Saturday, December 6, 2014

Metric system in the US

3 countries do not make use of the metric system:


Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States are the only countries that don't use the metric system

As Vox’s Susannah Locke wrote, "The measuring system that the United States uses right now isn’t really a system at all. It’s a hodgepodge of various units that often seem to have no logical relationship to one another — units collected throughout our history here and there, bit by bit. Twelve inches in a foot, three feet in a yard, 1,760 yards in a mile." That’s why the rest of the world uses the metric system, where "all you need to do is multiply or divide by some factor of ten. 10 millimeters in a centimeter, 100 centimeters in a meter, 1,000 meters in a kilometer. Water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C."


But, as some people still remember (hello, Michel T!), there was a movement in the 70ies to move to the metric system in the US as well. This is documented in the recent book "Whatever happened to the metric system?" reviewed by the New York Times hereunder

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE METRIC SYSTEM?
How America Kept Its Feet
By John Bemelmans Marciano
Illustrated. 310 pp. Bloomsbury. $26.

In the 1970s, children across America were learning the metric system at school, gas stations were charging by the liter, freeway signs in some states gave distances in kilometers, and American metrication seemed all but inevitable. But Dean Krakel, director of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma, saw things differently: “Metric is definitely Communist,” he solemnly said. “One monetary system, one language, one weight and measurement system, one world — all Communist.” Bob Greene, syndicated columnist and founder of the WAM! (We Ain’t Metric) organization, agreed. It was all an Arab plot “with some Frenchies and Limeys thrown in,” he wrote.
Krakel and Greene might sound to us like forerunners of the Tea Party, but in the 1970s meter-bashing was not limited to right-wing conservatives. Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, advised that the proper response to the meter was to “bitch, boycott and foment,” and New York’s cultural elite danced at the anti-metric “Foot Ball.” Assailed from both right and left, the United States Metric Board gave up the fight and died a quiet death in 1982.
In his entertaining and enormously informative new book, “Whatever Happened to the Metric System?,” John Bemelmans Marciano tells the story of the rise and fall of metric America. With a keen ear for anecdotes and a sharp eye for human motivations, Marciano brings to life the fight over the meter, its champions and its enemies. The 1970s bookend his narrative, but the reader soon finds the struggle lasted not a decade but centuries. And in what was to me the book’s greatest revelation, the meter — that alleged vehicle of international Communism — turns out to be American through and through.
The father of American metrication was none other than Thomas Jefferson, who in the 1780s turned his attention to replacing the menagerie of doubloons, pistoles and Spanish dollars then in use in the states. Jefferson proposed minting a new dollar, but whereas the European coins were divided into halves, eighths, sixteenths, etc., the American coin would be divided into tenths, hundredths and thousandths. When Jefferson’s plan was approved by Congress, the United States became the first country to adopt the decimal system for its currency.
That money is related to measurement might seem counterintuitive today. But as Marciano points out, until very recently the value of coins was ultimately dependent on their weight in gold or silver, which means the divisions of a currency imply a division of weight. And so, when Jefferson arrived in Paris as a diplomat in 1784, he joined forces with French luminaries in promoting a complete reform of weights and measures. Their opportunity came only a few years later, when at the height of the French Revolution its leaders cast away all traditional measures and replaced them with the new meter, kilogram and ­liter. Jefferson, who had returned home in 1789, was convinced the new system would be promptly adopted in America.
It didn’t turn out that way. As France descended into terror and war, the metric system became entangled in a worldwide struggle over its legacy. To its supporters it stood for reason and democracy; to its detractors, godlessness and the guillotine. It was not until the aftermath of World War II, when new global institutions were established and a host of new nations adopted the meter, that its place as the near-­universal measure was secured.
In America, however, repeated efforts at metrication, from Jefferson to Jimmy Carter, were scuttled by a formidable combination of hostility and indifference. According to Marciano the debate is now over, since the digital revolution has made conversion instantaneous and a change of system pointless. Still, as his book beautifully shows, clashes over the meter were more often about ideology, not utility. And so, as long as the struggle continues over reason and faith, universalism and tradition, I wouldn’t count the meter out.


Serendipity in research

Fascinating reading by the New Yorker on how geologists discovered that a meteorite had caused a massive extinction: basically, they used iridium as a simple marker for the time taken for a layer of clay to deposit, and they discovered so much iridium in that clay that they hypothesized that  a large meteorite had collided with earth at that time. Serendipity indeed!



