Mr. Government Employee Guy peered at my climate
maps. His brow furrowed. “You’ll need to convert everything to
Fahrenheit,” told me. “Nobody understands Celsius.”
Well, gosh, of course not. And nobody understands
kilometers or grams, either. That is, nobody except for the entire world --
outside of the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar (hi there, Liberians and …
um … Burmese.)
Why, why, why? My inner scientist is
inconsolable. The rest of the globe long ago graduated to a tidy,
mathematically pleasing system in which one cubic centimeter of water weighs
one gram, freezes at zero degrees Celsius, requires one joule of energy to heat
one degree C, and has a volume of 0.001 liters.
Why is it that we Americans are still wedded to charmingly Medieval
units whereby length is compared to the theoretical dimensions of a man’s
impressively large pedal appendage; area is judged according to how much land
your ox can plow in a day; volume comes in many handy and entirely logical
increments: dram, teaspoon, tablespoon, pony, jigger, jack, gill, cup, pint,
quart, pottle, and gallon; and the zero-point on our temperature scale is what
Mr. Fahrenheit, back in England in 1724, thought was, like, super-duper
cold? [Ok, in truth, Daniel Fahrenheit
supposedly generated the zero-point for his temperature scale by mixing equal
parts of ice, water, and ammonium chloride and testing the resulting
brine. I’m sure he had a good reason for
doing this.]
Metric (SI) units not only jive with what the rest of
the world is doing and make overpoweringly more sense than our weird amalgam of
body-part-based measurements -- they can also help prevent spacecraft from
turning into fireballs. Yes. Seriously.
In 1998, the Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the Martian atmosphere
because Lockheed Martin provided thruster performance data in pound force
seconds instead of newton seconds. Way
to go, America.
Nobody understands Celsius. Hair-tearingly
frustrating as statements like this are, I always used to assume that they
reflected a simple lack of familiarity. I used to think that when people
moaned, “I don’t get centimeters” or, “How much is that in pounds?” it
was simply because they were used to the old Imperial units (well, except for
maybe the jiggers and pottles). All folks needed was a simple
conversion: “Don’t worry, my fine friends! A kilogram is 2.2 pounds; a
kilometer is about 2/3 of a mile; Celsius degrees are larger Fahrenheit degrees
at a ratio of 5:9, and the two scales coincide at -40!” Given this info,
I thought everyone would be able to effect quick mentally-estimated
conversions.
Later, I realized that I was a moron.
Professorial flashback. “It seems that some
of you are having trouble with units…” This was an understatement
on par with telling a roomful of elephants that they were having trouble with
pole vaulting. There I was, pinioned in front of a group of
twenty-year-olds, all of whom were staring at me with semi-resentful eyes.
They’d given me an answer – I can’t recall if it was eight-point-two, or
five million and seventeen, or the square root of negative forty-two – but now
I was demanding to know what the numbers actually meant? I was
going to withhold full credit unless they clarified whether we were talking
about degrees Fahrenheit, tonnes per square kilometer, or pinches of fairy-dust
per rainbow-sparkle unicorn?” Obviously I was an Evil Professor with
demonic delusions of world domination. Obviously, I didn’t know how to
teach math.
I still don’t. I want to be good at
explaining mathematical concepts to others. I adore the intricate and
interwoven world of numbers and logic. Give me a conundrum involving an
accelerating train, a leaking bucket, or an island inhabited by truth-telling
trolls, and I will spiral into rapture. Like any good zealot, I am always
seeking converts. Alas, however, I suspect that the inside of my head is
such a peculiar landscape that inviting others to view its ecosystems and
architecture is not only ill-advised, but also criminally impossible.
My brain has always been this odd. I remember when
I was a kid, and visited my family members in England during the period when
that fine nation was suffering paroxysms of metrication. Everyone was
complaining – but I couldn’t imagine why, because the metric system was so
clearly awesome. By that point it was pretty clear that my little cousins
were going to have to grow up knowing their centimeters and kilograms, so my
aunt, trying to do what was best for her kids, was trying to use the correct
terms in answer to a barrage of childish questions about sizes, weights, and
volumes. “Um… you’re about… ten centimeters tall?” I was both
amused and righteously horrified by how badly this esteemed adult – whose
career was as a ballerina, not a mathematician -- was capable of massacring SI
units.
Nonetheless, I suspect that my now-grown-up cousins are
pretty comfortable with liters and joules. Why? Because England forced
the issue, while America waffled and whined. It’s hard! It’s
expensive! We also trotted out the most powerful argument of all, in a
country obsessed with personal freedom: We don’t wanna and you can’t make
us!
To be fair, the distinction is not as clear-cut as I’m
making it seem. For one thing, British beer-drinkers refused to give up
their pints. Meanwhile, the US is not metric-free; no, it’s much worse than
that. In America, we’ve created a nightmarish hodge-podge of
unit-illogic. Imagine tossing twenty jigsaw puzzles into a trash bag,
shaking the bag violently, ignoring any pieces that fall out, and then trying
to put together the remainder. For example, your Advil, Sudafed, and
Rolaids – and indeed all medications – are metric. However, dosages by
body weight are often in milligrams per
pound. (Yes, that is the sound of my head exploding). Nutrition
labels tell you about grams of sugar and milligrams of sodium, but refer to
Calories rather than kilojoules. I often run 5K or 10K races that are
blithely signposted with… mile-markers.
