Oh, wait… not that kind of Unitarian. While the inclusiveness and accessibility of the Unitarian Universalist Organization is admirable, the effort to conjure a religion out of thin air by accepting that everyone’s beliefs are equally valid, despite exactly none of those beliefs having any independent proof, seems kind of disingenuous to me. Pick a lane, amirite? I, instead, am a practicing Unitarian of the One True Faith that divides us all.
The units of measurement.
Oh, here he goes getting all metric on us.
Not exactly, and let me assure you that that particular discussion will be had but, as you might expect if you’ve been here a while, won’t end up as you probably expect. The more interesting story is, as always, not where we are, but how we got here.
Let’s get the units we mostly agree on out of the way. Those would all be related to time.
In the deepest parts of history somebody noticed a stick casting a shadow on the ground. They also noticed that the shadow moved during the day and had an AH-HA! moment. The shadow appeared at sunrise (duh), vanishing at sunset (duh2) and was shortest at noon. Wow! They must have thought. This could be useful. So, they divided the path of that shadow into the twelve units that we call hours.
Why twelve? You thought.
Good question. In olden times people counted on their fingers. Wait… A-hem… But they didn’t use each finger to indicate “one” as we do. Instead, they used their thumb to count along the segments of the four other fingers. Which gives them twelve. You can try this at home. Once they reached twelve, they’d raise a finger on their other hand which allowed them to count to what we call sixty (five groups of twelve, duodecimal + sexigesimal counting).
At this point the archaeo-anthropologists seem to lose the plot as they claim that sixty was the highest number they could count on two hands but, as you can also demonstrate, that number is actually seventy-two. Go ahead, I’ll wait…
I’m guessing that the sixty part of their story had something to do with minutes, but they couldn’t figure out how that particular thread related to the whole tapestry.
About 3,500 years ago the Egyptians added some stars into their time tracking and identified twenty-four stars (plus some twilight stand-ins) that could break up the night. And there things stood for a millennium or so until the Greeks came up with geometry and by extension our now agreed upon system of a 24-hour day with 60 minutes in each hour and, much later, sixty seconds in each of them. The end result being a time system the entire planet agrees on and your inability to add 1:12:26:45 and 42:23:25:50 in your head.
<Start>
<And… time’s up>
Then there’s the year. The generally agreed upon definition of the year – 365.25 days – beginning on what we call January first, with the slack taken up by the occasional Leap Year, or omission thereof. There are also several others with years based on 365.25 days but with different starting points. For example, where I sit now in Bangkok it is both 2026 A.D. (or C.E. if you are unable to give credit where credit is due) and 2569 B.E. (which started counting when the Buddha died from food poisoning at age 80). So, in my passport the most recent stamp was in 2026, but when I look at my driver’s license it’s dated 2568 since I renewed it last year. Note for the Curious: the others similar years are in Japan and Taiwan.
Then there is the Islamic calendar which is a pure lunar calendar so the months keep moving through the seasons and several others which are tied to the International date (2026-mm-dd) but which start a few weeks after January first.
You get used to it.
Then there are the units you came here for: Distance, area, volume, and temperature.
Oh, yeah, baby! Those idiot Americans not using metric.
Not so fast buckaroo.
First off, most of the “units” considered to be part of the International System of Units (S.I. because, The French) are not independently defined by that system. There are only seven – count them – official units in the S.I.: the second: time, metre, or meter: length, kilogram: mass, ampere: electric current, kelvin: thermodynamic temperature, mole: amount of substance, and candela: luminous intensity. There are also twenty-two derived units for some truly obscure units – like the katal, which until right now you didn’t know existed. However, nowhere in these lists will you find anything like centimeters, hours, kilometers, hectares, or any of the innumerable others that are merely multiples or fractions of the base units.
And that’s how it is in the United States of America. The US is, and has been since 1959, fully onboard and using the S.I. exactly as the rest of the world just with different words. So, while many places around the world would say “The next gas stop is ten kilometers (ten-thousand meters) away”, even though a kilometer is not officially defined. In the United States you’d hear “The next gas stop is 6.2 miles miles (10,000 meters) away”, with miles being officially designated in terms of the metric system. The list goes on. One teaspoon is officially 5ml, a tablespoon, 15ml. One pound is 0.45 kilogram. An acre is two and a half hectares (10,000 sq meters). However, the rest of the volume system switched almost completely to S.I. People are buying two-liter bottles of soda, 330ml cans and bottles of beer, and one-liter bottles of water without even thinking about the metric system. It seems they only bitch about “going metric” when it has to do with their Chevrolets (in which all the nuts and bolts are, in fact, metric).
Here, in Thailand, there are several units in common use where, as in the US, they’re still used for the same thing they used to be used for except they’ve been redefined to fit into the S.I. garage. The Wa, a length now equal to two meters, the Ngan (say “sing”, say “ing”, say “ng”. easy-peazy) which is 400 sq. meters (ten sq. wa), and the Rai, 1,600 sq. meters. These are all used pretty much exclusively in construction and land, with the metric hectare, 10,000 sq. meters, left gathering dust in textbooks. However, everything else is measured in meters and its derivatives. This leads to things like signs that say “House for Sale, 80 sq. m, 20 sq. wa”. Which at least won’t need much yardwork.
Then there’s the Queen of Screwing with Units: the United Kingdom, which uses a triply confusing metric / Imperial / English set of units. There you will see signs that say, “Danger Low Bridge, 4 meters, 500 yards ahead”. In fact, that’s not the worst of it. The former seat of Empire is officially metric, but, like the thatch-roof Tudors scattered about, old habits die hard there. Highway signs show distances in miles and the cars driving upon those highways use miles per hour and gallons per mile. But the fuel used to power the remaining non-electric autos is sold by the liter. And the gallons are different – 4.54 liters per gallon as opposed to the wimpy 3.79 liters per gallon in each ironically named “English” gallon used in America. Your height: feet and inches. Your weight: stone (fourteen pounds). Weight at the butcher’s or cheese monger’s: kilograms or grams. Beer: twenty-ounce pints. Milk: liters. You get the idea.
There is one lone remaining global standard that still relies on inches: the wheels on your car. But, as in many places, this holdout coexists peacefully and basically unnoticed even though you see it every day. Those numbers on your tires, something like “225/45 R17”, start with millimeters, slash into percent, and wrap up, in inches.
Personally, I still prefer dealing in the customary units even now clinging to life in the US. They have their deep origins in the dimensions of the people who needed to use them. In my days on the micro-farm, I could mark out a three-foot row separation in the garden easily. I could space seeds one inch apart using my thumb or four inches apart referencing my hand. I could pace out an area in yards with a long stride. It was easy. Using metric everything takes longer. When I built the greenhouse which was dimensioned in millimeters, I felt compelled to wear my “Is there a hyphen in anal retentive?” T-shirt. A clear example of perfection being the enemy of good.
With all these units in play, some official, some customary, and some which seem to be sticking around solely on the inertia of centuries, I am happy to let you use the ones you think are best even if I may disagree. There is one hill I will die on though.
Fahrenheit is better.
