Totalitarian Measurement

Kim du Toit
July 10, 2007
12:37 PM

Over the years, my hostility towards the metric system has been questioned—most notably, it seems, by engineers—and it’s probably time I spoke about the topic more fully.

Take a look at this article:

The size 14 dress could be consigned to history if a European Union quango gets its way.

Traditional British clothes sizing, which ranks women from size 4 to size 32, should be replaced by a more flexible approach in which dresses and blouses are labelled according to their actual measurements, it argues.

That would mean trousers would be sold by their waist measurement, and dresses by their bust and hip measurements.

On the face of it, that seems quite reasonable. Certainly, it would do away with the fog of confusion which currently bedevils women’s clothing sizes—where the size 10 of yesteryear has become the size 8 of today, and in so doing, forces women to try on clothing, regardless of labeled size, to make sure that it actually fits.

But here’s where this Euro-initiative gets rather murky:

The proposals, which are voluntary, are being drawn up by the European Committee for Standardisation and are part of a wider plan to force countries across Europe to adopt standard metric methods of labelling products.

As The Englishman pointedly notes: “Isn’t it strange how the words ‘European Committee’ [and] ‘voluntary proposals’ always seem to slip into ‘force’ and ‘metric’.”

Indeed, it’s the coercive nature of metric supporters which raises my ire, as much as the measurement system’s rather obvious shortcomings—more of which later on.

I am constantly astounded by the fact that metric supporters feel obliged to make use of their system compulsory, and exclusive. It’s all very well to argue that base 10 is more logical a system of measurement (well, except when you want to divide, say, by three or six), but that’s not really the point because all measurement systems struggle with anomalies like that.

What really gets my goat about the metric system is that someone decided that the basic unit of measurement is x, and at that point, all others rest on that premise and must comply.

For those who aren’t familiar with the metric system, a meter (actually, metre) is defined thus:

From 1889 to 1960, the metre was defined to be the distance between two scratches in a platinum-iridium bar kept in the vault beside the Standard Kilogram at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris.

This replaced an earlier definition as 10^-7 times the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along a meridian through Paris; unfortunately, this had been based on an inexact value of the circumference of the Earth.

From 1960 to 1984 it was defined to be 1650763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line of krypton-86 propagating in a vacuum.

It is now defined as the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in the time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the metre’s length (and therefore the length of all its children: centimetre, millimetre etc) had to be changed three times—which means that a tool made in 1938 will not fit a part made in 1986.

Most important of all, however, is the fact that the measurement has been defined in terms with which the average human being has no relationship, and no familiarity either.

Such is not the case with the old-fashioned Imperial system, which from the start was based upon a definition likewise arbitrary (according to legend, the length of King Edward I’s foot, and the length of his stride), but which had at least a marginal basis in the everyday, and which could therefore be imagined. Put your foot on the ground, and the distance from heel to toe is more or less a foot. (Edward I, aka. “Longshanks” because of his towering height, had very long feet—longer than the average person’s foot, even today.)

The “more or less” distinction is critical, because outside the engineering discipline, the average person has little need for hyper-accuracy. “Add a pinch of salt” works extraordinarily well for cooks, but not for engineers. Precision is needed to build bridges (not as much as you’d think, incidentally—ask the Romans, many of whose bridges still stand today), but precision isn’t necessary to gauge whether a couch will fit in a room. Just step heel-to-toe along a line, and you’ll get a good idea. In the absense of a ruler or other measuring device, it makes perfect sense to use body parts to gauge distance, because we all have body parts, hence the expression “rule of thumb” (another legendary measurement concept, meaning one which will serve the purpose most of the time, with an acceptable degree of accuracy).

The fact that Imperial measurement’s origins are often legendary also drives the Precision Junkies wild. From Webster’s 1913 Dictionary, the inch is defined thus:

A measure of length, the twelfth part of a foot, commonly subdivided into halves, quarters, eights, sixteenths, etc., as among mechanics. It was also formerly divided into twelve parts, called lines, and originally into three parts, called barleycorns, its length supposed to have been determined from three grains of barley placed end to end lengthwise.

In days of yore, everyone know how long a barleycorn was, because we were an agrarian society.

