Word: metrical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...seriousness, America cannot reject the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocols and the metric system. Something simply has to give. The best method for Harvard to protest our nation’s uncouth tendencies toward unilateralism is simply to get rid of the Imperial system, or—as I’m told Bush calls it in private—“the freedom system.” Surely no one would disagree that America’s domineering and swaggering use of the inch and the pound is closely linked to our nation?...
...will Harvard (and America) join the rest of the world? We cannot and should not continue with pounds-per-square-inch when we could be using the far more elegant pascals. We cannot and should not continue with drams and stones, when centigrams and kilograms could be used instead. Metric is elegant (think: the French), while Imperial is ugly, cocky, authoritarian. (Perhaps it should continue to be used in the “red states,” but not anywhere near civilized folks...
Moreover, it must be acknowledged that the metric system is vastly more intuitive and logical than the imperial system. Certainly a meter (which is defined as the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second) is far less arbitrary of a unit than a yard. (Then again, to be fair, the meter was originally defined as “one ten-millionth of the length of the earth’s meridian along a quadrant...
...hasn’t Harvard taken the plunge? Perhaps President Summers isn’t sure if Harvard’s female scientists can make the switch from ounces to grams on their recipe cards. Whatever the case may be, switching to metric would greatly benefit the school. Tour guides would then be able to answer the pressing question on so many tourists’ minds: how many hectares is Harvard Yard...
...filled up your tank. Known scientifically as "unmixed steam reforming," the process used by Dupont was invented in the U.S. But she is believed to be the first to apply it to sunflower oil. U.S. producers, who have 1.8 million acres under till and produce about 280,000 metric tons of cooking oil annually, are interested. So are producers in places like Argentina and Russia, which grow even more acres. For now, Dupont's prototype must be refined, and the cost of the process remains too high to be widely practical. But time and a few more years of rising...