Word: metrics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...over the coming year will increase by 14%. The last four Soviet harvests have been unnaturally scanty, so much so that the Soviet government refused to announce production figures for the past two seasons. But this year the U.S.D.A. forecasts a total Soviet grain production of around 200 million metric tons. That figure falls far short of 1978's record 237.4 million tons and of this year's optimistic target of 238 million tons. But, after two consecutive years of 160 or 180 million tons annually, the projected upswing heralds a notable improvement...
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...
...Even the metrically untutored do not blink when doctors prescribe 500 mg (milligrams) of antibiotics or electricians recommend 15 A (ampere) fuses. Yet just as they have resisted learning foreign languages, Americans have long balked at changing measures. Says David Gorin, president of the nonprofit American National Metric Council: "The problem has deep roots. It goes back to a time when our economy was dominant and whatever we made was the biggest and best...
Critics like Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth catalogues, object to metric for the very reason that most scholars favor it: the ease of converting one unit to another-say, kilometers to meters-by simply multiplying or dividing by tens. Says Brand: "You can't visualize a tenth very well, but you can imagine a quarter or a half of something." Adds Seaver Leslie, founder of Americans for Customary Weight and Measure: "The metric system is imposed rationality...