Lost in the Translation 01 19 2011
“We can’t do that.” Politicians say.
The reason the United States adopted the metric system more formally in 1975 was because they said we needed it in order to become more competitive. Now you have to remember just a few years before this the Kennedy administration took us to the moon. And you have to remember that before this we made the best stuff in the world. And before this we had the most educated population in the world.
Now guess what. In the United States we will always be either five or six feet tall. We will always be either thirty or ten pounds overweight. We will always be adding a cup of flour to our bread not a liter.
What am I getting at? We used to make the best stuff in the world and today we can’t even teach children how to read.
The metric system made those who had less feel they had more after all centimeter is half an inch so you have more centimeters if use this measure. But wait it is not have an inch it is a little less than more than half an inch so you get more per centimeter with this measurement.
Once they got us committed to walk on their path behind them, we soon lost sight of them after a few short miles or kilometers as we must know have to take our standards and translate them into something else. What have we lost in the translation? First we lost the lead in the automotive industry. And second and more importantly we lost the ability to translate good ideas into marketable products. Third, we completely lost our manufacturing sector. Do you know how much time it takes to figure out that 5/16 inch bolt is really an m8 x 1.5 metric bolt with twenty threads per inch? And that is exactly right this standard metric bolt has exactly twenty threads per inch. Who pulled the wool over our eyes? Our engineers waste quite a bit of time trying to focus on sourcing cheap parts from overseas to make products based on our standards. And to the contrary our standards have lost the translation into products. I get the feeling that many ideas do make it through the translation. We will always think in terms of pounds and inches. You are never going to hear that football commentator say that so and so weighs so many kilograms and is so many centimeters tall. It is never going to happen at this level and for it to be effective it has to readily understood at all levels and it will not be because it is not practical. Why because it is not a relevant system to use to describe real world phenomenon such as people. There will never be discernment between so many centimeters tall and ten more centimeters than that. It just does not have the bench marking that a foot does to our everyday experience. And improving our everyday experience is what is important not that of another countries.
Once we switched to the metric system in the automotive industry we lost our ability to focus on what was important in making automobiles. And the foreign competition used this, our being lost in the translation to zoom ahead of us. Whether we want to admit or not we are dependent on foreign countries for everything manufactured today. If inevitably we experience inflated prices because of this to bolster the economies of foreign countries we will start to suffer. Chinas restriction of rare earth metals is just the start of this. But this is okay because it will force the United States to become more responsible in the end.
What busy body prep woman is ever going to brag about losing kilograms of weight? The skinny one she is talking to is going to ask right away, "Well how many pounds is that?" And no average person wants to have to remember the conversion factors. Just put the average college graduate on a "Are you smarter than a fifth grader" show and they will fail at this one miserably even though they were taught this. And what man in the weight room is going to try and convert the pounds to kilograms to try and get the right weight for the next set. I give you a clue it is the one with the broken back.
Two systems are not practical. And because of the computer they are not needed. Computers were not readily available when the US renewed its push to the metric system in 1975. We have not been back to the moon and effectively we have been lost in space regarding our space program. What will happen next is the foreign countries that we allowed to gain the lead will now take this up and be the leader and we will still be asking ourselves who killed the Kennedys’. I’ll give you a hint on this one also, we can’t even teach children to read today.
When we think of the metric system in this country we need to use a new labeling system for it and only refer to it in terms of our SAE or Standard units of measurement. In other words, people learn from the base of what they know already, so we should only refer to metric system measurements in terms of our Units of Measurement. For example instead of using a kilogram we should call it a poundgram using its conversion to pounds as the preceding number. And a centinch is an inch so a centinch is defined then as being 2.2 centimeters or whatever the actual translation is, I am not going to bother looking these up today or tomorrow and neither will you. Hereby when have built the conversation factor into our standard and only refer to the metric system as a matter or reference system. Why? Because this makes the translation easy and the real world phenomenon it represents the focus of importance. Remember we cannot even teach our children to read.
You cannot teach two systems of measurement to a person and have those both be relevant. We lost at least two to three generations of practical engineers because of this.
The only ones who really understand the metric system in our everyday lives are the Engineers who design analog computer chips. Those are computer chips that translate real world phenomenon, that is things like miles and miles per hour, our standard units of measure. It will never be practical for us to adopt the metric system in our everyday lives because it does not have meaningful benchmarks. I can hear you already saying why can’t we make a benchmark system out of the metric system? Because we already have our benchmark systems and we have been engrained with an understanding of them that passes from generation to generation.
We used to make the best stuff on earth; today our junk piles are filled sky high with junky foreign electronics that are cheap and no longer work. There ought to be a law against them they are like a toxic cyst marker to someone else’s profit. Just the other day I touched an HD table top radio and a shock from my finger broke it, the digital clock on it is still ticking but the radio has no function whatsoever. If I want to set the clock correctly I suppose there are only two times in the day that I can do that, at twelve and twelve. Yeah they like those witching hours. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a clock doesn’t it.
