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Honolulu Lite

by Charles Memminger

Monday, October 4, 1999


Metric system comes
up an inch short

SOMEONE'S got to decide if the world is going to use the metric system of measurement or the good old English system.

Scientists just managed to crash a $125 million spacecraft into the middle of Mars because all the pointy-headed brainiacs couldn't agree on whether to calculate the trip in metric or English.

It took four years to build the Mars Climate Orbiter and 10 months for it to travel 600 million miles to its humiliating fiery death on the red planet. This was the biggest space booboo since the Hubble space telescope fiasco. The multimillion dollar Hubble was supposed to be the best telescope ever devised by man except one of those men fouled up a very important lens, causing the Hubble to be extremely near-sighted. It's bad for a telescope to be near-sighted, since its main role in life is to see things far away. In any case, it cost millions more to send up what amounted to be the most expensive corrective vision glasses ever launched into space to fix the problem.

The Hubble incident became a profound inspiration in my life, providing context for whatever failures I might encounter. I memorialized it in a short poem:

When I make a mistake

Or cause some kind of trouble

I know I'm still better off,

Than the guy who screwed up Hubble.

Now that NASA has shot the world's most expensive spit ball in to the eye of Mars, I have another inspiration.

As spacecraft go, $125 million isn't a lot of money. It wouldn't even make a dent in the national debt or prolong the Social Security system for a day and a half. But, hey, money's money. And if they're just going to sling it around the cosmos, how about having some of it land on my lanai?

It's not uncommon to lose an expensive piece of space machinery. I mean, gravity happens. But to lose a $125 million interplanetary camera simply because scientists can't decide whether to use metric or English measurements is kind of silly.

I assumed all scientists used metric. They like to use metric because it makes whatever they are doing seem complicated and important. At one point, the U.S. government wanted everyone to learn metric, but no one went for it. It just seemed so unnecessary, like learning Esperanto or advanced calculus. In the end, the only people who learned and regularly used metric were scientists and drug dealers. I don't know why drug dealers latched on to metric. Maybe to make their enterprise seem more sophisticated and make them seem smarter. A conversation between two guys in prison would go something like this:

"Whatareya in for?"

"Importing a kilo of coke."

"Kilo, huh. What is that, like cup or something."

"No, dumb-dumb, a kilogram of cocaine is 2.2 pounds. What are you, a burglar?"

In the Mars case, the Lockheed Martin Astronautics (LMA), designer of the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO), made navigational calculations in English but NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used metric, resulting in a Sudden Planetary Latitudinal Accident Thingy (SPLAT).

Obviously, something has to be done so this doesn't happen again. It would be easier if everyone in the world just stopped using metric, since they are just showing off. But since that won't happen overnight, I suggest Lockheed hire a few high-level drug dealers to help them with their calculations.



Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.



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