About the Size of It by Warwick Cairns (2007)

Subtitled 'The Common Sense Approach to Measuring Things', I found this book in the library and thought it sounded interesting. Cairns introduces himself as a man who spent ten years researching what people in Britain thought about changing to the metric system; in general, he found, they didn't like the idea. He then poses the question of why this should be, when we embrace changes in areas like technology and fashion quite readily. What follows is a tour of measurements, where they come from, and where they might be heading.

We have a complex relationship to weights and measures in this country. The metric system is what's taught in schools, and has been for... actually, I don't know how long. Yet, if you ask a Brit how tall he or she is, you will most likely get an answer in feet and inches; beer is sold in pubs by the pint; and road signs use miles. On a personal level, I'd use metric units to measure the length of something; but I could no more judge a metre 'by eye' than I could a foot. I think it's a fascinating subject for a book.

And I learnt a lot from About the Size of It: I didn't know how traditional measurements were arrived at; I never realised that litres and centimetres weren't 'official' (under the SI) metric units. Now I do. I also find that Cairns makes his central argument -- that metric units are good when you need to be precise (such as when measuring for scientific experiments), but traditional measurements are well suited to other occasions -- persuasively.

On the downside: although Cairns is a pretty good writer, his conversational style can grate over the course of a whole book; asides are fine, but sometimes it feels as though the author didn't check how the rhythms of it worked it writing. He also doesn't really get into looking at what makes measurements such a special (or, indeed, not-so-special) case when it comes to attitudes towards change. Overall, then, this is indeed an interesting book, but not as interesting as I'd hoped it would be.