10 HOURS TO THE DAY

International use: that is not what makes the SDRs bad. International standards are highly convenient: It is more convenient for an American to drive in Germany than in Britain, because the British drive on the left. But the best example surely is the system of measurement that is truly international (as well as used in all strata within a nation): the time of day in hours, minutes and seconds. It is neither metric nor English, it is Babylonian; but whatever it is, it has not led to world government.

Only a dreamer would suggest dividing the day into 10 hours of 1000 millihours each. If you want convenience, you must count on tradition and what people are used to; you cannot force something on them just because it is better for the mathematicians. But now watch out: that was an argument for the metric system, not against it.

For the metric system is not smarter than the English system because the radius of the earth is 3760 kilometers instead of 2350 miles. (Quite the contrary: the 12-pence shilling was smarter than the 100-cent dollar because you could divide it exactly into thirds.) What the metric system does is respect a tradition older than any ideology: that man has ten fingers and that his numbering system, including the names given to the numbers, is based on the number ten. It is a poor number as a base, for it has only two useful factors (2,5). Twelve, with double the factors (2,3,4,6) would have been better, as the Babylonians and Anglo-Saxons evidently realized with hours and inches. And if man had 8 fingers on each hand, his number system, arithmetically and linguistically, might have been hexadecimal, which would have allowed him to program computers in machine language, so to speak, on his fingers.

The metric system abandons such idle dreams and bows to tradition: It subdivides its units in powers of ten.

This respect for tradition results in easily remembered units. A cubic inch of water weighs a number of ounces that you have to look up; a cubic centimeter of water weighs 1 gram. Raise the temperature of the cubic inch by 1 degree Fahrenheit, and the required heat is an unrememberable fraction of a BTU; raise the cc by 1 degree C and the heat is 1 calorie; and so forth. True, the volume of an ounce of water is 1 fluid ounce; but what is the volume of 1.73 tons of water? The volume of 1.73 metric tons is 1.73 cubic meters. The metric system does not cater to world government, but to the arithmetically disinclined.