Simson L. Garfinkel 25 Gorham Street Somerville, MA 02144 work: (617) 776-4137 home: (617) 776-8455
Letters to the Editor The Boston Globe Boston, MA 02107
August 29, 1988 To the Editor:
As a professional science writer, 1 was thrilled to see your editorial encouraging the use of the Metric System in Amer­ica ["Metric Movement," August 29, 1988]. If "ordinary folks are the ones who will make it familiar," how about if the Boston Globe helped the effort by printing metric measurements in its news stories?
Take the front page of the August 29 issue. The story about the fatal air show crash in West Germany could have said that Ramstein Air Base is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Frankfurt, that the fireball was 30 meters (100 feet) high, that the Italian jets were flying 60 meters (65 yards) off the ground and 400 kilometers per hour (250 miles per hour.)
In the same issue, Bella English's column could have men­tioned a 2-meter (6-foot) Gumby and a 1-meter (3-foot) Califor­nia Raisin, and an AP article on tire ratings could have spoken about 38.1-centimeter (15-inch) tires traveling 113,000 kilo­meters (70,000 miles).
Of course, articles containing such measurements would never make it past the editors at The Globe or any other newspa­per, a fact with which I am all too familiar. This is one of the reasons why the Metric System has been so slow in coming.
Sincerely,
Simson L. Garfinkel