07-01-2018, 10:00 AM
(07-01-2018, 09:13 AM)KevinL Wrote: I am aware of your preferences, Iain, but I have to hew to the fact that across North America, housing continues to hold to inches and feet. And even if Canada is metric in many ways (food and gasoline in litres, distances in km), there are still tacit standards like personal height and weight that use imperial. It's not changing soon, and I'm not sure how anyone can easily push for that change.
It’s not just a “preference”. It’s the world standard, and for a good reason. There are actually offices that could push for changes; who it is and what they can realistically do is different in different places.
To use your example of personal height and weight, we should start by requiring that medical professionals must record newborn length and mass in SI. The forms could have “g” and “cm” pre-printed on them, and it could be made clear that they are not authorized to substitute their own choice of measurement units. The same for medical records and measurements of older people. Imported devices should be required to default to SI (e.g., thermostats, ovens, … anything else that uses temperature in its configuration). If we can require everything sold in the country to be labelled in French and English, we can require everything sold in the country to default to using SI. My original example was that the federal government should switch to using the “A” series of paper sizes. This would force companies dealing with the federal government to start using A4 in their contract dealings; I suspect they would just switch to using A4 all the time and fairly quickly letter and legal would become obsolete historical curiosities.
And finally, to go back to something Canard said, the schools should be teaching SI. It needs to be made clear that, among all the other policies applying to their employment, teachers are not authorized to conduct their classes in other than SI. Arithmetic is not permitted to be taught in Roman numerals either (although both Roman numerals and non-SI units could be mentioned in specific classes for the purpose of comparison and historical knowledge). There is actually a simple expedient that can support this too: classrooms supplies (rulers, tape measures, scales, thermometers) should be SI-only.