My uncle, Paul Brown, passed away earlier this year. (For some reason, we all called him Larry.) He was a good dad, a talented researcher and a respected scholar of Herman Melville’s – yup, the Moby Dick guy. My uncle also had a wicked wit despite his outward appearance as a serious academic, as evidenced by this little essay he penned (IN ALL CAPS, originally) sometime in 2016, most likely. Hmmm….now that I think about, my very smart uncle laughed a lot, and loudly, so I shouldn’t be surprised by how clever this essay is. Thank you, Auntie Theresa, for sharing this essay with me and letting me share it here.
Curled up with that SF classic or watching the Olympics as Phelps pretends that water is man’s natural element and Bolt lopes across the screen with ten meter strides non-chalantly breaking track’s 100 and 200 meter records, you realize the author or commentator has assumed, perhaps wrongly, you’re metrically literate.
You wouldn’t want Sir Arthur Clarke to despair at the American educational system, so let me offer a few rules of thumb and get our feet underneath us as we inch toward an understanding of the metric system. Once upon a time driving in England, I found myself exceeding one hundred kilometers per hour. Ah, now liberated at last by foreign travel, I thought motorists back in the U.S. would begin to respect my extraordinary new driving abilities and stop cursing my very existence. It was a Walter Mitty Moment until my English passenger informed me that 100KM amounted to only 60MPH, and he was glad not to be driving with me on the Autobahn.
Let’s get started on metric conversion. If you put your foot in your mouth, your dentist would extract 3/10 of a meter; if your favorite football team has a yard to go, that translates into a little under a meter, and if it’s first down with 10 yards to go, that’s a little over 9 meters. I realize that metric wizardry has you very excited and perhaps you’re salivating in a willing suspension of disbelief at what’s coming next.
Both a gram and a grain are equally small. An ounce will get you 28 grams, a pound is hlf-way between – well, let’s call it a half-kilogram and hope no one in the scientific community is listening. A stone for boxing fans is about 6.4 kilograms, which means about 14 pounds, so a good-sized heavyweight in my day at 200 pounds would have hit the scale at somewhere over 14 stone.
A ton, you’re right, is slightly over a tonne.
If your obsession with metrics is unsated, then a pint sloshes at under a half-liter, a quart, if you’re soused to the gills, is a lot of gills besides being somewhat over a liter, and a gallon, curdled, that’s a little less than 4 liters.
Now your favorite SF author writes:
“The gaseous Hydra snorting forth 600 liters of ammonia, was rushing upon me at 500 kilometers per hour, covering over 300 parsecs of the visible sky (well, we didn’t get to that yet), its massive tentacles soaking wet weighing over a thousand kilograms, when it suddenly stopped in its tracks, reached for the six-hundred liter Bud Light atop the flying saucer, and the rest was history.”
Now you know with your recently-awarded degree in Advanced Metrics said writer should check in at the nearest community college for a refresher course in basic science or perhaps the local psychiatric clinic.
What? You’re all leaving? And we were just getting to decimals.
Well, treasure this handout as if it’s the Magna Carta, or better yet, Asimov’s Laws for Robots. Attached, find those more accurate metric conversions for which you have waited a lifetime.
Paul Brown (a.k.a. Uncle Larry) and my Aunt Theresa.
David Grady: Words and Pictures 
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