Every dog has its day. Monday the 20th is Metrology Day. I have been given the distinct privilege of conducting the programme on the day at the National Metrology Institute of South Africa (NMISA). I probably landed on the hot seat for my sins of having been the master measurer and a bean counter for the nation for 17 years. So seven years later the dog chain has led me to a similar kennel, that of measurement.
Many moons ago as a boy growing up in a farming community in Lesotho, our convention was six tins of grain were equal to a standard bag called a khoana. It was called khoana because of the stripes that resembled those of a particular mice species. It even had an idiom attached to it. Bana ba khoana ba tsebana ka mereto — the children of a khoana recognise each other by the stripes at the back. Its protein was tasty — a forget-me-not dish. The bigger bag with a green strap was seven tins. During threshing of wheat with a combine, “Baas” Oosthuizen preferred to be paid with the green strap and not the striped khoana bag. Then deliberations would arise. Conversion of livestock was six sheep to an ox, and two three-year calves to an ox. When there was a death in the village, a reed would be used to measure the length of the dead and taken to the coffin maker to construct the casket. So the tape measure was the dead because there were no rulers and such devices.
Communication on measurement was a physical encounter. When measuring time, the holes in the corrugated iron allowed sun rays to go through, and the light on the floor or walls marked the time for a break. Where there was no classroom the extent and shape of the shade marked breaktime and the end of a school day. So metrology is everything.
More recently I have been intrigued by toilet seats. They mostly are skewed to the left after some use. One wonders how symmetrical bums, one assumes, tend to shift the seats to the left. Is it the power of air and matter that make it that way? And why to the left? I started checking my posture and realised that when one sits, you do not throw yourself into a sofa or onto a seat. The Right hand tends to lead. And because many people are right-handed, their repeated exertion of pressure on the toilet seat pushes it to the left. Aha! what a metrology discovery. In fact, last week I confirmed that if there is an assistive handle on the right, the skew is to the right, suggesting that few as the left-handed people might be, they do exert pressure on the seat in similar ways to the right-handed.
Standards are crucial to advance human development. Miles and kilometres, pounds and kilograms, Fahrenheit and Celsius, the list goes on. All have to be concordant in the pursuit of implementation of a better life for society.
Man cannot live on bread alone, NMISA reminds us. We are nine days to the measurement of a different kind, that of the political health of a nation, and deciding the next five years. So let us vote wisely and follow the advice of NMISA, which says science matters in the improvement of lives. The celebration of the science of measurement, which is a baby compared with politics as defined by Socrates, executed by the state in 399 BCE for his opinions on the science of political measurement, reminds us of the contributions of science on the eve of an election.
The CSIR has been my home recently as I continue to interface with the science system. On Friday morning we were at a summit of the National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI). The immersion of scientific contribution and critique in state affairs is crucial, and the withdrawal of innovation and investment in research and development, especially by the private sector, remains palpable for various reasons, just as they lacked trust even when the government in the second and third administrations was open for business. It took no less than Johann Rupert to confess how opportunities for business were lost due to lack of trust in the government..
A sobering moment is nigh. The Metrology International Day commemorates the signing of the Metre Convention in 1875 and has been celebrated worldwide for more than two centuries. On the other hand, serendipitously a South African innovation team at Suppple has taken metrology to a higher level, where it counts in ordinary people’s life — consumer goods, especially food. Six days ago, as though to celebrate Metrology Day, Suppple launched an authentication tracer programme that follows products. Many people have disease and/or die from consuming food products. What Suppple has introduced is a consumer-based tracer facility on all products that are on shelves. This is liberating, and crowdsourcing the information will change production behaviour. Goitse Konopi and Eldrid Jordaan of Suppple listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange five days ago. What a way to celebrate World Metrology Day by placing measurement and safety in the hands of the consumer. I am the non-executive chairperson of Suppple's board of directors with a team of luminaries.
Metrology is the science of measurement, and World Metrology Day acknowledges and honours the contributions of individuals working in intergovernmental, regional and national metrology organisations and institutes to foster international harmonisation in this field. Standards are crucial to advance human development. Miles and kilometres, pounds and kilograms, Fahrenheit and Celsius, the list goes on. All have to be concordant in the pursuit of implementation of a better life for society. So a translator is needed to manage the historical measurement differences that are a subject of political identity and culture, for instance, between the British and French.
On a project into orbit to study Mars in which the French and Americans collaborated in 1998, a classical error of non-concordance occurred at a cost of a project of $125m. The French used the metric system, and the Americans used the British (imperial) system. “There seems to have emerged over the past couple of years a systematic problem in the space community of insufficient attention to detail,” said John Logsdon, director of George Washington University’s space policy institute.
“It was launched that way,” said Noel Hinners, vice-president for flight systems at Lockheed Martin’s space systems group. “We were transmitting English units, and they were expecting metric units. The normal thing is to use metric and to specify that.”
None of Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) rigorous quality control procedures caught the error in the nine months it took the spacecraft to make its 461-million-mile flight to Mars. Over the course of the journey, the miscalculations were enough to throw the spacecraft so far off track that it flew too deeply into the Martian atmosphere and was destroyed when it entered its initial orbit around Mars last week.
The loss of the Mars probe was the latest in a series of major space flight failures this year that destroyed billions of dollars’ worth of research, military and communications satellites or left them spinning in useless orbits. Earlier this month, an independent national security review concluded that many of those failures stemmed from an overemphasis on cost-cutting, mismanagement and poor-quality control at Lockheed Martin, which manufactured several of the malfunctioning rockets.
But Nasa officials and Lockheed executives said it was too soon to apportion blame for the most recent mishap. Accident review panels convened by JPL and NASA are still investigating why no-one detected the error.
John Pike, space policy director at the Federation of American Scientists, said it was embarrassing to lose a spacecraft to such a simple maths error. “It is very difficult for me to imagine how such a fundamental, basic discrepancy could have remained in the system for so long,” he said.
In a way the spaceship was lost in translation.
The science of measurement is not only about spaceship launching, it is also about bums landing on a toilet seat.
Join us at the CSIR with NMISA to commemorate and celebrate measurement.
Dr Pali Lehohla is a non-executive director at Suppple, a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa
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