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Boris Johnson has revealed plans to bring back pounds and ounces once Brexit is done as he attacks Jeremy Corbyn as “the most extreme Left-wing candidate produced by the Labour Party in a century” entering Number 10. In a wide-ranging interview with the Daily Mail, the Prime Minister laid out his post-election blueprint to lift the EU ban on imperial measurements and hark back to the old system. He said: “We will bring back that ancient liberty. I see no reason why people should be prosecuted.” The Conservative leader added: “I think the reality is a lot of people are...

The American Library Association Purges its Racist Feminist Founder Eugenics, feminism and anti-Semitism. July 4, 2019 Daniel Greenfield32 Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. The Dewey Decimal System is the foundation of the modern library. Hundreds of thousands of libraries have laid out their collections around the work of the founder of the American Library Association. Now Melvil Dewey has been purged by the American Library Association. The ALA's resolution declares that its founder "does not represent the stated fundamental values of...

When I was coming of age, soccer was pushed on us, and so was the metric system — and for the same reason: The rest of the world did it; America was stubborn and behind, in its rejection of those things. America held on to this screwy imperial — imperialist! — system: feet and yards, pints and gallons. The rest of the world had this elegant and logical and non-imperialist — non-British! — system. America had its brutish sports: football, in particular. We needed to embrace the real football, soccer, played by thin, small, virtuous Third Worlders, who had no...

The proposal, conceived by a bunch of pointy-headed Parisian philosophes, sounded brilliant: A universal system of measurement, derived from decimal-based units and identified by a shared set of prefixes. It would end the era of merchants buying goods according to one unit, selling in another, and pocketing the ill-gotten profit. It would simplify scientific calculations and enable the free exchange of ideas around the world. It was an enlightened system for an enlightened time. If only the French scientists could persuade other countries to adopt it. But pirates have a way of ruining even the best-laid plans. In 1793, botanist...

Well, this is a new one.While announcing his candidacy for the highest office in the land, newly minted Democratic presidential candidate and former Rhode Island senator and governor Lincoln Chafee made the bold case for … the U.S. to switch to the metric system?Bloomberg's Dave Weigel was there: Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat, gave a brief and chipper address that called for America to re-engage with "international community" with diplomacy and "symbolic" moves. That meant everything from barring campaign donors from becoming diplomats, to allowing Edward Snowden to come home without punishment, to bringing America into the Metric system."It doesn't take long...

The German Nation Metrology Institute (PTB) in Braunschweig has set itself the enormous task of finding a new formula for measuring a kilogram. The weight is currently based on a metal cylinder called the International Prototype Kilogram that is kept in a safe in Paris. The problem is that the precious object is—very gradually—losing weight, according to scientists. […] A race is now underway between scientists around the world to find a way of defining an unchangeable kilogram without relying on a lump of metal, which is unsurprisingly rather complicated. Researchers at the PTB in Braunschweig claim to be very...

I’ve met a lot of people and learned a lot while traveling Europe the past several weeks. Of all the things I have had to explain to fellow travels as not only an American – but a Texan – by far the most frustrating thing is our stubborn refusal to embrace the metric system. I can confidently argue the finer points of how the use of y’all and the plural form all y’all are descriptive and have a place in the American lexicon. I take pleasure in explaining the intricacies of chicken fried foods. But the metric system is another...

The kilogram may need to go on a diet. The international standard, a cylinder-shaped hunk of metal that defines the fundamental unit of mass, has gained tens of micrograms in weight from surface contamination, according to a new study. As a result, each country that has one of these standard masses has a slightly different definition of the kilogram, which could throw off science experiments that require very precise weight measurements or international trade in highly restricted items that are restricted by weight, such as radioactive materials. But ozone and ultraviolet light could be used to clean the kilograms without...

The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight — if ever so slightly. Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies. "The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart," he...

The European Union is set to confirm it has abandoned what became one of its most unpopular policies among many people in Britain. It is proposing to allow the UK to continue using pounds, miles and pints as units of measurement indefinitely. The European Commission will announce later it is leaving all future decisions to the British government. The decision is being seen as a victory for supporters of the ancient imperial system, the so-called "metric martyrs". Pint saved The UK had been due to set a date for phasing out all its imperial measurements within three years. This would...

Should we adopt the metric system? Yes, it would be convenient and practical to be able to quickly understand that there are 1,500 meters in 1.5 kilometers. No, the need to look up that there are 1,760 yards in a mile helps us learn how to use reference books. And it's not really that hard to multiply that by 1.5 to figure out how many yards are in a mile-and-a-half.