To put this into gunnies’ parlance, the old Russian method of using arshins to graduate a rifle’s sights makes perfect sense, in that an arshin is roughly the length of a human step (ditto the Austrian schritt, which is the same definition, albeit of a different length). Converting the sights to metres can be problematic because a metre, which is not an intuitive measurement, makes little sense to the average human being until you say that a metre is slightly (3.37") longer than a yard, which everyone can gauge without a mechanical measurement device.

Of course, because we humans prefer order to chaos, we’d like to think that therefore the metric system, which is at least consistent (except for that three-time change of the metre’s length thing), would be preferable.

But that preference for order over chaos is also dictated by the counterbalancing preference for freedom over order—in other words, order is fine, right up until freedom, in fact or in perception, is severely circumscribed.

And this, in reality, is why the metric system is embraced in Europe—where the people are more comfortable with social order, even at the expense of personal freedom—whereas in untidy, freedom-loving America, the old Imperial system is still king. Indeed, the efforts of ur-European sympathizers, bureaucrats and government to implement the metric system in the United States, have met with resounding, and consistent failure except in the sciences and engineering disciplines (because scientists and engineers always have measuring tools near at hand, and are used to working in abstract concepts anyway).

Also note that the loudest proponents of the metric system (outside the science- and engineering fields) tend to be people who tend to favor statism.

Let me illustrate the point with something from one of my previous lives.

When I worked for a Great Big Research Company in South Africa, we measured and reported on the flow of consumer goods through supermarkets. Auditors visited the stores every so often, took stock, and reported apparent sales back to head office.

Those stocks and sales were reported in units, eg. Coke 6-packs, Kleenex 12-pack toilet tissue, Colgate Shampoo 250ml, and so on. My job was to convert those units into measures defined by our clients: gallons, cases, client-defined measures (eg. something called “equivalent consumption units”—the amount of soup it took to feed one meal to a family of four), “shift quantities” (the amount of product produced by a single factory shift), and so on. Almost every single product category had a “family” of conversion factors, all applied to the same input data, and all fed out to the clients in the measurement units they specified. Some clients even had the data reported to them in several versions: Marketing might want to see actual consumer purchase decisions, Sales might want to see cases, Production might want to see gallons or litres, etc.

It would have been far more efficient simply for us to use one measurement system—efficient for us, that is—and we could simply have mandated that all clients accept the data as reported, and forced them to perform their own conversion factors in-house.

But we didn’t, because that’s not how capitalism works. Yes, sometimes capitalism is inefficient—but it’s inefficient because of the choice which savvy marketers offer to their customers.

And, if I may explain the concept simply (for the benefit of those who are from Santa Monica or France and can’t understand how it applies to us): when it comes to a governed society, We The People are the customers, and government is the supplier of services. To put it even more bluntly, government exists to serve us—we do not exist to make government’s life easier—and that goes for everything, including weights and measures.

Sure, in closed systems it makes sense to use a single method of measurement: the Armed Forces are metric (for reasons which escape me, unless it was a concession to NATO), and engineer-saturated institutions like NASA ditto (although I note with glee that in their Press releases, NASA uses Imperial units to describe distances—”x thousand miles”, rather than “-kilomoters”, even though internally, they use metric units). 

But when it comes to the public, we have made it plain, in no uncertain terms, that We The People prefer user-friendly measurements over abstract ones.

What’s interesting is that in our free society, the metric and Imperial systems manage to coexist. On Coke cans, for example, the volumetric contents are generally given in both constructs—355ml and 12 fluid oz—and everyone seems to be fine with that. Yes, it’s a little inefficient: why do something twice instead of just once?

Well, that’s the whole point. Freedom itself is an untidy, sometimes inefficient system. But freedom (and its sidekick, choice) is the way we’ve decided to exist in this country. More to the point is the fact that we have made the declarative statement that government and bureaucracy exist for our benefit—not the other way round. So if government and the bureaucracy has to deal with two different ways of measuring the same thing, that’s just too bad.

We The People might not know how to define 237cc of liquid—but we damn sure know how much a cup holds, because we drink our coffee out of one every single day of our lives.

