1. The Metric Mug

This is my preferred coffee mug, from which I drink approximately 750 mL of coffee per day. It's made of opaque white Pyrex, with the Canada Metric logo (the listing M with a stylized maple leaf inset) on one side and a handy "250 mL" mark on the other.

This mug dates back to the late-70s, the major period of Canada's still-incomplete metrification. It likely spent 20+ years in our offices, used occasionally by secretaries and speech writers who didn't (or worse, couldn't) appreciate it as the amusingly dated tchotchke it is.

I like to think I've saved it from an ignoble end--smashed accidently in the hallway by some Imperially-minded lout.

Though perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to judge, since I think in kilometres and celsius, but also in feet and inches and pounds. (In fact, I'm one of the half-converted people described in this short essay on Canadian metrification.)

My partial metric adoption happened despite a serious national effort to educate us in SI units (which goes to show how hard it is to change people's habits of mind, especially those learned early). In fact, one Christmas morning, possibly 1980, we found the metric board game under our tree. This game was produced by the Canadian Metric Commission (no doubt for free, and thus continuing my parents' long history of giving lame educational Christmas gifts) to help people learn the metric system. As games go, it was execrable--lots of laminated pieces and amateurish beaver illustrations. But it was another component of a pervasive, and as I recall sometimes painful, campaign to shift people to the new measurements.

While digging up information on the metric system, I was surprised at its age and its fairly impeccable pedigree (in comparison to the hodge-podge of the Imperial "system," e.g. see this Brief history of the SI). Also, I'm amazed that virtually every aspect and phenomenon of our physical world can be described using the seven base metric units (which are the metre, the kilogram, the second, the Ampere, the candela, the Kelvin and, er, the mole).

Related stuff:

• Metric in Canada - a site dedicated to completing Canada's metric conversion
• A chronology of the SI metric system - a U.S. metric timeline (I wonder if the U.S. will convert by 2009, when all packaging in the EU must be in SI units).