I’ve long held the goal of avoiding another generation
of this madness. So, there I was in Natural Resources Management trying
to get that classroom of kids (ok, twenty-year-olds are technically grownups,
but I’m curmudgeonly, so I’m going to refer to them as kids) to solve a problem
something like this: “A lake with a surface temperature of 12°C decreases in
temperature linearly with depth, at a rate of 0.8 degrees Celsius per
meter. Express this temperature gradient in degrees Fahrenheit per foot,
and report the temperature at 23 feet below the surface.”
College juniors and seniors. None of them could
solve this.
To their credit, the same students solved most of the
other problems I assigned. They gamely Googled conversion factors that
allowed them to turn grams into ounces, acres into hectares, and board-feet into
cubic meters. Unfortunately, online calculators are only as useful as
their users’ understanding of how they work. Internet gizmos only convert
absolute temperatures, not temperature gradients invented by psychopathic
professors. The zero-point on the Fahrenheit scale is arbitrary, kids; a
real (absolute) zero exists somewhere (down at −459.67°F.)
Even on the easier questions, quite a few kids effected
their conversions backwards, never stopping to notice that as a result, their
answers made no sense. They shuffled digits around and plugged
them into formulae without any clear notion of roughly what answer they were
likely to get. Um, did you know that miles are bigger than kilometers? Yes sirree.
Making sense is… well, it’s kind of a big deal to
me. Making sense is what I fall back on when my leaky brain refuses to
hold onto details – which is, to be honest, most of the time. A lot of people
have told me, self-deprecatingly or defensively, that they’ve forgotten what
math they once knew. I can relate all too well; I’m a champion
forgetter. I just had to look up the Fahrenheit reading for absolute
zero. I am a much crappier Trivia Bowl teammate than anyone seems willing
to believe. Seriously, people. I am not being humble. I am BAD at
this stuff. Without sneaking peeks at the internet, I can’t list all nine
Supreme Court Justices, tell you who wrote Gone with the Wind, or remember that
our pottle-and-jigger-loving buddies are Liberia and Myanmar.
On the other hand, although I am a sieve when it comes
to facts, I’m ok with concepts. For me, forgetting mathematical concepts
seems akin to forgetting how to read, or forgetting how to understand
sarcasm. I can’t tell you the formula for the surface area of a
sphere, but I’d certainly be able to tell if my answer were off by an order of
magnitude; a sphere is unlikely to have a surface area greater than a cube with
sides the length of the sphere’s diameter, because – well, you know, THINK
about it. I also know, at the very least, that the surface area will be
expressed in square units, and the volume in cubic units. My
students? Well….not so much.
Not that I never memorize. My understanding
of measurement scales is, just like everyone else’s, based in part on
memorization. Twenty-six-point-two miles is a marathon. One hundred
and forty pounds is what I’d weigh if I lost fifteen pounds. Three
hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit is where you bake gooey chocolate chip
cookies. But my mental map is also based on a fundamental
understanding that a scale – any scale – is merely a convenience, created and
maintained by humans. Days and years are real, inasmuch as they are units
determined by the rotation and revolution of the earth. Hours and weeks
are not real. Nor are miles, grams, or pottles.
I’m pretty sure the oddities of my brain at least
partially dictate the oddities of my worldview. From a mathematical and
scientific perspective, what it comes down to is that any knowledge that I
can’t turn inside out, view from all angles, and connect to fifteen other
mental concepts is likely not to make it through even a single mental laundry
cycle. Oh, sure, I can learn something for a quiz; there was a
fifteen-minute period of time, back in 1987, when I knew every country,
capital, and major river in all of Africa and Latin America. But Lesotho
and Djibouti failed to link themselves to any of the detritus rattling around
in my brain, and I now have no idea which is which. Really, logic is the
only thing that holds my brain together at all. And the metric system is
logical.
What I finally came to realize is that most Americans
love the old Imperial system for exactly the same reason that I love the metric
system – because we’re lazy clods, and we want to fall back on what’s
easiest. The difference is that if memorization is your strength, then
“easy” means sticking with what you already know, even if it’s illogical.
If memorization is your Achilles heel, then you long for a system in which all
you need to recall is how many base-ten orders-of-magnitude to apply to your
milligrams, kilometers, and terabytes.
Maybe, eventually, our nation will bite the bullet and
actually force us to change – although that might be too much Big Gubmint to
pass muster, politically. Maybe, eventually, the infiltration of 2-liter
soda bottles and fat-grams will render that lovely, logical system familiar
enough that it will be acceptable even to people who Just Don’t Get
Units. Maybe one day we’ll stop accidentally burning things up in the
Martian atmosphere. Maybe, by the time I
retire from this-here career in science, Americans will understand
Celsius.
Until then, Mr. Government Employee Guy is right, of
course. We’ll have to change the maps. Except, of course, for the
ones we’re producing for our neighbors in the Yukon…
