Metricate me, Cap'n!

To avoid any awkward confusion upfront, "metrication" is defined as "rewriting something in such a way that it is indecipherable to Americans" "the act, process, or result of establishing the metric system as the standard system of measurement."

The United States has officially recognized and endorsed the use of the metric system (officially the International System of Units - Le Système International d'Unités - or SI) since 1866.  However, it is one of three countries in the world that has not adopted it as its primary system of measurement (the other two are Liberia - a former US colony - and Myanmar).

This is not a post about how great the metric system is (very great), or why the metric system is better than the conventional system (it just is), or even how stupid the US is for refusing to adopt such a common sense series of units (quite stupid).  No, this post is none of these things because all of these things have been written about ad nauseam.

Essentially, the United States has refused to switch to the metric system because of a myriad of political and cultural reasons.  It is the only developed country in the world that has continued to use conventional units (with the quasi-exception of the UK), and most people tend to believe that metric units will continue to be used only in academia and technical fields like robotics and engineering.  However, I believe that the US could, and will, switch much faster, and much sooner, than is presently predicted.  And all because of the Internet.

North America has the highest percentage of Internet penetration in the world (73%); the United States alone has about 220 million Internet users.  Internet culture has blended so much with American culture that it is not uncommon to hear Internet expressions like "lol" or "1337" (pronounced "leet" and short for "elite" for all you non-1337 h4x0rz out there) used in everyday verbal conversations.  The Internet also uses metric.

Think about it; the hard drive in the computer you are reading this on is measured in gigabytes, the SI prefix giga, meaning "one billion," bytes.  My Internet connection is measured in Mbps - megabits per second (mega being the SI prefix for "one million").  The resolution of the photos you uploaded to Facebook the other day are measured in megapixels.  You use the metric system every day on a computer and on the Internet.

The international nature of the Internet also contributes to the metric influence.  Since so many (metric) countries are represented on the Internet, and since the Internet hosts content from all of them, it is inevitable that if one spends enough time on the Internet, one will encounter the metric system.

It is this subtle infiltration of America by the metric system that I believe will ultimately lead to a United States in line (literally) with the rest of the world.  90% of US residents aged 18-29 use the Internet, and so the metric system has finally learned what the Catholic Church has long known - "get 'em while they're young."  I foresee a kind of Glorious Revolution in which the metric system is finally introduced, in policy, as the primary system of measurement for the United States by the maturing Internet-age of Americans - those born 1992 (the birth of the World Wide Web) and later.

Gone will be the Carter-era pamphlets on "metrication" and a "metric future," to be replaced by...well, nothing.  We don't need propaganda to convince us to use the metric system, we already use it voluntarily with our computers and the Internet.  The Internet has brought the world together, and has (recently) begun the process of standardizing a compendium of knowledge and experience (including a system of measurement) that transcends national boundaries.  As high technology becomes more and more integrated within our culture, the metric system, the measurement scheme of high tech, will become integrated, as well.

Fear not the revolution, for it has already come.

P.S. Commenter Dr. Detroit makes a very good point, and I am reproducing part of his comment here: 

"There were many starts and fits in the direction of the metric system in the US since the fateful year of 1866 when it became legal throughout the land. A toxic combination of business lobbies (it's too expensive!), undereducated patriots (it's un-Amerikun!), and sheer inertia (imperial works, why bother?) has killed off any serious attempts at conversion several times. Although people may know their kilo-, mega-, and giga- prefixes thanks to PC's and the Internet, we still live in an America of 21-inch monitors, 3.5-inch hard drive bays, and hard-drive densities measured in bits/square inch." 

It is, sadly, true that high technology, because much of it is developed in America, is subject to the awkward dual use of metric and customary units.  I would concede the point that many measurements of high-tech devices are still measured in inches and other imperial units.  However, it is conceivable that we are in the first stages of a metric transformation that could be graphed as a parabola, that is, a transformation that starts slowly but builds upon itself to become a huge and significant force within a short period of time.  As the generations that never learned the metric system age (or as my mom so eloquently put it to me, "when I die"), the metric system may gain ground at an exponential rate (hence the parabola comparison).  Already we are seeing some small glimmers of hope as computer manufacturers have completely rejected the idea of using fractions of an inch in screen size measurements, in favor of the decimal system (ie .1, .2, .3, etc.) which is used by the SI.

