A SALUTARY EFFECT OF BREXIT.

Give me gold in ounces, home runs in feet, downs in yards, race tracks in furlongs, and soundings in fathoms.

One of the pleasant side-effects of Britain leaving the European Union is that Britons can again use their traditional measures.

The British government has announced that U.K. businesses will once again be allowed to sell their products in traditional, British units of measurement, like pounds and ounces, instead of the metric system.

This move is a win for freedom-loving people everywhere, and the restoration of customary units should be a cause for jubilation in the streets.

The metric system has its origins in the French Revolution, as a way to stick it to the Ancien Régime. It didn’t go international until 1875, when a group of diplomats got together in Paris (which, historically, is a pretty good indicator that a bad decision is on the way) and signed the Treaty of the Meter. That treaty established the BIPM, an intergovernmental organization with a French name, to oversee a new, worldwide measurement system.

"Customary units," he notes, are emergent, whilst that international system was imposed by technocrats.

By “customary units,” I don’t just mean the U.S. customary system, but any unit of measure derived through custom. If you read about the origins of customary units, you’ll find that many of them are based on specific occupations, like brewing, farming, and surveying. They were invented by people doing their jobs who needed a way to measure things. They developed units of measure that were useful to them and persuaded others to adopt them for ease of commerce. Customary units eventually became standardized through a bottom-up process. They represent the wisdom of our ancestors, the accumulated experiences over the centuries.

The meter represents the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. It was originally defined as a tiny fraction of distance along the earth’s equator. It’s so far removed from anything normal people do, it may as well have been invented by aliens.

It's not so much that aliens (or French cartographers) invented it, it's that all the redefinitions of the meter are so recondite as to defy parody.

The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle, so the Earth's circumference is approximately 40 000 km. In 1799, the metre was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar (the actual bar used was changed in 1889). In 1960, the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. The current definition was adopted in 1983 and modified slightly in 2002 to clarify that the metre is a measure of proper length.

Light propagates over some distance in a second, so if we measure that distance in meters, a meter is the inverse of that distance? Got it? Might as well agitate the kryptonite, or license a radio station to put out a signal smack on the one-meter band.

The metric system is Esperanto for measurement, except many more people have been seduced by its scientistic allure. The metric system is based on the utopian idea that everything old is bad, and that humans have the power to create a better world by severing all ties with custom and tradition and imposing contrived, rationalistic systems on people, whether they like it or not.

A student columnist for The Northern Star has been so seduced.

Metric measurements are available next to Imperial units on many consumer products, people run 5Ks and many students have to use those pesky conversion charts in science class to switch units from imperial to metric.

In the eyes of the public, America is still very much an imperial system country. Everyone knows how long a foot is, how much liquid can fit in a gallon and what to wear when it’s a certain temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. If the units were changed to the metric system, far fewer people would know.

There's no reason to have to worry about conversions in science class.

This is precisely where middle school teachers lose students. If you're going to teach the MKS measures in science class, simply say "We will use these weights on the balance and these lines on the graduated cylinder and this thermometer and the second hand on this stopwatch" and turn the students loose. The equivalences can come later, or not at all.

The columnist actually makes that point.

Because Americans are subjected to the imperial system primarily, those who engage in industries that rely on the metric system are going to be disadvantaged by having to learn a whole new system and how to convert from one to the other.

In other fields, like transportation and construction, as well as in everyday life, the imperial system is completely pointless. The metric system could work just as well in any of these fields. Why would we use an outdated system when there’s a perfectly good one that is more efficient and used by the rest of the world? While the imperial system isn’t hurting anyone, it’s just a perplexing oddity that would be better if more of an effort was made to make the metric system America’s primary measurement system.

Why introduce more perplexity in a misguided attempt to create what sounds like more efficiency?  Somebody remind the staff at The Northern Star that institutions evolve to conserve on transaction costs.

But then, I've learned not to worry about the conversions.  Why is HO (for half O) scale 1/87 actual size?  Because British O scale is 1/43.5 actual size.  And we have all of that because the British decided to work to a scale of seven millimeters to a scale foot.  Go figure.  Thus, in the United States, where our O scale is 1/48 actual size, and our scale is a quarter inch to a scale foot, we have scale rules configured with 3.5 millimeters to a scale HO foot.  And something built to the seemingly more intuitive 1/50 actual size (two centimeters to a meter, for those of you in MKS land) is close enough to O Scale that I make do.