), anna (1/16 rupee) and pie (1/12 anna) of the past, the new money will consist solely of rupees and naye paise (literally: new coins) worth .01 rupees. The trouble is that for three years both sets of coins will be used at once, and since there is not always a way of translating...
...exhibition pool described above, the building also contains one of the largest suspended swimming pools in the world. Used primarily for practice, this 167-foot stretch of water is divided by a movable bulkhead, which can be adjusted to make the pool fit any standard American or Metric course...
...fortnight ago a court issued a warrant for Bolanos' arrest on a charge that Comercial Guatemalteca had failed to live up to its contract to deliver 5,000 metric tons of corn to a government agency (apparently it was more profitable to sell available corn to private dealers). But last week the warrant had not been served, Bolanos was at liberty, and Comercial Guatemalteca was still in business. The government even granted the firm a license to import 4,000 metric tons of frijoles (black beans), now selling at scarcity prices in Guatemala, and 100,000 sacks of cement...
Sweden has been trading its own low-grade uranium ore (200 grams of uranium per metric ton) for refined French uranium metal. At present the Swedes have one 300-kw. reactor built underground in Stockholm, another big reactor with a probable output of 20,000 kw. and some plutonium...