Musings on the World Wars

This past Saturday on KUNM, Radio Theatre played a PRX piece by Marjorie Van Halteren about the World Wars and the War in Iraq from the perspective of an American living in France.  In Europe, finding unexploded bombs from the pre-1945 era is commonplace, and there are special forces in both Germany and France that do nothing but round up and destroy these still-live explosives.  In fact, several years ago my paternal grandmother, who lived then in Leatherhead, England, called us up to tell us that an unexploded firebomb had been found under the floorboards of a shop in the town.

As Americans we never have to deal with the after effects of wars - especially those wars in which we were a combatant.  Since WWI, only one battle has been fought on US soil and none have been fought in the contiguous 48.  Finding a bomb in your back garden must really bring home the reality of a war that ended nearly 110 years ago.

Speaking of bringing things back to life, Kelsey has reposted a very interesting set of pictures from the First World War.  These photos are nothing special in terms of composition or subject matter - they depict soldiers in typical WWI uniform standing in trenches or sitting around - but they are in color, as almost no other photos of the Great War are.

I showed these pictures to my photo teacher, who asked if they had been hand-colored.  I don't think they have been, judging by the accuracy and the detail of the work, but I looked it up anyway.  As it turns out, a method of color photography was developed in 1907, just seven years before the outbreak of hostilities in Europe - autochrome.

The pictures, like the bombs and the radio piece, bring the World Wars slightly closer, subjectively, to modern times.  We can identify more easily with a color photograph than we can with a black and white one.  Perhaps things like these will help us avoid such a war in the future.  Maybe we will never have a war so horrible, so bloody, that it can be described by no other name than simply, "the Great War."  

Only if we remember these artifacts, these photos, these stories.

Post-election politics, part I of several: Parties

This series of posts, "Re-examining the Election," will be my "super-post" about the election that I promised.  Tonight I will focus on the two party system that we have had for generations here in America.  George Washington warned against parties, but James Madison saw them as essential to a new type of democracy.  All democracies in the world (that I know of) have some sort of party system, but is there a better way?

Last night I was chatting with Kelsey of Plastick Manzikert and he brought up the religious right faction of the Republican Party and how he thought that this election would be the death knell of the religious right.

That would be great if it were true.

Overall, I don't think the Republican Party membership agrees with the religious right - at least, not the Ron Paul-esque factions of the party - but what ends up happening in elections is that religious right candidates and leaders get into positions of power within the party when they would not generally be accepted by a majority of party members.

This got me thinking - if party platforms were less catch-all and more specific, then we would have a more diverse set of parties to choose from and thus we would "weed out" the extremist factions from "mainstream" parties.  This is the kind of thing European governments do.

To which, of course, Kelsey replied "What about the FN in France [and the BNP and the UK]?  They still get 10% of the vote.  It means no power, but they are scary as heck."

Yes, diversifying and specifying does mean that we get some really scary parties out there, but it also means that they are isolated and can't worm their ways into mainstream, catch-all party leadership and run the country from there (think Karl Rove and Dick Cheney).  Not without a coalition, anyway.

OK, so smaller parties are better, but two major problems remain: 1) How do we change the election system to promote more parties?  After all, there is nothing in the Constitution that limits us to two parties (or mandates parties at all), so we must have arrived here somehow.  2) How do we deal with the election of an executive when no party receives an absolute majority of the vote (or something close to it)?

There is a principle in political science called Duverger's Law which states that an electoral system based on district plurality (like the electoral college, where the winner of a state gets all the electoral votes, no matter the margin of victory) or single-member district plurality (where specific districts individually elect their own representatives to a legislative body) will favor two parties or factions in the system.