All the way into the nineteen-sixties, paleontologists continued to give talks with titles like “The Incompleteness of the Fossil Record.” And this view might have persisted even longer had it not been for a remarkable, largely inadvertent discovery made in the following decade.
In the mid-nineteen-seventies, Walter Alvarez, a geologist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, in New York, was studying the earth’s polarity. It had recently been learned that the orientation of the planet’s magnetic field reverses, so that every so often, in effect, south becomes north and then vice versa. Alvarez and some colleagues had found that a certain formation of pinkish limestone in Italy, known as the scaglia rossa, recorded these occasional reversals. The limestone also contained the fossilized remains of millions of tiny sea creatures called foraminifera. In the course of several trips to Italy, Alvarez became interested in a thin layer of clay in the limestone that seemed to have been laid down around the end of the Cretaceous. Below the layer, certain species of foraminifera—or forams, for short—were preserved. In the clay layer there were no forams. Above the layer, the earlier species disappeared and new forams appeared. Having been taught the uniformitarian view, Alvarez wasn’t sure what to make of what he was seeing, because the change, he later recalled, certainly “looked very abrupt.”
Alvarez decided to try to find out how long it had taken for the clay layer to be deposited. In 1977, he took a post at the University of California at Berkeley, where his father, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez, was also teaching. The older Alvarez suggested using the element iridium to answer the question.
Iridium is extremely rare on the surface of the earth, but more plentiful in meteorites, which, in the form of microscopic grains of cosmic dust, are constantly raining down on the planet. The Alvarezes reasoned that, if the clay layer had taken a significant amount of time to deposit, it would contain detectable levels of iridium, and if it had been deposited in a short time it wouldn’t. They enlisted two other scientists, Frank Asaro and Helen Michel, to run the tests, and gave them samples of the clay. Nine months later, they got a phone call. There was something seriously wrong. Much too much iridium was showing up in the samples. Walter Alvarez flew to Denmark to take samples of another layer of exposed clay from the end of the Cretaceous. When they were tested, these samples, too, were way out of line.

The Alvarez hypothesis, as it became known, was that everything—the clay layer from the scaglia rossa, the clay from Denmark, the spike in iridium, the shift in the fossils—could be explained by a single event. In 1980, the Alvarezes and their colleagues proposed that a six-mile-wide asteroid had slammed into the earth, killing off not only the forams but the dinosaurs and all the other organisms that went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous. “I can remember working very hard to make that 1980 paper just as solid as it could possibly be,” Walter Alvarez recalled recently. Nevertheless, the idea was greeted with incredulity.
(...)
Today, it’s generally accepted that the asteroid that plowed into the Yucatán led, in very short order, to a mass extinction, but scientists are still uncertain exactly how the process unfolded. One theory holds that the impact raised a cloud of dust that blocked the sun, preventing photosynthesis and causing widespread starvation. According to another theory, the impact kicked up a plume of vaporized rock travelling with so much force that it broke through the atmosphere. The particles in the plume then recondensed, generating, as they fell back to earth, enough thermal energy to, in effect, broil the surface of the planet.
Whatever the mechanism, the Alvarezes’ discovery wreaked havoc with the uniformitarian idea of extinction. The fossil record, it turned out, was marked by discontinuities because the history of life was marked by discontinuities.

How turning frogs into pregnancy tests is now killing them worldwide

Frogs all over the world are disappearing fast. The culprit is a fungi. According to this New Yorker article, here is how this fungi got spread:


Chytrid fungi are older even than amphibians—the first species evolved more than six hundred million years ago—and even more widespread. In a manner of speaking, they can be found—they are microscopic—just about everywhere, from the tops of trees to deep underground. Generally, chytrid fungi feed off dead plants; there are also species that live on algae, species that live on roots, and species that live in the guts of cows, where they help break down cellulose. Until two pathologists, Don Nichols and Allan Pessier, identified a weird microorganism growing on dead frogs from the National Zoo, chytrids had never been known to attack vertebrates. Indeed, the new chytrid was so unusual that an entire genus had to be created to accommodate it. It was named Batrachochytrium dendrobatidisbatrachos is Greek for “frog”—or Bd for short.


Rick Speare is an Australian pathologist who identified Bd right around the same time that the National Zoo team did. From the pattern of decline, Speare suspected that Bd had been spread by an amphibian that had been moved around the globe. One of the few species that met this condition was Xenopus laevis, commonly known as the African clawed frog. In the early nineteen-thirties, a British zoologist named Lancelot Hogben discovered that female Xenopus laevis, when injected with certain types of human hormones, laid eggs. His discovery became the basis for a new kind of pregnancy test and, starting in the late nineteen-thirties, thousands of African clawed frogs were exported out of Cape Town. In the nineteen-forties and fifties, it was not uncommon for obstetricians to keep tanks full of the frogs in their offices.

To test his hypothesis, Speare began collecting samples from live African clawed frogs and also from specimens preserved in museums. He found that specimens dating back to the nineteen-thirties were indeed already carrying the fungus. He also found that live African clawed frogs were widely infected with Bd, but seemed to suffer no ill effects from it. In 2004, he co-authored an influential paper that argued that the transmission route for the fungus began in southern Africa and ran through clinics and hospitals around the world.
“Let’s say people were raising African clawed frogs in aquariums, and they just popped the water out,” Speare told me. “In most cases when they did that, no frogs got infected, but then, on that hundredth time, one local frog might have been infected. Or people might have said, ‘I’m sick of this frog, I’m going to let it go.’ And certainly there are populations of African clawed frogs established in a number of countries around the world, to illustrate that that actually did occur.”