ROANOKE TIMES

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 2, 1993                   TAG: 9308020007
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ray Reed
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium


MILLIMETER BY MILLIMETER, WE GO METRIC

Q: Are Yemen and the United States the only two countries not on the metric system? What happened to U.S. efforts to convert to the metric system? M.C., Roanoke

A: Yemen went metric in the '80s.

Our only partners in the inch/pound system are believed to be Liberia and Myanmar (formerly Burma), says Gary Carver at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Check your car if you think U.S. conversion efforts have been abandoned. If it's a fairly recent model, your old wrenches won't fit anything - except maybe the spark plug, which is always 9/16 inch.

That 3 1/2-inch floppy disk in your computer? It's 90mm.

Metric is creeping up on us, and only those who pay attention to riders that get attached to bills in Congress knew about it.

By next Valentine's Day, all the food on grocery shelves is required to be labeled in grams as well as ounces. That's educational, Carver says.

Metric is the world standard, and conforming is the only way the United States can sell products overseas.

But they're sneaking it into our food. That's because last time the government told us to go metric (in 1975), we ducked in defiance.

This time won't be a social change. They're fixing the way industry operates. Gradually, the stuff we buy will be in metric units. Soft drinks are halfway there, liter-wise. Soon the 8 1/2-by-11 sheet of paper will be a little taller and narrower.

For consumers, the hot spots are food containers, highway signs and gas pumps.

There's no word on when Virginia road signs will give distances in kilometers. Georgia, though, will do that for its foreign guests at the '96 Olympics.

Nothing's been said, either, about gas pumps making the change. Some stations tried liters in the '70s when gas topped $1 a gallon and their pumps wouldn't show dollars. Customers got a bad taste for metric, associating it with higher prices.

When we wake up in 2000, everything we think, do and say will end in zeros.

Uh, make that "everything we do and say." Thinking's harder to change.

River moves, lines don't

Q: What happens when states such as Missouri and Illinois have the Mississippi River as their boundary and flooding cuts a new riverbed into, say, Missouri's territory? Would the part of Missouri that winds up on the Illinois side then become part of Illinois? A.J.

A: The states keep what's theirs.

Kaskaskia Island, for example, is on the Missouri side of the river but it's part of Illinois. That's because the river once flowed west of the island, but moved about eight miles into the Illinois side during a flood years ago.

The wide Mississippi changes course so frequently that years ago a survey line was established in the center of the old river course to form the state lines.

Any time the river shifted after that, the state boundaries stayed where they were.

That's according to the Army Corps of Engineers in the Memphis and St. Louis districts.

Got a question about something that might affect other people too? Something you've come across and wondered about? Give us a call at 981-3118. Maybe we can find the answer.



 by CNB