Since I can't explain it any better, let me just give you the example from the Wikipedia page on Duverger's Law: 

Duverger suggested an election in which 100,000 moderate voters and 80,000 radical voters are voting for a single official. If two moderate candidates and one radical candidate were to run, the radical candidate would win unless one of the moderate candidates gathered fewer than 20,000 votes. Observing this, moderate voters would be more likely to vote for the candidate most likely to gain more votes, with the goal of defeating the radical candidate. Either the two parties must merge, or one moderate party must fail, as the voters gravitate to the two strong parties, a trend Duverger called polarization.

In addition to this effect of polarisation, Duverger also pointed out a purely statistical problem with single-member district plurality (SMDP): if a statistically significant third party is spread out over several districts, then no single district has enough support for that party to elect a representative from it.  This problem can be solved, but can also be created, with gerrymandering, the oft-criticized act of redistributing and redistricting to benefit or hinder on party or group of voters.

Now before you go around thinking that SMDP leads only to two parties, I have to point out that many successful multi-party democracies have SMDP systems; India, Canada, and the UK all have more than two statistically significant and politically significant parties.  The US, however, doesn't.

In every election since 1980, no third part candidate has received more than 3% of the popular vote, with the exception of Ross Perot, who received 18.9% of the vote in 1992 and 8.4% of the vote in 1996.  More significant in the American electoral system, no third party candidate has won a state, nor received an electoral vote (discounting faithless electors), since George Wallace won five states and 46 electoral votes in 1968.  No non-Republican/Democratic party candidate has won the Presidential election since Zachary Taylor, a Whig, in 1848 (at that time the Whigs were a main party).

So, how can we promote the growth of more (and not just more, but smaller and more specific) parties in the American electoral system?  Well, for a start we can get rid of the electoral college and the system of Congressional Districts.  Yes, they were a good idea when the fastest method of communication was a horse and rider, but today these are simply outmoded concepts.  

We should hold national elections for parties to see what percentage of the public actually identifies with a party's platform, not their candidate.  Assign seats in the Congress based on the national results of this election, not individual state results (i.e. 45% Democrat, 30% Republican, and 25% Whig would yield 196 Democrats, 130 Republicans, and 109 Whigs in the House of Representatives and 45 Democrats, 30 Republicans, and 25 Whigs in the Senate).  This is called proportional representation (PR).  Distribution of the Representatives would still be based on population, and the individuals could still be elected by their respective state parties or local district parties, but this ensures that no gerrymandering to disenfranchise third parties could occur.  This might work, though not as well, on a state-by-state level.

Also, a problem that has grown in recent years, but was not even imagined in colonial days, is that of campaign finance.  I realise that I'm reprimanding my own party here, but I don't think that one party or candidate should be allowed to massively outspend the other.  Much as I love the things the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party have been able to achieve with the millions upon millions of fundraising dollars that they received this election cycle, I don't think it was very fair.  I think that it is every citizen's responsibility to find out as much as they can on a particular candidate; no party should have to plaster posters and fliers around and buy up as much television airtime as possible to inform a voter or scare them into voting one way or another.  If ignorant voters vote for someone out of ignorance, well then the country will be run by ignorant people.  You only get out as much as you put in.  But I digress.  

All candidates, in all races, should be publicly funded.  Either no outside funding should be permitted or it should be severely limited and regulated, as it is in France.  If you want to volunteer for a candidate, that's great, go out and do it.  Just make sure that everyone is on equal footing.  Historically this has been one of the biggest hurdles for third parties; they just can't afford to run campaigns.

On the fiscal side of things, though, funding ~15 parties through a primary season all the way to the election could get expensive for the government.  In that case, maybe some tax should be instituted to pay for campaigns, or maybe campaigns should be funded 50/50 publicly/privately if they receive a required amount of the vote.  NO MORE HUGE, LONG PRIMARY SEASONS!  Campaigning should begin maybe in April, at the earliest.  Not only would this save a heck of a lot of money, it would save us all the headache of having to watch political careers go down in flames as well as preventing long, drawn-out party infighting.

OK.  Well then, on to question two.  How do we deal with the election of an executive when no party receives an absolute majority of the vote (or something close to it)?