Put simply, therefore: Imperial measurements are user-friendly, and the metric system isn’t. The way I see it, users are more important than bureaucrats and their desire for order, most of the time, and we prefer it that way.

Put even more simply: I prefer freedom over precision.

So screw the unfriendly metric system, screw the metric coercionists, and screw the totalitarian horse they all rode in on.

And now, it’s time for my lunchtime 568.25ml (Imperial).

Hip O’Crit

Kim du Toit
July 10, 2007
10:36 AM

That’s not the name of an Irish folk singer, it’s this bastard:

HOUSTON � A state lawmaker who opposed a bill giving Texans stronger right to defend themselves with deadly force pulled a gun and shot a man he says was trying to steal copper wiring from a construction site, police said Monday.

Rep. Borris Miles told police he was fixing a leak on the second floor of the Houston house he’s building Sunday night when he heard a noise downstairs and saw two men trying to steal the copper. After Miles confronted the pair, one of the men threw a pocketknife at him, Houston Police spokesman Victor Senties.

Miles, a former law enforcement officer, shot the man in the left leg, police said. The wounded suspect was being treated at a Houston hospital. Police were trying to identify the other suspect.

Charges of aggravated robbery are pending against the wounded suspect, Senties said.

Police said Miles, who is in his freshman term, is licensed to carry a concealed weapon. No charges have been filed against Miles, Senties said.

Miles, a Democrat, voted against a bill that gives Texans stronger legal right to defend themselves with deadly force in their homes, vehicles, and workplaces. The so-called “castle doctrine,” passed by the Legislature this year, states that a person has no duty to retreat from an intruder before using deadly force. The law goes into effect Sept. 1.

It would serve the little twerp right if he were charged with using excessive force, simply because he shot a man who was, after all, unarmed when shot.

Somebody call the Harris County DA (another foul bastard).

Quote Of The Day

Kim du Toit
July 10, 2007
9:13 AM

From Insty:

“We have better soldiers than politicians. Then again, we have better everything than we have politicians...”

And right now, if we talk about a special kind of politician—the “Run Away” faction on both the DemCong and Stupid Party sides of the aisle—“everything” would include “rancid rat turds”.

Timorous cowardly bastards.

Turning Pro

Kim du Toit
July 10, 2007
7:26 AM

Over at the top right of the page, you’ll see a link to MyBiographer.com.

Spend a minute or two watching the intro (yes, it’s leisurely, but it’s lovely).

And then take a look at the website behind it.

Just to put all this into perspective: we finally firmed up the idea for this business last Monday night, and decided to give it a go. In the past six days we’ve built the business plan, built the website, and started the whole thing (pricing, order forms, letterheads, business cards and above all, the questionnaire).

The first dozen or so questionnaires went out this morning, to our beta group.

From unemployed slacker to fully-employed busy person in a week. Yowzer.

I’m going to get busy with the confirmed Beta bios (still waiting for confirmation from a couple more—you know who you are), and so blogging may be a little, ummm lighter than has been the case recently. (Sorry, but you all understand the capitalist thing.)

This is fantastic. All my life I’ve wanted to write, and up until now it’s either been easy but with little monetary compensation (this blog), or difficult and with little compensation (my novels).

Now I’m going to be paid to write about real, live breathing people, writing their stories for posterity, giving them and their families a lasting legacy. It does not get any better than this.

To all who have supported me through these past few years, my sincerest thanks. If I may beg a further favor from you: please spread the word. Email the MyBiographer.com link to your friends and family, tell them it’s a great idea (because it is) and encourage them to hire me.

And finally: none of this would have been possible without Connie, The Mrs. and Tech Support—all those full-time jobs in one person, and my wife and partner in all things. She came up with the basic idea; she got me to believe in the promise of the thing; she built the MyBiographer site single-handedly, from scratch; she set up the operation, creating the typesetting, documents and letters—and all this just so she could say: “I’m married to a professional writer.”

I am the luckiest man in the world, and I’m so glad I get to share my happiness with you, my Loyal Readers.

Thank you, a million times over. Happy Dances all around.

