Readers may be interested in a recent exchange of views between Clay Rogers, a journalist with a newspaper in Iowa, and Paul Trusten, Vice President of UKMA’s sister organisation in the USA.
Category: Science
Whitworth’s forgotten legacy
Whitworth is famous for the eponymous screw thread, and for his promotion of standard measures and interchangeability that brought about an engineering revolution. Less well known are his enthusiasm for decimal measurement and his opposition to the introduction of the metric system in Britain.
Has SI delivered?
The fuss about measurement units at the start of this century has overshadowed progress thirty years earlier in education, science and engineering. We look at the benefits that were predicted at the start of the transition to SI and ask if they have been delivered.
Maybe they were moonlighting …
In contrast to his last article, John Frewen-Lord takes a look this week at some of the activities of seven famous people who later had SI units of measurement named after them.
Will Scotland keep the pound avoirdupois as well as the pound sterling?
What impact would Scottish independence (if it were to happen) have on weights and measures? Martin Vlietstra supplies an answer.
Continue reading “Will Scotland keep the pound avoirdupois as well as the pound sterling?”
One hundred years of metric rainfall measurement
– not that the media have noticed. John Frewen-Lord looks into this oversight, drawing our attention to a centenary that occurs on 1 May.
Continue reading “One hundred years of metric rainfall measurement”
An old habit dies hard
One of our regular contributors, John Frewen-Lord, observes that the beauty and value of the built-in simplicity and coherence of the metric system is not being learned by the UK population despite forty years of teaching.
All too often, mystified when we measure
John Frewen-Lord recalls several recent examples of difficulties with measurement and asks if common measuring devices actually inhibit using the metric system.
The IET – how does it measure up?
We return to one of our favourite topics – the link between numeracy, units of measurement and British engineering success.
BBC told to stop undermining the National Measurement System
In its response to a recent BBC consultation the UK Metric Association (UKMA) has called on the BBC to live up to its declared mission and hence to support – and not to undermine – the exclusively metric National Measurement System.
Continue reading “BBC told to stop undermining the National Measurement System”
Metric Views 