This is a difficult question.  In other developed democracies, Prime Ministers are appointed by the ruling party or coalition (a subject for another post) or a President is elected via a system of run-off elections which progressively eliminate candidates until only one is left (wouldn't that be a fun reality show?  Run-Off Terror!).  I think that perhaps the latter would be more appropriate for the United States, but then again, we also have a provision in the Constitution that deals with the possibility of no candidate receiving a majority of electoral votes that could be easily adapted to fit a system without the electoral college.

Article 2 of the United States Constitution on the election of the President and the breaking of ties:

if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse [sic] by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse [sic] the President. But in chusing [sic] the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; a quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two-thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall choose from them by Ballot the Vice-President.

This method could work in a popular vote system, and I think, considering the existing infrastructure and tradition, it would be the most practical.

Parties might also form coalitions to achieve greater amounts of power.  Allowing large coalitions would be a mistake in a new elections system.  Coalitions are simply another name for "big, catch-all parties," just like "factions" were for "parties" in the 18th and 19th centuries.  If coalitions with large, moderate member bases and radical leadership get into power, they could do some nasty things.  I'm all for majority rule, but coalitions are a perversion of majority rule in that the few control the many, who in turn control the even many-er.  If that makes sense. 

As you may have noticed, quite a bit of my proposed electoral system comes courtesy of France.  France has a very good elections system, I think, especially with regard to campaign finance and advertising (there is no TV advertising, only government-regulated news coverage where everyone gets exactly the same amount of time, and no candidate can use the French colors of red, white, and blue in their campaign material).  Maybe we should learn something.  After all, our Constitution could stand an update, and the French have the most similar form of government (we did inspire their revolution, and they did make ours possible).

Well, that post was long enough, so I think I'll finish it here.  I have more post-election issues to discuss, but those can wait for another day.

College

Today I went to a college fair at the convention center in Albuquerque, and besides being overwhelmed by the number of different colleges in attendance, I was shocked by the cost of going to college.  Maybe I'm being unrealistic, but I think that $40,000 a year is a bit much.  

For example, two colleges I'm thinking of applying to, Bard College at Simon's Rock and Reed College (both, admittedly, very small, selective liberal arts schools) charge upwards of $36,000 a year for tuition alone, according to CNN.  

It also seems bizarre to me that the government only subsidizes college expenses through FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.  Though this program can, and has, aided many students who would not have otherwise been able to go to college, it does not cover the huge cost of attending private colleges and universities, which, with some exceptions, are generally better than state schools (please don't kill me!  I mean in academics, and I admit that I haven't actually gone to these schools, so I'm basing this off of college ratings and reputations).  The maximum FAFSA grant is about $9,000 (added up the figures here).  Many schools are also now meeting 100% of demonstrated need (cost of college - other awards and expected family contribution, based on tax filings), which is great, but that can still leave a large sum of money to be paid.

My question is, why doesn't the US government subsidize costs (more than just FAFSA), if we care so much about education and how the US is being eclipsed academically by the students of other countries?  I read a statistic the other day that China has more honors students than the US has students.  Sure, that's a product of population and should be expected statistically, but isn't that the kind of thing that should make government officials concerned with education say "hmmm, I wonder if we should maybe look into this 'higher education' thing"?

There are countries that already have looked at these statistics and thought, "oh!  We should do something about that!"  France funds all of its higher education directly from the state (oh, noes!  Socialism!), and thereby reduces individual tuition costs to at maximum, 700 euros.  The United Kingdom has a similar system; all universities, except the University of Buckingham, are publicly funded (but not publicly owned) and have their fees capped at 3,125 pounds a year.  Even South Africa has average tuition fees for university around 3000 USD a year (24,000 South African Rand to 2845 US Dollars).  

The fact is that the United States cannot continue the contradiction of effectively requiring, through social pressures and job requirements, a college degree and jacking the price up on college attendance.  I return once more to the simple idea that it is a government's responsibility to provide for its people.  It is the responsibility of the government of the United States to either lower tuition costs to an acceptable level, or to eliminate the social requirement of getting a college degree, preferably the former.  That probably won't happen within the next year or two, unfortunately.

In closing, I do not believe that the ability to pay should have any bearing whatsoever on an individual's ability to attend an institution of higher learning.  Anyone with the mind and the will to learn should be given the opportunity to pursue learning to the furthest extent possible.