Wallpaper 07/10/07

Kim du Toit
July 10, 2007
7:00 AM

Reading Abbey, founded 1121

Neighbors Wanted

Kim du Toit
July 10, 2007
1:11 AM

Our next-door neighbors have put their house up for rent—I think his job needed him to move, and as he only bought the house less than a year ago, he can’t really sell it.

I don’t know what the rent on the 4BR/2.5BA/2CG will be—quite a lot less than $2,000 per month, is my guess—so if anyone’s interested, drop me a note at the usual. The house is in excellent shape.

Your next-door neighbors will be somewhat eccentric, of course; but as long as you don’t mind the screams from burning hippies, and the occasional yet revolting sight of a naked fat guy cavorting on his front lawn firing a rifle into the air, you will find the neighborhood quite convivial.

Sloppy Language, Wasted Money

Kim du Toit
July 9, 2007
10:44 AM

So at last the Gummint has realized that malaria is a problem, and is going to Do Something About It:

Malaria, which is spread by the female Anopheles mosquito, was essentially eliminated from the United States by the 1950s, but it is still devastating parts of the world. It is the leading cause of death for children younger than 5 in sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2005, President Bush committed $1.2 billion over five years to prevent and treat the disease in 15 of the hardest-hit African countries, with the goal of reducing malaria deaths there by 50 percent. The program uses government money but harnesses funding and manpower from partners as well.

Of course, the idiots couldn’t help but misuse a term, just in case a million dead people a year isn’t a powerful enough image:

“When you look at the number of people who have died, it’s a genocide,” said R. Timothy Ziemer, coordinator of the President’s Malaria Initiative.

No, it isn’t.

“Genocide” is when a specific race or ethnic group is killed. In the case of Africa, the fact that Black people are dying is a simple fact of geography. White people also die because of malaria, because the poxy mosquito doesn’t just infect Black people. Had we not eliminated malaria in the United States in the 1950s (thanks to, errrr, the eeeevil DDT), we’d also be dying.

But that minor quibble aside, this is a Good Thing. It’s a shame that it’s taken us this long, but we can thank the stupid Greenies and assorted eco-loons for banning DDT—then and now, the best way to prevent malaria—because without them, malaria would be far less of a problem in Africa.

For the record, I had a slight brush with malaria myself, and thanks to modern medicine (and copious amounts of quinine tonic, taken with gin), I managed to escape with few ill-effects. It’s no joke, and that the do-gooders could have allowed this foul disease a chance to kill so many people, just because DDT was over-used (flooding rivers and ponds with it, instead of just spraying the inside of houses and huts)—well, let’s just say that the Hall of Shame beckons.

And now I’m going to say something Krool & Hartless.

I am aware that We The Suckers are going to pour a jillion U.S. dollars down the sinkhole known as the African AIDS crisis, and I have to tell you, I look on it with a jaundiced eye. Why?

Because most of the money will never reach its final destination; it’s not going to cure AIDS (of course); and it’s not going to stop the rampant promiscuity for which Africa is famous.

And unlike malaria, which you can get just because you were in the same zip code as a malarial mosquito, you get AIDS from one activity, and one activity alone, and all the money in the world isn’t going to stop Africans from doing that. Ergo, the money is not going to stop the spread of AIDS.

So why spend any on AIDS relief/prevention, when it’s going to have no effect? And if we are hell-bent on spending more money in Africa to save lives, there always the option of arming the people of Darfur, who are still being needlessly slaughtered.

So if you want to sum up my attitude towards this whole Aid for Africa thing, it would be:

DDT: yes.
AK-47s for Darfur: yes.
Stupid feelgood throwing money down the bottomless AIDS pit: no.

Seriously: we should be taking all the money earmarked for AIDS relief, and ploughing it into malaria prevention. In the cold, hard calculus of saving lives, the latter has a measurable ROI, the former none at all.

Like I said, Krool & Hartless. But realistic.

Obfuscatory Nonsense

Kim du Toit
July 9, 2007
8:22 AM

That’s the alternative for “Lies and Bullshit”, which was my initial choice for a title. From Fred Barnes at The Weekly Standard:

THE IMMIGRATION BILL is dead, but the immigration issue is alive. And since the thundering herd that opposed the bill offers only stiffer border enforcement as an alternative, it’s left to advocates to come up with a better (and less narrow) measure.