What else did we get from giving up our standard? The earth and that includes water and skies are more polluted than they have ever been. We had set the standards in this country but somewhere along the way those without standards have come to rule us and this is what we get.
Johnny’s baseball bat will always be made of wood we measure in feet. My fishing poles will always be measured in feet and inches. Those newborn babies will always be measured in pounds. A basketball and a football will always require so many pounds of air if we even bother to measure or conceive a way to measure how much air is in them without it all leaking out before we have to add more and accurately form the guess as to how much is in them. Now that just makes sense to me as a better and more responsible measurement. Why? Because it is one we have to think or in real world terms, real world that is the origin of reality now isn’t it.
By the time Johnny figures out how to convert pounds to whatever it is metric and then try and fill his soccer, football, basketball or whatever it is with the proper amount without it leaking out whereby he then has to guess he will not have learned how to play the sport. I can hear someone already saying that if they create a gauge for sports equipment that doesn’t leak air after it measures that they will be rich, well you will. But the rest of us will still be living in a pile of junk. I bought a digital tire gauge and after figuring out it did not work by wasting two toxic batteries that are not good for something else I went back to the old reliable mechanical gauge. More junk in our landfills and a lesser standard of living for Americans.
Let the metric system only be referred to as a fraction of our standard units of measure.
When we switched systems to favor those adopted by countries we were already ahead of and that was all of them we lost everything. And we did this after we lost a great President.
Who are we going to cater to next the Mexicans? Most got here illegally and cannot even speak English with what’s left of the rest of us. Here is what they are rudely saying, “This guys American, act like you are a natural born citizen while I serve him this burrito with e-coli hamburger meat that has sat in the bin all day along with the mayo or cream that is also a breeding ground for viruses and bacteria. This will make him sick but he won’t know what caused it. He will just assume it is the water here in the US that is now the same as it is in Mexico. Don’t worry soon he will have to switch to our brain child Pesata system of measurement and also forced to speak our cluck sounding language until they are all dead.”
The foreign standards garbage that doesn’t work more than a day is piling up in our landfills and then all these precious metals that China won’t give us anymore are apt to seep through the landfills and into are water systems. And our children are then born to look like the village outcasts who have had to drink their water from downstream of where the Royal Chinese have their outhouse on the shore of the river earth. And if you don’t think a person born with down’s syndrome or what we used to call a Mongoloid looks just like a Chinese person you are on a system of measurement that is not based in reality. A mongoloid is indeed what the immigration department used to term a low grade imbecile and deport. And here are two facts that you do not know about low grade imbeciles. 1. Their minds are different and develop differently, it is what I call dependent minded. And 2. There a great many of them in the United States and the majority of them look like traditional Americans.
The system of measure is not what is important; it was the standards that stood behind it. It was something that is now historical today and it can only be truly termed “American Values”. It was our ideas and concepts about how things should be measured and understood that was important and that has been lost in the translation. Is it any wonder we cannot teach a child who drinks out of the equivalent of toilet water how to read? Every American should install water filtration systems in their house to combat this. How could ever force a nation of low grade imbeciles to do this. How could you teach a nation that cannot even read and drinks polluted water that clean water is important? How can you ever mandate clean water in this country when our intelligence in terms of understanding its importance is nonexistent because of it? It will never be mandated even though it should because low grade imbeciles are in power today. Argue with them and the first thing they do is reach for a cigarette to combat the stress of having to think. A low grade imbecile would rather kamikaze dive bomb you to its death than admit it is a low grade imbecile. In case you missed paying the twenty five cents for my last article. Japan was a large polluter of Mercury in the decades that lead up to it bombing Pearl Harbor in WWII. If you do not think that Mercury poisoning leads to psychotic kamikaze behavior you also do not know that a 5/16 inch bolt or a ¼ bolt that isn’t an SAE bolt but instead a metric bolt is really a metric bolt labeled an M8 x 1.5 which is really a bolt that has exactly twenty teeth per INCH.
What’s next? We are all forced to read Chinese symbol language? I’ll wonder whatever happened to our red hexagonal stops signs when I am wearing peasant shoes and walking a mile for a loaf of bread I can’t pay for. That is, if I don’t get locked up and caned first for asking patriotic questions, the answers to which are a reality that they cannot stand.
Problems have many levels and I have not even addressed how important it is not to pollute in the first place when it comes to the water we drink in our taps. But to solve any problem you must address it at its source, there is really no other way.
Thomas Paul Murphy
Copyright 2011 Thomas Paul Murphy
Originally published on 01 19 2011 at:http://themilwaukeeandwisconsinnews.blogspot.com/
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