As one of the “thundering herd”, allow me to offer a correction, you condescending bastard.

We’re not insisting on stiff border enhancement as an alternative; it’s the sine qua non of any immigration reform.

In other words (for the non-Latin-fluent members of the Amnesty Brigade), we know all too well that without stringent, tough and comprehensive border containment (one of the Constitutionally-required duties of the Federal Government, incidentally), any and all steps to contain illegal immigration will fail.

They will fail in the following manner:

1. Apprehension is made difficult because the increasing number of illegal immigrants would always swamp the capabilities of law enforcement;
2. Prosecution of the apprehended is impossible when the increasing number of the apprehended exceeds the capacity of the court system to process them;
3. Incarceration of the convicted illegal immigrants would swamp the capacity of the prison system to hold them until their
4. Deportation, which is pointless when the southern border is porous and the illegals can simply walk back over the border.

If a burst pipe is flooding your house, the correct methodology is first to plug the leak, and then to take care of the floodwater. It’s true of plumbing; it’s equally true of the illegal immigrant problem.

Any gainsaying of this principle is made for one of these reasons, or a combination thereof:

• sloth (I don’t wanna do it, the job’s too big / too hard);
• stupidity (never mind the facts, let’s just deal with the ones that are here first and ignore the others coming in);
• laxity (who cares how many aliens come over the border?);
• treachery (I want to get more of “our” kind of people into the country);
• cowardice (I don’t want to be confronted with news pictures of wailing people being shipped back over the border, and have to deal with the negative publicity)
• self-interest (I—or my benefactors—want the cheap labor the illegals provide), or
• misguided altruism (we should share our bounty with anyone who asks).

We members of the “thundering herd” know that the job of dealing with the flood of illegal immigrants is a massive one. We also know that it has become a massive job because you, our elected representatives, have screwed around since 1986 (the last amnesty), offering little loopholes here, bending the rules for this industry there, and making the job of law enforcement difficult all over the place.

So now the problem has become huge. Your response? A “grand plan” which promised to do it all, but which anyone with a lick of commonsense knew was doomed to abject failure—and the problem would then become more than critical.

When you’re faced with an enormous problem, you don’t create a grand plan, but a simple one. You take the first step, and one step only, no matter how difficult, and you make that work. Then you attack the problems that remain, one by one.

The only difficulty is deciding on the first step.

In this case, the first step is: close the fucking border.

But we can and should do a couple of things while the border is being closed, things which would also help reduce the flow, and which do not require funding to be diverted for the border closure.

Simple one: deny State benefits to illegal immigrants. That’s easy. Proof of citizenship before any free medical care is delivered, and any free education likewise.

Any state or city found disobeying that mandate: no more federal funds, not a penny, not for anything.

Another simple one: start fining and otherwise punishing employers who hire illegal immigrants. If ignorance of the law is no excuse, as we are so often told by law enforcement, then ignorance of your workers’ employment status should be equally so. That’s a law and everything, so it shouldn’t be too difficult.

That’s enough for now. We’ll tell you when we’re ready to discuss temporary work visas.

Buggering Around

Kim du Toit
July 9, 2007
7:48 AM

Somebody tell me why I should not be pissed off at this state of affairs:

The Department of Homeland Security seems more concerned with passing immigration legislation and not repeating the response to Hurricane Katrina. While this occurs, the terrorist threat, the reason the department was established in the first place, continues to build. Almost six years after the attacks of September 11, we still have no national terrorism prevention doctrine. Programs continue to be episodic and not based on a plan for prevention. State and local government homeland-security budgets continue to be cut, while daily priorities take precedence.

Let me be as blunt as I can: if there’s a successful terrorist attack inside this country (eg. one like the botched attempts in Britain, only ones which actually work), the rage of the people towards government is going to be terrible, and ugly.

Let me illustate the ineptitude of the DHS by asking these two simple questions.

Of all the students from Muslim countries currently in this country on student visas:

1. how many have allowed their visas to expire, and
2. does the DHS know where they are?

The answers (50-1 odds) are, in reverse order: no, and don’t know.

‘Nuff said.